EpicDuel PVP Game Design Notes

January 06, 2016

New year, new list of goals and milestones. 2015 was a hard year with a lot of late nights and steep challenges, but much was learned and accomplished, enough to prepare us to attack 2016 head-on!

AQ3D Kickstarter 200% FUNDED!

This is old news, but still fantastic! I’ll just use Cysero’s post since he put it so eloquently:

All Hail the Backer/Founders of AdventureQuest 3D!

You did it! You really did it! AdventureQuest 3D is happening!

What an incredible way to start our New Year of adventure together. Including Kickstarter ($368,503) and Paypal ($34,265), our final total is a colossal $402,768. ALSO, you have gotten AdventureQuest 3D greenlit on Steam and unlocked ALL of the posted Stretch Goals! Absolutely amazing! Way to go everyone!

Thank you!

On behalf of the entire Artix Entertainment team, thank you. This is all because of you and our amazing community. As a direct result of successful support on this campaign, we will now be able to finish building and deliver AdventureQuest 3D. Thank you for seeing the potential of this project. Most of all, thank you for giving us the opportunity to build this amazing cross-platform, massively multiplayer game for you. As a Backer/Founder, we invite you to join us as we build it!

The incredible success of the AQ3D Kickstarter is an incredible opening to 2016! “Why is this good for any other game,” you ask? “How does it affect EpicDuel?” Well, Artix Entertainment is more than one product: it’s a network of games. When one game does REALLY well, the traffic to all the other games increases. This benefit extends to our mobile games, including BioBeasts, of course. If AQ3D delivers on the promises of the Kickstarter, there’s no reason it won’t be orders of magnitude more successful than AQW, which could mean a new breath of life into the legacy games as new players discover them for the first time while veterans return after many months or years away, their hearts brimming with nostalgia.

Gifting Conclusion

This week, the 2015-2016 gifting event reaches its conclusion. We had a bit of a hiccup as addressed in the previous post, but we’re still very impressed with the amount of gifting in this second iteration of the popular event. After the event concludes, we will award the prizes as soon as we are able. Keep in mind that this is a manual, not automatic, process so it will take some time to distribute the prizes.

BioBeasts

BioBeasts is so, so very close to releasing. After many weeks of polish and overcoming technical setbacks from Unity, BioBeasts is probably as ready as a game could be to launch. We were hoping to possibly release before Christmas, but since even a company as huge as Apple takes a vacation around that time, we weren’t able to get a final build approved.

Yes, we were already approved, but if you change anything in the game, even nudging a logo or fixing a typo in the game, a new build must be submitted for launch approval. This is part of the reason it’s so difficult to put an exact launch date on mobile titles. The Android process is much easier, but we feel it’s crucial to the success of the game that we launch on iOS and Android simultaneously.

In the name of full-transparency, let me show you the final tasks remaining for BioBeasts:

• Polish Tutorial
  • Ensure clarity in every tutorial step ( this is mostly done, there are just some minor tweaks we want to add to the tutorial which we hope will add clarity. )
• Third-Party Integrations
  • Test Apple and Google purchase platforms
  • Test Ad integration via Unity Ads
  • Test Analytics via Unity Analytics
• Finalize Marketing materials
  • BioBeasts Video
  • Image graphics for Google Play and Apple Store
  • Image graphics for AE network
• Launch and play final beta testing build!
• Hit the big red submit button!

Central Station War

The Central Station War is still coming later this month, as Legion and Exile collide once again in Delta V’s classic starting zone. The defenders will commandeer the communications array in the middle of the station and seek to destroy Propaganda Towers broadcasting unsanctioned materials, while the attackers will attempt to subvert the alignment propaganda being spewed towards newcomers with some of their own.

What Comes Next?

After the launch of BioBeasts, we expect a few content updates to add a few “wish list” features and implement the inevitable, but hopefully minimal, bug fixes. We will do everything we can to promote it through every channel available to us so that will consume much of our time immediately after launch. What happens after that depends greatly on the success of the game. We have plenty of ideas from the testers and in-house to potentially expand the scope and depth of the game if it really takes off.

As for EpicDuel, we are continuing development as planned. Our Guest Team is actively conceptualizing future events, writing new mission chains, reorganizing existing content, and preparing to launch a new War. New Years and Heartbreaker gear will also return as planned.

Tags: Nightwraith