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Tesserex
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« on: December 25, 2009, 02:26:22 PM » |
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Greetings Dragon Trainers,
We understand that many of you are starting to feel that we have given up development on PD2. We are definitely overdue for giving you guys an update on what's going on behind the scenes, and we apologize for the lengthy delay and the tension this has caused among players. So in the interest of being open with the community, as we have always striven to be, here is the complete story on what's going on back here.
Development on PD2 has not been canceled. We have still been trying to fix major issues that arise, and our assistant has been doing a great job adding new minor features to both PD1 and PD2. Also note, to those of you have been very upset about this:
We believe that we have recently conquered the rollover bug that caused the app to be down for hours at a time every morning. This comes at the cost of consistent backups, which means that if we ever do need to restore from backup, the data may be out of sync (you may have no turns, and also no stats from turns. Or you may be assisting and attacking simultaneously.) This also corrects the double combat bugs. But since we have never needed a backup restore on this server, it's probably not an issue.
New items should still be released as well, as soon as we have icons for them. On the other hand, development on new features, including clans, has been put on hold. I know reading that sentence will have most of you up in arms, so you deserve to know exactly why this is.
Around the same time that Zed left us, I (Tesserex) began my full time job. On top of work, both Ravenex and I have a personal life to attend to. The time that we can devote to LiquidFyre has dwindled to approximately 50 man hours per week. This includes a full day on Sundays, and two evenings. While at first this was mostly spent on clans, progress has been very slow for several reasons, mostly conflicting design decisions and difficulty integrating with the rest of the game, as well as overall complexity. The number of players for both games right now pays us about 50% more than our server costs, which is very little. This amount is also slowly declining. This basically means that we cannot expect to earn anything significant the way things are right now. To be honest, it does not make much sense for us to be putting in this work as overtime and interfering with our personal lives for little or no benefit.
I know that sounds very bleak, but not to worry! Where has our time gone, if not toward clans? Well, we cannot spill the beans entirely, but we have been hard at work on a new product, which is not a game, but which has a chance to bring LiquidFyre out of the pit and turn it into a full time business, with the ability to pay us a salary. Like any startup company, this is a risk, but our initial probes into the market have been met with a very positive response. There are other successful companies in the same market, with different products. If this venture is as successful as we hope, we will quickly regain the ability to devote our time to making enjoyable games.
So if you want the blunt truth, here it is. Worst possible outcome: our venture fails miserably with no customers, our revenues dwindle below the server costs and I pay out of pocket until it becomes too much, and then everything shuts down completely. But this is the same outcome as without trying this new product, and would probably happen about a year from now. The best possible outcome: we succeed, and are quickly able to pay ourselves a salary and more, get an actual office, hire people to do graphics, and so on. Then we can finish clans, or better yet, re-release both PD games, better written with fewer bugs and better graphics. And then we can have the fun we want, making more games for you to enjoy.
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