![]() "We read all of it," Bourassa said of the criticism the team received in Early Access reviews. That's great when people are happy with the game, and less so when they aren't. That large community also meant whatever messages Red Hook received from the players were amplified. But now we have somebody in that position and it's working a lot better." ![]() In hindsight, having seen those initial numbers from the first couple of months, we could have taken action on the community management standpoint a little sooner. "So suddenly this really large audience and not equipped from a community management standpoint to have somebody full-time dedicated to managing those social media channels, engaging those people on forums and effective moderation of the forums. "We sold through more than we thought we would in our wildest dreams, honestly," Bourassa said. "We went through every negative Steam review, parsed out the through lines, collected it all in a Google Doc and reviewed it all, so we were definitely cognizant of what was happening." In some ways, the game's success in Early Access made the problem worse. I just have a heightened awareness of it." Sometimes prior to this experience, I'd just sort of find myself stressed out, whereas now I can feel it tickle at the back of my spine a bit as it slowly builds. I definitely became more aware of the creeping stress. Give them some space.' So we learned to talk about stress in the game's terms, somewhat jokingly, obviously, but still it definitely changed our perception of it. "We'd even say, 'Oh, so-and-so is afflicted. "We would joke that working on the game was a lot like being in the game, and you could see during the course of development people's stress levels rising and falling as certain things happened," Bourassa said. Stress builds up over time, and characters begin to develop various psychoses that impact their performance. The game uses a permadeath system for the characters, and each journey leaves both physical and mental scars on the characters. The Lovecraftian RPG lets players take a group of characters through the remains of an ancestral estate, fending off evil creatures as they go. The stress of game development is mirrored in some ways by Darkest Dungeon's gameplay. It's only been six weeks since the last update, but still that culture of consumption is out there constantly wanting new material." We'd go for six weeks without updating and we'd see a couple things pop up like, 'Has this game been abandoned?' That's ridiculous. Keep updating content, keep it live, keep it fresh. Also just from a pure Quality of Life standpoint, the pressure on a small team to keep those updates rolling and keep outbound communication visible. "There can be a perception that games get abandoned in Early Access, although we had been updating the game fairly regularly. "We didn't want to languish in Early Access for a very long time," Bourassa said. It was more of a gentle exhale this time out as opposed to a big, enthusiastic cry."īut if the game was succeeding in Early Access, why was the team crunching so hard to hit a January release date? no less thrilled with the results, just a little worn out from the past couple months of heavy overtime. Plus, the crunch had been a lot more severe leading up to the full release, so we were pretty tired. This time out, knowing there was already an audience and we had built a community over the past year, releasing the game didn't feel like that unbridled love affair. "It was a real unknown, so when we succeeded out of that launch, we were really exuberant and it was a thrill ride. Keep updating content, keep it live, keep it fresh." When you do an Early Access launch, you're sort of robbing from your full release later, but we're really happy with how it's performed on both releases. "Certainly the January 19 launch was not nearly as big as the early February launch into Early Access," Red Hook's Chris Bourassa told recently. So it should come as no surprise that when Red Hook flipped the switch on Darkest Dungeon to move it from Early Access into full release, it may have been a bit anti-climactic. It's even been nominated for three awards at next month's Independent Games Festivals, including the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. It enjoyed a successful Kickstarter campaign that saw it quadruple the original funding target, and spent almost a year in Steam Early Access building community, generating buzz, and padding coffers for Red Hook. Red Hook Studios' Darkest Dungeon had its proper launch on Steam last month, but it was already a hit long before that.
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