Continuing my podcast series with developers who went the Early Access route, I’ve welcomed back Tim Keenan from Misfits Attic to talk about developing Duskers.
We started off with catching up with Tim and about the latest version of Duskers. That kicked things off with talking about Early Access and the move from it to 1.0. Many games have trouble deciding when to officially release their game or holding elements back for the big release. Another major point is managing consumer expectation and feedback with your game. While it’s great to be able to add everything suggested by your fans, knowing when to say no is very important to have any chance of managing your project correctly.
Another difficult point is balancing releasing patches vs. continuing to build your game, and Tim talked about the challenges of that and figuring out a schedule to adhere to.
Tim shared some examples of the help he received from the community in terms of improving Duskers by playing the game and examining it at a level that Tim couldn’t do, because he was busy developing the game. This kind of feedback is very valuable to improve the game and more importantly get it to a better state for release.
Tim talked about some of the harder parts of Duskers and how the community feedback helped to change his mind and led to making the game better. One great example of that would be the change of the module system in Duskers and how that impacted both playing the game and the difficulty.
Another important point that we talked about that developers need to understand is that you need to have your foundation of your game done before going on Early Access. The version that you launch with, should clearly represent what your game is going to be about and the game should only get better from there.
This was another great cast and hopefully we can have more Early Access impressions with developers in the future. If you enjoyed the cast, please consider donating to the Patreon campaign for Game-Wisdom to help keep things funded.
- For our previous Early Access cast with Liam Welton from Failbetter Games, you can find it here
- To check out Duskers, here is the store page and the official site
- Here is my playlist of recorded plays of Duskers in earlier versions; with more plays to come
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