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He did not have to do anything with this fiasco and actually didnt do anything wrong. It is unheard of that a totally different team gives away free games because they had financial support from a publisher that did another game that went wrong.
Sadly feeling like those two months of helping SMP here on steam getting people started on Towns was wasted time now, but least I got to meet some nice people so not totaly wasted.
Might be easier said than done, though. However, finding a way out of the deal with SMP would probably be greatly beneficial to Dwelvers in the long run. Otherwise ♥♥♥♥ will hit the fan once they launch on Steam...
I do want to say that I do believe your intentions were good, and you seem like a good and honest person. The only thing I and many others know about you, however, is that you were one of the two people involved in Towns, and you are the game and graphics designer of Dwelvers. Obviously the lead developer has more influence than anybody, but when you're one of a team of two, the association is going to stick. I disagree with muzzy's post above in that, for most people who purchased Towns and felt burned by it, the ties with SMP aren't related to the funding Dwelvers got, but to the fact that 1/2 of the Towns team, who quit when the game was unfinished yet sold as a finished product, is now working on Dwelvers. Even in this post, you mention how bad the launch was and a vague thing about "decisions," but most customers' problem with the game wasn't so much the launch but the lack of updates for over a year after that.
Again, I don't mean to sound harsh; I'm simply saying how this will look to a lot of people, and how it looks to me. I don't know anything about the personal situation between the two developers, but I don't really see any reason to absolve you from responsibility for this game and assume with confidence that Dwelvers will be different.
So regarding the free game / discount. I agree with ragnar119 that rasmus is under no obligation to give his game away for free, and he shouldn't feel obligated to. That being said, he should understand the stigma that will come, deserved or not, from having you as a part of his team. In this sense, I think giving it to Towns customers is a good idea, as it will restore a good amount of goodwill and generate a lot of positive word of mouth promotion for his game. As far as a discount goes, I think it's important to understand one thing: the Towns community is probably the LAST place you want to try and promote early sales of an unfinished game to supporting a "good guy and a talented dev." For the record, I believe you and Xavi are both probably good guys and talented devs. But I can't think of anything you can do to convince me to buy an unfinished game being worked on by one of the two devs of Towns on the promise that it will be updated and supported in the future, and this is before we even get into the issue of any of that money going to you and Xavi. I suspect a lot of people feel the same. So I dunno, if it were me, I would either give Dwelvers to previous Towns owners, or just ride out the stigma coming from the Towns connection on the strength of the finished game. The discount thing seems like a solution that's not going to do anything in the long run - Towns customers either won't go for it, or they'll go for it and still complain. You'll still have the connection to Towns to mitigate, but no really generous act to generate goodwill and benefit from.
If you buy the game from Rasmus direct, do you get a free Steam key? I do like having as many of my games as possible on Steam and if this is the way it works, it does look more promising.
As much as i'd love to get something for free, I feel inclined to agree with this. Giving away that many free copies of a game for something which isn't really your (Rasmus' specifically) responsibility is kinda ridiculous, even if it would be an incredibly classy thing to do. I like the discount idea, but i'm not sure how effective it would be at winning over others that feel more burned on the issue than myself.
I can hardly speak for everyone but I can certainly say (while i'm not happy about that either) that is FAR from the primary concern for me. Ben is only one person on a larger team this time around and the responsibility for how this game turns out will rest a great deal more on Rasmus than him. The worst I see as being likely from Ben's involvement in Dwelvers is progress slowing if he eventually decides to bail on the game. It's not like the game didn't exist before Ben after all.
Well first, speak for yourself since you can't possibly know what "most customers" are thinking.
With that out of the way, fair enough. I certainly can't blame you for being cautious after what happened with Towns. That being said, I still think you're attaching more responsiblity for both games to Ben than I believe is warranted. Not that he doesn't bear a great deal of responsibility for the situation but with the way you're talking it's as if the only way things could be fine is if he quit or Rasmus did something radical to bury the hatchet.
As for his point about the launch, I don't think he was suggesting that was the biggest problem with the game. That's just where everything started to go horribly wrong since they released an unfinished game and got called on it. It is a little ridiculous that he's falling back on that "planned vacation" argument though. We heard it back then and it didn't matter so it hardly seems important to mention now. If there was a planned vacation then there shouldn't have been a launch at that time.
Again, i'd love to get something for free as well but i'm not entirely sure that course of action would generate enough "buzz" around the game to make up for the lost potential sales. It ceretainly could, and a good DK style game is something people have been waiting for a long time but the good will from that gesture would have to be worth at least 200k additional sales (or however many were actually redeemed from the giveaway) to work out for them financially. It's possible if the gameplay appeals to a wide enough audience but that's pretty rare for an indie game in such a niche market.
Call me a fool if you like but I think I could be plenty happy with a significant discount on the game and some assurance that Xavi wouldn't be getting any money from my purchase. As much as this whole Towns situation has sucked, it's not enough to put me off EVER buying unfinished games.
Re: assigning blame between the two devs: maybe I could've been clearer, but I guess my point is that I can't really pick and choose who to assign more blame to here. There's only two devs, and we're only hearing from one of them, and what we're hearing is pretty vague. For this to go on for over a year after release, it just doesn't seem right in my mind that one dev was doing everything wrong while the other 1/2 of the team tried his best to do everything right to no avail. While I agree that it certainly does seem that he was more dedicated to finishing the game than Xavi, I don't really have much of a choice other than to assign him part of the blame. While I won't pretend to know how game development works, him being listed second on the site as "Game and Graphics designer" seems to suggest that it's a pretty big responsibility, and it's something that I just wouldn't be comfortable supporting until I see a finished game with adequate post-launch support. About me being unforgiving - once bitten, twice shy. But to be honest, if Dwelvers gets released and it's a good game and there's none of this drama, then I'm obviously going to be much less cautious of whatever Ben works on in the future.
Re: giving the game away to customers: I think I said enough on that in this thread (and the other), and I guess it just comes down to a difference of opinion. I'm no expert, and you may be right about giving the game away not generating enough positive buzz in the end. Like I said though, giving a discount seems like a strange thing to do considering the experience people have had with Towns, so maybe a better idea would be the discount applying after release? I think people would be more appreciative of it if they didn't have to gamble on another unfinished game. Maybe the discount being post-release was the plan all along, though, so I might just be wasting my e-breath.
Which is exactly my point and why i have repeatedly hinted about it.
Regarding updates. this is an important thing to note and i am glad you have brought that up.
1 - You cannot possibly imagine how i felt when i saw my little baby goes to flames just because the guy in charge is operating out of fear and greed. this was my first serious game project and one that i knew can decide my fate in this industry.
Also, you must realize that this naturally carried on and have damaged the rate of development.
2 - That said, the only reason this game ever got any updates post steam release is because i practically had to "force" xavi to keep working on it and he even admitted it so himself.
3 - the only reason those Updates were far from satisfactory, was because i ultimately failed at forcing xavi.
i was also incapable of doing more than just painting more blocks, adding more items, redoing art and scripting. i simply have no access to the source code and xavi refused to hire a new programmer, even back then. and what this game needed was not more blocks, or more items, it needed fully realized, finished features.
4 - people noted that instead of making improvements and expanding the current features we were jumping a head to add new ones are somewhat correct, what they don't realize, is that most of the features that people criticize Towns for lacking were ones i specifically listed before xavi and declared them as mandatory if he wants to call this game Finished about a month before the release. needless to say he disagreed.
Ouch.
So basically, he had already lost the motivation to continue working on the game even before the launch happened, and he launched it to get the "final" version out? Or did he lose motivation only after the launch? I suppose it must've happened before the launch, if he suddenly considered the game to be finished.
Well, this sure explains why the game just kept getting worse (apart from bug fixes and things that didn't change the game functionality). It all makes sense if the man himself was no longer interested in what he was doing.
It bugs me that Xavi himself isn't saying a word about the whole thing.
Which would mean he doesn't give a ♥♥♥♥ about the crumbling of Towns, and would explain the lack of communication.
I'm sure that's true. After all, if it eventually got fixed people would at least have had a decent game in the end. Now they just have an unfinished mess that will linger in their games library for as long as Steam lasts.
I can understand that. When there are only two people to blame, it seems logical to split that blame evenly among them. Perhaps i'm being more forgiving because i've always had an outlook where 2 man teams like that were really only 1 man teams because of problems like this:
A graphics designer is certainly an invaluable member of the team but they're not a coder (though there are plenty with the skills to be one.) The game's progress in terms of overall polish ends up having a lot more to do with the work of the programmers than those working on the art assets. For instance, if the AI is being retarded or the game continually crashes; that's a problem with the code.
That probably would, indeed, be a better idea. As you stated yourself though, we don't know whether that was a part of their potential plans to begin with. That's something we'll just have to wait to find out since even they don't seem to have come to a conclusion on that yet.
Well that's unfortunate. Sounds like you exercised some poor judgement in choosing your first project. Here's hoping that poor judgement doesn't prove to be a consistent problem...
Actually, iirc, that was a part of the strength of our arguments in calling the game unfinished. I believe that information had at least become partially public so we had a point of reference from the development team to say "this obvious key feature even to them isn't there."
Yeah, i'd like to hear what he has to say about it but this isn't really anything new. As little communication as there has ever been in regard to Towns, very little of it ever came from Xavi. We'll see if that changes anytime soon but I know i'm not going to be holding my breath.
- get on steam in as late stage of development as possible. Try to release more content rich and stable version, and not some alpha demo,
- communication is the key. Post news, devs blog , plans for future (even putting some of devs/mods in steam chat to help people if they have problems) and all the things Rasmus is already doing on his main forum, but just share it with steam forum also.
- and normally regular updates
If you manage to do this 3 things you will make a core steam fan base, as most people will see that things are handled very different compared to towns, and I guarantee you, you will not have that much problem with the SMP connection.
Anyway, some people made a good proposal, if you are making a discount for Dwelvers(again, do not give it for free), make it for the finished game and early access (there will be some towns people that probably would like to get the game in early access, and i dont see a reason why force them to wait ), but say it explicitly that the discount can be used when the game is finished (and maybe even say that people should wait for the game to be finished)