[Pitching/Who do I contact?]

Typically, if you are pitching a game project, you are doing it because you are going to pay a studio to create it for you, or you are requesting funding to have your own studio create the game. Whoever funds the game owns it.

 

If you do not fall into either of those two categories, then the answer to your question is nobody. As others have said, there are millions of ideas out there. They just need a market and money to get realized.

 

But, you can always make your idea come to life in your own spare time. Proving you can develop a game is always a way to get into the industry.

[New Engine?]

While Unreal and Cryengine have cheaper short term subscription plans, they come with added stipulations including a royalty rate for Unreal. Cryengine's cheap plan also only supports Windows as of right now. Unity seemed to have everything we needed all in one package (a good toolset, no need for external third party software for animation/audio/ui/etc, and support for Win/Mac/Linux).

 

That all being said, the work and time required to port the existing code base to one of those engines would be more trouble than it is worth. We've learned a lot about Unity and developing with it over the project so any new project going forward would have a lot less headaches to have to figure out in the technical department which usually end up slowing down development.

 

Any sequel would mean the existing engine would not only get a some new features but, a lot of existing systems would be improved to allow better workflow and for more/better content to exist since they don't have to be rebuilt from scratch.

 

As for the character art, like Adam said, there are a lot of models and pieces that needed to be generated for all of the item/armor pieces you can wear. Character creation and Inventory paper dolls were not added until around the middle of the project either so it was not known early on how detailed character art would need to be since the majority of the time is spent looking that them from a far away top down camera. 

 

It's safe to say any sequel would use Unity again.

[Frame Rate Discussion]

There are definitely components that characters use that need a CPU optimization pass which is likely the contributing cause to your slowdowns. The ol' Refactor Tractor will be visiting them shortly.

[[435] Can't enter Ogre cave]

There have been a number of selection issues in this scene specifically. It was just tracked down late today that all of this was caused by upgrading Unity from 4.5.1 to 4.6.1 in between this beta release and the previous one. Something is going on in their new release that isn't triggering the OnMouseOver call for various objects in the scene. 

 

We will be addressing this issue this week now that we know what the cause of the issue is.

[[435] No music and no ambient sounds in game]

Does the build number in your game say 434 or 435? (It was just changed to build 435 this evening after 434 was mistakenly uploaded).

[[435] Game freezes after pressing New Game]

If this happens again, can you upload your output_log?

[[435 Windows] Voice Samples Don't Play in Chargen]

Let's just say...this was fixed this morning.

 

And we added a few more line types that play instead of just Selected.

[[434 Windows] Unlootable Golden Celery]

This is known, there are a handful of weird selection issues on this map specifically. We're still looking into what the issue is exactly.

[bugs in spanish]

Exceptions due to the fact that text added right before this build went out had not been localized for other languages yet

 

Next beta build should be fine, even if unlocalized text is run into.

[[392] Character Creation Non-Functional]

Ah yes...this bug. This was a bug with big head mode. This has been fixed. You probably have Big Head mode on in the options menu. Just turn it off and you should be good. This will be working in the next update.

[Black screen after leveling up]

This makes sense. This is likely because we added in some new strings prior to this update that hadn't yet gone through Localization for translation. So the game is having exceptions looking for places in the text to insert stats. This should be working fine on our side now. 

 

As a side to this, BMac made it so string exceptions shouldn't mess the game up anymore.

[Black screen after leveling up]

I think the next build has this fixed in it. Are any of you running in languages besides English? What classes are you using?

[[392] Character Creation Non-Functional]

I think this has been fixed in our internal build.

 

Could you by chance provide the output_log.txt file after closing the game after this happened? (Should be located in the game data folder.)

[New build feedback]

 

Really? People are that up in arms over the highlighting?

Sure, could be done a bit more subtile but overall I have to agree with mutonizer,... it helps.

 

There is a "feel" to some games (all games?) without which you just cannot get into the mood of the game itself. It varies from person to person of course but usually it's UI, pacing and visuals, plus that "little something". When I say it's not a big deal, I mean right now, because of the purpose of the change.

That said, it cannot be left as it is that's for sure and needs to be a toggle, no doubt about it.

 

For example, the new NPC backers. Upon loading a new character on the new build, I went around the church and noticed them. For some reason, the icon, the color and disparity from others NPCs totally broke it for me, that "feel" I mean, it simply pulled the plug on my fresh PC and broke any sense of immersion there usually is after I create a character and go "let's adventure!".  

And even though there are no such NPCs later on, nowhere but in town really, it stayed with me. Why? Go figure man, but first thing I did was to mod their icons out..and now it's fine, and I don't get that disconnect anymore when I create new PCs to test the build. Well that and changed the highlighting hue to 25% alpha...

 

So all in all, it's not a big deal..for now...but it's not nothing

 

 

The Backer NPC UI and system was functionally put together a while back and our design team just got around to hooking up the backer NPC data to the characters. So at this point, this is the first time these things have hooked up so the whole team can get a look at it all. Currently, we're more interested that everything is in and working properly. Small things like background colors and icons can be tweaked or removed once our leads and artists have gotten time to do a major review of the overall look. The UI art team has been working a lot on icons on portraits lately as there have been quite a bit to get done.

 

Just remember guys, each patch you guys get has only been about 3 weeks apart. Some of the things you see may have been added earlier that week and haven't gone through a full official review pass by the leads and the rest of the team. Rest assured that we will do various passes on things added and you may just be looking at the first go. 

[Sensuki's Suggestions #004: Area Map Functions (with video)]

Scrolling should be smoother, double click to close set and close, lighter explored fog of war, and dynamic elements/time of day should all be in for the area map in the next update.

[Information window during Character Creation / Level-Up does not update, or updates on Last Mouse-over.]

These indeed are valid issues and are logged in our system. However, they probably won't be addressed on the first upcoming update as focus has been more on critical systems of the game. If all goes well, these should be addressed on the second update.

[Purchased adventurer not at proper level]

This should be fixed for the next update. How it works is you will create them as a level 1 character and they will have enough XP to be able to level up to the level you purchased them for. This is so you can progress their stats and abilities as you see fit.

[Extreme Menu Lag]

Character Creation specific lag is known and is just some updating code that needs to be optimized. This will be being worked on soon. Will have to look into the Godlike Aumaua model combo though to see if there is indeed some inefficiencies going on there. Thanks for the info!

[Load times too long?]

The game has not gone under heavy optimization passes quite yet. We already have a few loading optimizations in and ready for the next update but, there will continue to be more as time goes by since they are still needed. Once more of the mechanical and feedback issues have been addressed, then parts of the team will slowly start to work on optimizing (both memory and speed wise). Hopefully you will see some improvement in the future.

[Sensuki's Suggestions #001: Disable Vertical Sync]

I think I saw Brian had added this in sometime this week. 

 

But on a side note, our mouse cursor is not an in-engine rendered mouse cursor. It is using the hardware windows cursor and just changing which cursor visuals are displayed. This is done to ensure that the mouse feels very responsive like it does when you are just doing other normal stuff in Windows.

[Menu at character creation]

Should be easy to put in.

[OE Communication Plans]

The day the beta went out, everyone on the team still had a sizable list of issues and improvements to work on, half of which you guys have already pointed out. The leads and QA will go through suggestions and bugs and write up anything new that you guys have found that we want to address. QA specifically will attempt to reproduce new bugs mentioned and write up a more detailed issue for the proper team member to work on.

 

Once we have a noticeable amount of improvements in and we have ensured that the build is in a releasable condition, an update will be pushed. There are no hard dates planned for that but, more than likely you can expect an update every few weeks or so, at least early on.

[Sensuki's Suggestions #006: I re-wrote the CC Class Ability Descriptions]

Since the starting abilities and functionality of classes have been constantly modified during the project, these descriptions were not added in until just before the backer beta. They still need a proper formatting pass (including the newlines, bolds, and color tags). However, feel free to continue editing them as you see fit and we can always use those as potential reference when we clean these up.

[Just downloaded the game from Steam; tried to launch the game through Steam, and via the install folder, game fails to launch.]

This seems to be more oriented around a problem with Steam than a problem with the game itself. Google search on that error code suggests verifying the install integrity, disable F-Secure if you have that installed, or do a clean install from scratch again.

[FPS drops during hair / color selection]

The FPS drop on small customization changes is known and we have a fix in the works right now.  The updating of the character on any change just needed to be optimized.

 

Thanks for the post!