And as usual thanks for being so clear on the business side you guys are dealing with, it's very educational.
My pleasure! I know it's interesting stuff to most of the folks here, so I try to be as transparent as I can.
Regardless, I hope the redesign works out for you, and brings in lots of new sales. Regardless of the look, I'd certainly like to see future content expansion, and in general I'd like you guys to have the funds you need to work on whatever you want. I was sorry to hear about the sales slump, it's kind of depressing that a game as string-laden as Diablo 3 can have an impact like that.
I appreciate it! And yeah, I was disappointed in the Diablo 3 effect, too. I think that it just caught us at a bad time, and also overlapped AVWW in terms of playerbase too much. I think that AVWW had not gotten quite enough traction yet by the time Diablo 3 came out, so when our sales slumped we then were no longer so prominently featured on any stores and thus our title kind of got shuffled to the back as other titles came out. With more of a feature on a store or in the press that could have been overcome, but I think the graphics were offputting to stores as well as news folks, because they want to have pretty pictures to go with articles or on their store front page. Among other things, if they thought the game was bad based on some prominent early reviews or whatever.
Ultimately, as long as we can break even on an expansion for AVWW and keep all our staff comfortable, then probably that's something we'd do next year regardless. I think that's a big chance to reinvigorate the game with a larger audience -- but only if the graphics are better before then, hence our focus now.
Part of me is very wary of accidentally falling into the
sunk costs fallacy trap, though. In other words, trying and trying to make something pleasing to a larger audience when it is only pleasing to a smaller audience, and wasting tons of money and time trying to do that instead of just making more games (which is way more fun, as well as more productive). So for now I'm kind of hedging and working on other projects while seeing what the reaction is to the art rework here, while at the same time keeping a certain baseline of updates so that our core fanbase doesn't run out of new things to find. It's a balancing act, to be sure, but hopefully our fans of AVWW will be as patient as our AI War fans have been in the past (just not for such a long period as happened with AI War, of course).
Are you going to be showing more art examples and screenshots or whatever as you progress forward with this?
Yep! In fact, my plan is to
probably start integrating the new art as it is completed. It will clash horribly in parts, but that's already true. And as various regions or monsters or characters get completed, for instance, things will just look the new way in that area and then the old way in another area.
Heavy Cat is very receptive to revision requests and comment while the project is ongoing, so that will provide us with the best opportunity to make sure that things are working well in the game engine and that players are overall liking what they see. It's going to be a few weeks before the first in-game stuff is ready to go, I expect, because there's still lots of pencil sketches and R&D to do first.
The response in this thread has largely been extremely positive, though, so I'm quite encouraged. Most of the things that people have mentioned not liking were the same things that bugged me and that HC is already going to be revisiting anyhow. And all that stuff is more about colors and shading and detailing rather than the more fundamental aspects. And given how large parts of the image are made of awesome even with the current colors and shading and detailing, that's also very encouraging.
Glad to hear you're optimistic about the future, first of all, in spite of things not being amazing.
It's been very rough, emotionally, but most of that was over the past months and not now. Now at least "the other thing on your foot has dropped" so to speak, and neither the world nor the company nor this game has ended. So that's always very encouraging.
What has been most encouraging of all is the reaction that folks have had to our shifting to working on both the AI War expansion and Shattered Haven.
Both are also projects that take a lot less time to complete, and should be done in October and November respectively, knock on wood. And with the art revamp also slated to end in November, that really makes it so that we're in a good position for the holidays (which is the most important time of year for us, income-wise).
Having a plan that only involves 3-4 months rather than 18 months like the AVWW project turned out to, is a big help.
I'm encouraged by this, I have to say:
Yeah, they have some amazingly talented artists in a lot of various styles. The one thing to bear in mind is that the image you're seeing there is a static backdrop and so can be lit and drawn from one perspective that never changes. The quality of art in a game where there is parallax and lots of things chopped up is going to be a bit different because of the need to make all of those things assemble-able in many different ways.
In a lot of respects, the day/night cycle of AVWW is one of the biggest limiters of quality in the art. But in lots of discussion with HeavyCat, I think that we've figured out cool ways to work around that. One of the things that bugged people the most about the characters in the original art style of the game was how there are no shadows on any of them, but that's something that won't be the case here.
