A 'ReBuilt' Thought...

[Teal_Blue]

Just a thought, probably not possible, but still I thought worth mentioning.

Sarah Northway of Northway Games?
Made a little zombie flash game with 'casual' gamer style of art. Rebuild was a small success.

When she approached a version 2 a year later or so she tried a different art style at her customers requests...  A much more severe and serious style.

And found she suddenly had a much larger bunch of gamers on her hands.

Rebuild is now going on to a third version to much acclaim and popularity. You can look it up on Steam just to take a look, though it was the style of version 2 that really started the rush.

I only mention it because everything about Shattered Haven is very interesting to me except the character art that makes me think I'm playing Zelda on a DS. Which was ok when I was younger, but really prefer something a little serious now.

Any chance such a thing could happen one of these days?

-T

[x4000]

I absolutely adore Rebuild II; I hadn't heard of Rebuild III, I'll be sure to check that out when it is ready.

In terms of Shattered Haven, you never know, but I tend to like works that stand alone.  I love the retro style of game art as well as the modern, and Shattered Haven was originally conceived as kind of a love child of Zelda 1 and Lode Runner The Legend Returns.  For that to work, the perspective and such has to be the way it is.  A re-skin with different pixel art but the same tile-based nature could work, but I don't know that it would be as much of a tone shift as people would want for something like this.  Rebuild uses an isometric point of view that is a lot closer in, so there was a lot more freedom there for pretty much any art style.

[Teal_Blue]

 It was just a thought, and i know what you mean, it would be better to have a work reflect your feelings and feel true to what you wanted it to be, rather than just change styles to change styles.

 And besides it just struck me, that changing the character art isn't as simple as just drawing new pics, since everything is spaced to a certain size for puzzle reasons, it would cause problems just to put different art in without having to resize it to make sure it fits correctly. Which probably would mean a lot more work than what i am thinking it would take.

 I just hate to see Shattered Haven not be popular, it seemed so cool when we all were testing it while you were making it and ideas were flying fast and furious. It felt like it was going to go far. Maybe being part of any creative thing is like that? But of course we don't have cystal balls to see the future. I guess if we did things would be a lot more certain, but probably maybe a lot more boring too? As we would miss out on all the projects that were cool, but just didn't quite catch the wave.

Anyway, just a random thought, sometimes i ask things without thinking them through enough. But thank you for the post back.

-T

[x4000]

Hopefully someday it will be properly "discovered," we shall see.  In the end, some games wind up getting lucky and being popular, and others don't.  There are obviously factors like audience and quality and so forth that are central to the game itself, but there are also luck-related factors.  I'd say some of our titles have been luckier than average, while others have been unluckier than average, and then all the other factors outside of luck also come into play.  This one just plain wasn't lucky, whatever else anyone thinks about it (good or bad).

[nas1m]

It is a great game, for sure.
But even for me as a die-hard Arcanaut the (player) character art for this none was hard to stomach I have to admit . Which really is a shame as the game can be downright beautiful in places...

Also having big/menacing instances (like the squid and the black man) represented by bigger than one tile entities would have gone a long way imho (although I see the issues that would likely have caused with the engine...).

Any chance for you to add a couple of story progress related achievements for Haven at some time?
This would really motivate me to give it another go ...
 

[x4000]

I agree that the character art is pretty terrible.  It's something that I feel like... hmm, I'm not going to go there.  Suffice it to say, it's not what I wanted, visually, when it comes to the individual sprites here.  In terms of actually having this be pixel art and whatnot, I thought that was the complaint, and that I like.  But the specific pixels do bug me, yeah.

For the shadow man and squid being larger, that would have been great, but isn't something that the engine really supports.  It was only the third full graphical game engine I had coded from scratch (this was back in 2008), so there were a lot of things I did in ways that I later found limiting.

[nas1m]

In terms of actually having this be pixel art and whatnot, I thought that was the complaint, and that I like.  But the specific pixels do bug me, yeah.

That's exactly how I feel, I'm definitely more than okay with this title being pixel art - just to be clear .

I guess you did deliberately over-read my question regarding achievements above ? Not that I can blame you for it given the likely amount of rveenue the respective dev time will likely generate ...

Ah well. Good to see the old titles getting some love, anyway. I appreciate it!


OT: Any news on when we may expect a glimpse at the TLF expansion?

[x4000]

Ah, sorry, I didn't mean to skip the achievements question. It's something that is kind of out of scope at the moment, honestly.

For the TLF expansion, that's going to be very late July or early August when we start the beta for that. Aiming for a September 2.0. That schedule has been pushed back so that I could work on the Linux ports and our site and so on, since we have some breathing room right now.

[nas1m]

Ah, sorry, I didn't mean to skip the achievements question. It's something that is kind of out of scope at the moment, honestly.

Ah, pity. I was hoping for just one "act completed" for each act location to measure game progress in achievements, but well - maybe one day .

For the TLF expansion, that's going to be very late July or early August when we start the beta for that. Aiming for a September 2.0. That schedule has been pushed back so that I could work on the Linux ports and our site and so on, since we have some breathing room right now.

Okay, cool. You might want to make a forum topic or blog post regarding this, though, since the last announcement is still out there as the latest word (at least as far as I am aware)...

[x4000]

I believe that I did mention it, but I'm not sure.

[Teal_Blue]

Sorry, didn't mean to sound like the art for SH was bad, I think it is fine for something like Zelda. I just thought a more artistically severe style might mean more sales. Of course I have no experience in knowing that with any certainty. Just the example with Rebuild, that I had a guess might work for SH too.

Anyway it was just a thought more than a request. I figure you've got enough of those right now.

-T

[x4000]

All good!