Archon:Classic

Archon:Classic

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Alastor Jun 10, 2014 @ 11:57am
Updates?
There have been two updates recently. One was over 100mb and one was about 15mb.

I thought this game was completely dead. The dev blog and forums on the official website don't even exist anymore.

What exactly are these mysterious updates? No talk of it, no patch logs, nothin'. I can't imagine them working on this game like four years later when it has been dead for those four years basically. They didn't even push out all the features they said they would do and the devs have been basically nonexistant when it comes to this game.

I opened the game and didn't even see anything new after the 100mb update but the newest one added some advertisements in the bottom right corner of the main menu. One of the ads is for something called Archon Resurrection but clicking it just takes you to the Archon Classic which is outdated and has a lot of dead links.

Archon Resurrection makes it sound like this game may be getting a revival. I sure hope so.

Anyone have any idea what's going on?
Last edited by Alastor; Jun 10, 2014 @ 12:03pm
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Showing 1-15 of 43 comments
GauRocks Jun 10, 2014 @ 1:12pm 
I don't know, but if they're going to update this game, I hope they do something to tweak Prelude to Dusk 5 and Last Midnight 10 so the golds on those levels are less luck-based. Sometimes Prelude 5 turns out that the wizards don't bother reviving, but in most cases both of those levels give you four turns to kill five guys and the AI won't always attack. Last Midnight 10 is also just an absurd mismatch, basically forcing you to fight a level 3 + illusion opponent on a fully white square with one of your level 1 units right at the start.

It would also be nice if Last Midnight 9 followed the rules of the game and made you lose when you have no legal moves left, since that seems to be a straight up bug with how the game calculates win conditions. If I had to guess, I'd say the game assumes that the sorceress will always have three movement and so it thinks she can get off the island.
FleetCommand Jun 10, 2014 @ 9:25pm 
I'd also love to know what these updates are for.
Berzeger Jun 10, 2014 @ 10:03pm 
Yeah, a log would have been nice.
Astrobia Jun 15, 2014 @ 5:03am 
An update just to add advertisments when they haven't even delivered the promised feature list from 4 years ago would be amazingly poor form. I hope it is a prelude to the long awaited network multiuplayer build they said they had a prototype working for way back when.
FleetCommand Jun 15, 2014 @ 6:03am 
It must be something else than just advertisement as the version number has changed at least two times in the past couple of days from 1.1.8/9(?) to 1.1.10 then 1.1.11
Alastor Jun 15, 2014 @ 10:14am 
Yeah, I really hope it's more than advertisements. I looked on Steam Charts and it records an average of 0.5 people per day on the game, so half the time nobody is even on. I don't get the purpose of putting up advertisements on a game that was dead four years ago so maybe occasionally one or two people could witness an ad.

I'm really curious on what Archon Resurrection is though. I couldn't find any information on what it could be and clicking on it doesn't help at all. It's like they just threw it on there to confuse us. They rarely ever post on their twitter and the Archon website is dead and hasn't been updated in years. React! Games seems incredibly unorganized and hardly ever vocal with their community.

I've always wished a remake of Archon would happen as I was growing up and now I'm still hoping for that. I don't feel like Archon got the proper treatment it deserved in a remake.
Last edited by Alastor; Jun 15, 2014 @ 10:15am
Astrobia Jun 15, 2014 @ 11:25am 
Having done some research I wouldn't be optimistic. The teams about to launch a kickstarters for this http://www.superdungeonbros.com/ it's on greenlight too but I'm not going to support it when they didn't deliver what they promised last time I supported them. Either way I'm willing to bet once the kickstarter launches the day after tommorow that ad spot added by the patch will update to advertise that. Either way with there whole team working on the new property I doubt they'll be spending time ressurecting the old one they gave up on.
Plattinator Jun 16, 2014 @ 9:19pm 
Hello! I was a junior programmer brought on part way through the development of this in 2010, and am one of the lead programmers working with React now.

Here's the deal with this update. As you rightly noticed, the game has been pretty much abandoned. A couple weeks ago, the boss asked me if I could dust off the source and add some ad space on the front of the game, and also add some analytic tracking. While we were in there, we updated some of the combat obstacle sprites and the Invictus powerup icons and added a few maps. Update 1.1.10 was pushed up, and then I realized that I had made a mistake and the analytic events weren't being sent, so I fixed that and pushed up 1.1.11.

Why do the update for a long dead game with one user every other day? Good question! The idea was that we will have a huge discount for the Summer Sale coming up and hopefully get a fair amount of new players in the game. We want to track how those players play the game, what parts of the game they play, which alignment they play with, which units kill which unit, and stuff like that to help with designing a new version of Archon. Nothing's been announced with that, and it's not in active development right now, it's just an idea that's being kicked around. But yeah, that's what the Archon Resurrection link in there is about. I don't know what's going on with that website, but I'm sure it needs to be cleaned up. And then there's the link for Super Dungeon Bros, which we were also hoping to promote by getting more players into Archon and having them see that on the front page.

I hope that clears things up a bit. I'll see about getting an update announcement posted for this stuff too. That was an oversight on my part.

Regarding the network stuff that was promised a long time ago, I don't know what was said, but that obviously didn't happen. I remember we had a couple guys brought on to work on that and it didn't work out. I guess there was some premature announcements made about that, and it sucks that it didn't pan out. I agree that online multiplayer is what was really missing from this game. We play it at the office sometimes, and it's still a fun game, but it's the most fun when playing with other humans.

I wasn't aware of the Conquest issues, but I should be able to get in there and fix those problems now that I've got everything set up to make new builds. Let me know if you know of any particular problem areas other than Prelude to Dusk 5 and Last Midnight 9 and 10.
Astrobia Jun 16, 2014 @ 9:54pm 
Well at least you're open and honest. The willingness to go in and make fixes while you are familiar with the code is plus too.
Alastor Jun 16, 2014 @ 10:20pm 
It's nice to see some light shed on the situation Plattinator. Thanks for the info.

When talking about a new version of Archon does that mean new version of Archon Classic rebranded as Ressurection, or an entirely new game? Classic already is very promising, with the right work it'd be perfect. An entirely new game with a fresh launch could draw more attention though. I just feel like some people would be skeptical of another Archon purchase from React at this point.

I hate to say it but even I'm skeptical of any future releases from React. It's not that Archon: Classic is bad or anything but the fact the website stopped updating and the forums and dev blog for the game sort of just stopped existing is strange to me. It seemed like as progression and growth were ready to happen with the game and community it just suddenly hit a brick wall. I really would like to support future Archon titles but how can I know that the dev team wont just vanish like Classic? It can be a bit frustrating.

I'm sure you guys don't do anything harmful intentionally and I'm sure you guys love making the games you make. Game development can be hard. I think the biggest issue with Archon:Classic though was communication. It'd really be nice if you guys were a little more vocal about stuff. That's really the main thing frustrating for me on this title is being left in the dark. At one point I hear that online multiplayer and all kinds of updates are coming and I'm excited. By the time I check on updates again there's no place on the internet to even get Archon infromation anymore. It's really confusing.

I hope you guys can understand my frustrations and I really wish you guys the best with your future releases.
Astrobia Jun 17, 2014 @ 1:37am 
For me the issue was they said it was comming pretty much from day one... So okay fair enough put the money down on it and I got my money's worth regardless but what bites is I told a whole mess of other people to buy the game on the pretext they planned to add network multiplayer to it. Made a liar out of me. On multiple occasions as I'd regarly be asked by said friends when it was comming and I'd check the latest updates which said it would be in the V2.0 update and on one occasion there was even an announcment that they had a network build running at a LAN over the weekend so we were expecting it really soon... And then after that everything just went dark. No more news updates, no more responses on the community forums. Your comment Plattinator that things didn't work out with the people hired to make that build is the first response to the communities most freuently asked question we've received in years.

It's nice to finally have an answer, unfortunate though the circumstances that answer pertains to. Still like Alastor aluded to I hope you realise now the negative impact making those assurances and then initiating radio silence when they prove unviable has on your community... Especially with you starting up a crowd funding project, as those are hugely dependant on community relations. If the same sort of stunt gets pulled after a kickstarter that closes the door on any other crowd projects being viable for pretty much the entire team going forward.

When a kickstarter goes live the KS will invistigate the history of the team members on the project to gauge there abilitity to deliver on their KS promises and with permenant records of past transgressions people will remember and spread the word to be wary on the project page. Once bitten twice shy.

Now you (Nate Platt I presume) have been open and honest here which reflects well on you individually, certianly much more so than Chad and Jim have done so in the past with what was going on with Archon development. This is a step in the right direction but you really need to impress on the rest of the team how important that openess from all of them is going to be with a crowdsource project as it affects not just the percieved integrity of the company but the future prospects of the team members in it as well. There are very hostile elements in the crowdsourcing landscape and if you don't interact with the community they will turn on you and drag you down. As a backer of over 150 KS projects https://www.kickstarter.com/profile/astrobiablack as well as numerous others on other platforms such as indiegogo, patron, rockethub and investedin this is not merely a casual observation on my part.

Don't get me wrong I'm not implying they are unreasonably viscious, they aren't. It is simply a two way street. Crowdfunding relys on mutual trust. There have been plenty of low lifes and would be developers that have scammed large sections of the crowdfunding community out of their hard earned money... Not only robbing their patrons but other prospective crowd projects that money could have gone to where it would have been used to realise a labour of love. So the community collaborates on investigating the viability of project proposals and the integrity of the team members behind it for the protection of both parties. This applies even outside of kickstarter crowdfunding specifically an falls into crowdsourcing in all departments. People who rip off wholesale open source projects for financial gain are met with the same hostility with boycott campains and even industrial sabotage in more than one example.

That's the nature of the beast and it is important to understand how different it is to the publisher/licence holding clients you have dealt with in the past for mobile app development. The community is your client and they don't put down hard and fast design and marketing guidelines for you. They offer feedback but you get to make the decisions... However you are still answerable for those decisions. Now as I describe the crowdsourcing landscape it might appear agessive and intimidating but that's purely defensive. The reality is the response you get from the croudsourcing community will be a reflection of what you feed into it. If you support the community the community will suport you. If you turn your back on them they will do the same. For a productive relationship you need to keep them constantly abreast of what is going on with development and "immediately" notify them of any changes to your development roadmap and explain why those changes are made. If you go dark then they will turn dark. Now you'll still get backers with a sense of entitlement raging out over any changes and sometimes for no reason at all but they are in the minority (you'll get the reverse in small numbers as well). If you keep the community well informed that's 95% of your crowdsourcing obsticals overcome.

Now I would have thought after he worked on Archon Evolution non-commercialy Archon: Classic was a project of passion for Chad Lee. So I hope you can understand why seeing it abandoned and the community more or less discarded was a shock that has left many of us wary when faced with new projects him and Jim are producing and hope we will support. They need to make a statement themselves if they intend to mend those bridges (and I don't mean here on the steam forums), preferably before they are called out to do so in the KS projects community pages. KS is one place where bad press is particuarly detremental.
GauRocks Jun 17, 2014 @ 5:40am 
Originally posted by Plattinator:
I wasn't aware of the Conquest issues, but I should be able to get in there and fix those problems now that I've got everything set up to make new builds. Let me know if you know of any particular problem areas other than Prelude to Dusk 5 and Last Midnight 9 and 10.

The only other thing I've found would probably require a much more complicated fix. Ironically, I only found it because of the issue on Last Midnight 9. If you select a flying or teleporting unit and quickly move the cursor back and forth between a legal and illegal (water) tile while mashing the button, you can eventually get the unit to move onto the illegal tile. By going diagonally, I was able to get the Sorceress to escape her island prison and blast the puny knights who dared to kill her Basilisk. I assume it's because there's a (very short) window between the game putting the cursor on a space and checking that space's properties. I don't know if it's fixable without either massively changing the engine or adding an input delay that will hurt leaderboard scores, but since you asked, I figured I'd mention it and let you take a look.
Last edited by GauRocks; Jun 17, 2014 @ 5:41am
Plattinator Jun 17, 2014 @ 1:08pm 
Originally posted by Alastor:
When talking about a new version of Archon does that mean new version of Archon Classic rebranded as Ressurection, or an entirely new game? Classic already is very promising, with the right work it'd be perfect. An entirely new game with a fresh launch could draw more attention though. I just feel like some people would be skeptical of another Archon purchase from React at this point.

I hate to say it but even I'm skeptical of any future releases from React. It's not that Archon: Classic is bad or anything but the fact the website stopped updating and the forums and dev blog for the game sort of just stopped existing is strange to me. It seemed like as progression and growth were ready to happen with the game and community it just suddenly hit a brick wall. I really would like to support future Archon titles but how can I know that the dev team wont just vanish like Classic? It can be a bit frustrating.

The new version would be an entirely new game. The existing code wasn't written with networking in mind, and it turned out to be a huge job to rework it. I don't blame anyone for being skeptical, we dropped the ball on this one, especially with keeping the community up to date. I really appreciate you guys voicing your frustrations. I would like to be more active with the community going forward.
Alastor Jun 17, 2014 @ 1:36pm 
Thanks Plattinator, I am very pleased with what you have to say. Honestly if the whole company has the same attitude you have and will possibly become more vocal and learn from past mistakes then I'm sold on the next Archon game.

I look forward to seeing the games you guys have to offer in the future.
Last edited by Alastor; Jun 21, 2014 @ 10:11am
Plattinator Jun 17, 2014 @ 1:57pm 
Astrobia, I really appreciate your feedback in here. You definitely have some gaming and crowdfunding cred, but most importantly, what you said really makes sense. We're a pretty small company here, and I think we lost focus as we've taken on projects for different clients. Chad still wants to make things happen with a new version of Archon, and it sucks that we've damaged our trust with the community.

Just to make sure I'm understanding, the main problem seems to have been a lack of communication, right? It sounds like it's not so much that online multiplayer was promised and then turned out to be unviable, but that no announcements were made at that point. I mean, it's still bad that things were promised but not delivered, but poor communication is what was really frustrating.

Again, I'm glad you posted here, and on the greenlight page (that post led me here).
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