We released Dawnmaker 18 days ago, and I'm due for a report on numbers. Everybody loves numbers, right? Here are ours!
Dawnmaker
Friday, 26 July 2024
The frustration of (never really) finishing Dawnmaker
By Adrian on Friday, 26 July 2024, 19:00
We are 5 days away from the release of Dawnmaker! It is a time of excitement, of stress of course, but also of regrets as we realize that there are so, so many things that we will not be able to add to our game. Let's introduce today's topic with a short video that is very à propos:
Friday, 3 May 2024
The challenges of teaching a complex game
By Adrian on Friday, 3 May 2024, 16:00
When I was 13, my mom bought me Civilization III from a retail shop, then went on to do some more shopping. I stayed in the car, with this elegant box in my hands, craving to play the game it contained. I opened the box, and there discovered something magical: the Civilization III Manual. Having nothing better to do, I started reading it…
Monday, 11 March 2024
Killing two birds with one deck in Dawnmaker
By Adrian on Monday, 11 March 2024, 11:00
Let's face it: Dawnmaker still has some important flaws. We're aware of that, and we are working on those flaws. One of the biggest remaining problem with the game was that one of its core mechanics, the oppression of the Smog, was… well, not explained at all. If you didn't have a developer behind your back to tell you, there was almost no way you could understand it.
Thursday, 8 February 2024
Dawnmaker a une page Steam ET un trailer
By Adrian on Thursday, 8 February 2024, 15:16
Dawnmaker, le jeu sur lequel je travaille dans le cadre d'Arpentor Studio, depuis plus de deux ans, a désormais une page Steam et un trailer. Je vous laisse découvrir ça :
Ça vous a plu ? N'hésitez pas à ajouter le jeu à votre liste de souhaits sur Steam !
Monday, 27 November 2023
The ruins of Dawnmaker's lost continent
By Adrian on Monday, 27 November 2023, 10:00
Today we are releasing a new version of Dawnmaker, with two big changes. The first one is the 2D board, which I talked about in my previous blog post. The second one is a new feature called "Ruins and Rewards". That feature… adds ruins and… changes rewards. Yeah. Pretty good name, right?
Tuesday, 10 October 2023
Removing Dawnmaker's 3rd dimension
By Adrian on Tuesday, 10 October 2023, 10:00
If you've played Dawnmaker in the last 6 months, you will have noticed, hopefully, that the board was rendered in 3D. After having received a lot of questions and criticism about that feature, we've decided a few months ago to redo the whole board rendering in 2D. After two months of work, I am proud to announce that Dawnmaker will soon have a new version containing only two dimensions! Today we're going to dig deeper into the why and how of this transition.
Thursday, 3 August 2023
Dawnmaker's endless conundrum of infinite replayability
By Adrian on Thursday, 3 August 2023, 10:00
Over the last few months we've had the opportunity to show Dawnmaker to a lot of people, and notably a few publishers. We had the good fortune of receiving very valuable feedback on the game, which allowed us to identify two important problems with it, or at least, with its demo. The first problem is that our artistic direction isn't compelling enough, but that will not be today's topic — though we are, of course, working on it.
The problem we're going to discuss today it that of replayability. Some of our players, and most of the publishers we talked to, have expressed that they do not feel inclined to restart a game after they lose. Once you've understood the patterns of the game, restarting a new game feels like doing the same thing again, and it is boring. That feeling was especially pronounced for players losing in the 2nd or 3rd region of the demo: you have to restart at level one, a level that you have already mastered and don't feel like going through again.
This is a pretty big problem for a game that wants to have a high replay value, which is what we're aiming for. So today, I'm going to tell you about the key thing we're currently adding to the game as a first step to solve this issue.
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