Before saying anything else, we want to take a moment to offer our heartfelt gratitude to those who have seen the worth of what we're doing and translated that perceived worth into pledges. It gives us tremendous confidence to move forward with this project knowing that you saw the potential in what we're creating. To sum it up; thank you, thank you, thank you.
Thank You
Postmortem
It is obviously a discouraging, disheartening blow to have come so far with this campaign and fallen short on our funding goal. Many of you pointed out that you believe this was largely due to a lack of exposure. This is a sentiment we share, however under further analysis we've come to a greater understanding as to why and how to correct it going forward. The biggest feedback we got from members of the press was simple: the creation tools look great, but there wasn't enough gameplay shown to prop that up and give reason for the tools to be used. We agree. This was a conscious decision on our part due to limited time and resources. We opted to show what we felt made this game the most special which is our community focus and simple, powerful suite of design tools. However we understood, from the first day I pitched this idea to a group of friends/game devs and invited them on this journey, that gameplay would be the top priority - that we would design engaging gameplay first and then design the rest of the game around that. That's been what we've striven for ever since and it's disappointing to find that we didn't show that sufficiently.
What Happens Next
Our next major milestone will making good on our promise to release Early Access content on Steam. We are shooting for a May release. We've outlined in a prior update just what that will entail, including a player-created mega-dungeon which will be used to test out our dungeon creation and persistent world systems.
In the meantime we will be transitioning to PayPal-based funding as we move from here to that point. We invite all who have backed this project to continue your support by transitioning your pledge to that platform. This will help us to make good on the promise of a May Early Access release by allowing us to continue to work full-time on the project and helping us to keep the lights on at the studio. The same pledge rewards apply (if you would like to specify a pledge reward, just put it in the message area provided by PayPal when making your pledge. Otherwise we'll just make sure you get the reward level appropriate to your pledge amount).
One of the true positives about the way this campaign has worked out is that we understand that those who contributed their pledge are those that truly believe in what we're doing. If you do, then we humbly invite you to support us by pledging via PayPal to paypal@thecollectivedreamstudios.com or go to Dungeonforge.net.
Once again, thank you, thank you, thank you for your continued support and good wishes as we move forward with Dungeonforge.
