18/08/2017
Dear Goblins!
The elven queen is quite angry with us. The reason being, that we, the small heroic goblins from the mines deep below have finally developed our FULL potential. With numerous weapons, armors and hats, as well as magical cards to boost our strength and speed, we are well-equipment to raid the elven halls and steal any shiny loot that we can carry! Horray!
Now, jokes aside: We, the development team of looterkings had a rough last weeks here in Cologne and we are now happy to announce the release of version 1.0 to the public!
Because of unfortunate events that came up simultanious to the release we only now are able to publish this news, for example. Nevertheless I wanted to share some information on how development was and what kind of difficulties we had during the process.
We are a small team. Or to be precise, we WERE a small team (6 people). This project was, to be honest, too big for us: Not only the number of artists and programmers working on this was too small, also the experience was too little, as none of us had done a professional production beforehand. And to top the hybris we had when starting: We wanted to create a MULTIPLAYER game, which, from a technical point of view, is simply f***ing hard to do.
But there we were - we had some money to start with and had lots of enthusiasm. In the first year we made fast progress, gfx were coming along fine and basic gameplay was established. We announced the game, strolled through steam greenlight like is was a walk in the park and went Early Access. That's were problems started :D
We knew that Early Acces would be hard for us, because we really had some work left to do. Gameplay was not finished, balancing was off, whole features missing - yet we had no other choice than to go public and gain some money to keep production alive.
Reception was ambiguous, of course. Although Early Access is meant to be a process of development to share with the community, there always are those who expect a finished game, where only polishing has to be done. Looterkings was not like that - we had some serious issues to solve: The multiplayer-feature took its toll and we had to invest a LOT of time to solve technical issues. Gameplay-wise we noticed that we are nowhere near a final version. Good for us, there where a lot of people enthusiastic about the game: They helped us a LOT. MissionCards, ShieldBreak, Ingame Item Unlocking, Shop Placement & Teleport, MiniBosses, Enemy Design and Balancing were direct changes and additions we did based on the suggestions of the community. Slowly we moved in the right direction.
BUT we had one big issue, not unknown to many indie developer: Money was running out. Because of problems with our partners in marketing we could not reach enough people interested in our Early-Access game. Fear was growing that we would not be able to finish our work.
We started to look for publishers. After all, we had a solid game, 3D, multiplayer, nice gfx without cheap assets bought from the unity store, details SFX, our very own OST and at least 5 levels. Yet, the quest for a financal partner that would help us with marketing was difficult. Mostly because... Early Access. 80% oft the companies did like the game, but as it already was released to the public, interest stalled. And time was still running out.
We started to work harder and concentrated on adding the missing content. We were so close! We had nearly all features we wanted implemented. We had a system that allowed us to add weapons, gear, levels and enemies easily and fast, we had solved all technical issues.
Luckily, we could find a publisher in the last minute: Headup Games . Not the deal we were looking for, but it gave us 2 more months to finish the game and to reach version 1.0. Unfortunatly we already had lost one team-member and I (the project leader) had to minimize the team further to keep production alive. Additional to this, I as the project leader had stopped to pay myself money but was living on the cash I had put aside when working as a motion designer before production started. So at this moment, we are but 2 people working on Looterkings, with me sometimes having to jump to payed jobs to be able to afford my rent.
BUT, against all odds, we made it! Looterkings has reached version 1.0. And yes, there are some small features still missing (controller support), we have 9 instead of 10 levels and the last levels may not be as detailed as the first ones. But thats it. Apart from these issues, we managed to release a uniquely designed, funny dungeoncrawler with lots of content... and we are proud of it!
As many of the indie-productions out there we had our fair share of trouble and problems - but this is a happy end. We even will have a further game-mode we will release in a months time. Be prepared to learn what goblins do in their free time :D
As for now, we would very much like to know your adventures when trying to reach the elven queen in her holy halls.
Thank you for supporting us. Thank you from the heart.
