May 4, 2018
Forsaken Castle - Duck Block Games
Hello to all our fans on Steam! Going forward, we will be cross posting our Kickstarter updates on Steam so everyone who doesn't fancy going to Kickstarter can keep up with the latest news about Forsaken Castle.
If you haven't seen the original campaign on Kickstarter, you can check it out here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/duckblockgames/forsaken-castle
Please enjoy the update message below:
Hello Everyone!
We hope everyone is having a good year so far! It’s been way too long since our last update and for that we sincerely apologize. We’ve been working hard on the game, but for a few reasons that we'll cover below, we had some trouble with posting updates. Today we’d like to talk about what has been going on since our last update and our plans moving forward.
What’s Been Happening
Since our last update in October we have been working on many visual updates and fixing some design issues we had discovered. We spent some time working with a local pixel artist to help update some monsters as well as create some new ones! The holiday season was a little busy while getting ready for PAX South but we got most of our character updates done as well as a new UI system. Even with all this there were still some issues with the game that we didn’t have time to address yet and has taken us longer than expected to get done.
Since PAX we have been updating all of the level art to fix issues and better match Lily’s new sprite, as well as changing how we are building the levels in Unity. Some of the new pixel art was a challenge and was taking longer than expected, but is now coming along much quicker and will make creating content for future updates much easier. We are hoping to have an update to the demo with many of these changes soon, even though it won’t be our finalized vision of the full 30-minute demo.
Lily will encounter these statues where her progress through the castle can be saved
PAX South 2018
After having our first crazy and fun PAX experience with PAX South back in 2017, where we got to show off our very early prototype (i.e. bugs running rampant within the game) and got some great feedback, we were absolutely looking forward to going again in 2018. Tragically, both of us were coming off of a pretty bad cold, though I was further ahead in recovery than my brother Clint. Thankfully, the build for PAX South was very stable, so we didn’t have to jump in very often to reset or otherwise address any issues. This freed me up to spend most of my time tucked just under the screens working on the massive UI system revamp that I started as we were driving the 7 hours to San Antonio.
A quick look at some of the new UI screens coming soon
Last year, we had only one screen with the game running off of my laptop, so any issues effectively halted play for anyone passing by. This time around we managed to add an additional screen and make a build of the game which ran great on the tiny Nvidia Shield TV (Android). Using a small USB thumb drive, we were able to sort out any issues and live patch the build without disturbing either of the two stations except when needed to quickly upload a new build. This allowed us to dish out double the amount of playthroughs than our previous year.
Booth efficiency gains aside, we enjoyed the fact that we always had people at our booth stopping by to check out the game and as a result, the controllers were rarely inactive. Many people from across the country and even from abroad enjoyed playing the demo. We were also happy to hear from a number of online game streamers that were interested in playing Forsaken Castle on their streams as soon as they could. During many of our conversations with people passing by the booth, we also found a great many who showed up were also our backers! We loved getting a chance to talk with everyone!
Our banner became the backdrop for some interviews and the subject of a number of camera phone pictures ^_^
Gallery Music Track
We also have a new track from Zack to share that will ultimately be going into the 30-minute demo. Let us know what you think in the comments below or over on the SoundCloud page itself!
https://soundcloud.com/zack-parrish/forsaken-castle-gallery-2
Timeline Changes and Update Schedule
While we have been working very hard to make improvements to the game, we have unfortunately failed to complete a number of our development milestones in the time we had originally estimated. Because of this, we have decided to make a few changes going forward.
First, our goal of having Early Access on Steam by Q2 2018 will not be able to happen and for that we are deeply sorry. We really wanted everyone to be able to enjoy the game by at least a year from our Kickstarter, but we’ve been learning a number of things for the first time and it has slowed our progress more than we had originally anticipated.
Second, because we have continued to miss our goals we decided it would be best to wait until we are closer to finishing the game before giving a firm release date.
Finally, we will be making sure we have an update post every month, even if it’s just a short update.
We really appreciate our backers and want everyone to keep everyone informed. We weren’t sure how much content would be enough for an update, but then too much time would pass and we got caught in a cycle of feeling we didn’t have enough content to justify the time between posts. Which is something we needed to deal with and change now to break the cycle and create a better feedback loop with all of you.
We hope you all understand and look forward to all the upgrades we have planned to make Forsaken Castle the best game it can be.
Sincerely,
Lance & Clint Trahan
Duck Block Games
P.S. We hope to have an updated demo ready by the next update and will be hosted here on Steam for anyone interested in trying it out. We're working hard to get it to the fully polished 30-minute experience, but this next update may fall a little short of that mark but it will still be very close to completion and in a good enough state to release it.
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- New character, Summer! She’s the kind of plumber that makes Mario look bad. Summer starts with all irrigation techs unlocked and a small stash of cash.
