Dev Log

[Hollow]

There seems to be a bug with Steam achievements. 'Super Sheep Slayer' shows up in potential achievements global achievements, but 'Sheep Slayer' shows up only in global achievements. 0% have it and it doesn't appear to be available in your personal achievements.

Also, your store page just went up. Is it my imagination, or are all the preview screenshots squished? It doesn't look so great.

Should we have been emailed our keys yet?

[Chizu]

Yes, the screenshots on the store page are 4:3 images stretched to 16:9, so they kinda look wrong.
Other than that, nice to see it up~

Hope the keys are dished out pronto :V

[Hollow]

Also, you say I should have 4 leftover white skulls, but my save file has 10 available and I've bought everything available to me. It seems like something on the file I uploaded on my post is glitchy. Hrm.

[Yinan]

Well, in an earlier Version, the left over skulls were different (you had 10 to many white skulls, but 1 to few obsidian skull).
So if you have a save game that you started in or before that version and applied the patches to it later, then of course your data will be messy. You got the10 white skulls to many of the earlier version but also the one to much obsidian skull that was added later.

[larsiusprime]

Yinan's probably right - if you played the game while we were still updating the test builds, we changed the balance around a lot and that might be the deal.

As for the achievement, I'll look into it and see what's wrong. I emailed new screenshots to Steam, they apparently need to be widescreen ratio, so I gave them ones with some padded black borders that shouldn't squish.

[larsiusprime]

Okey dokey. New build version 1.0.49, going up on Steam soon.

1) Fixed Error #1009 bug - 0 length save files no longer crash the game, they are treated as empty save slots
2) Fixed eternal "loading" hang - related to a dependent .dll file we accidentally introduced. Fixed in 1.0.49 (probably)

As soon as some testers get their eyeballs on this, I will upload it to Steam. I need to verify 2 things:

1) That the above bugs are indeed fixed (possible to do by "sneak" installing the zip file's contents into your Defender's Quest Steam installation directory)
2) That no NEW bugs are introduced

So, for testers that don't have the game on steam yet, you can still help us verify #2, which is at least as important as #1. The major things that have changed are file loading logic and the steam SDK bridge. I haven't made any major tweaks anywhere else just yet.

Things are pretty hectic this week, so the next "global" update to all versions of the game hits the public update server next Monday. This should cover our direct customers, as well as GOG, GamersGate, Desura, and Impulse - I think, at least. We'll also try to update the kongregate version and give them their long-promised direct download soon.

I have the steam key mailer script in hand. I'm testing it now. If I'm lucky, these will go out today. If not, well - sometime after today

Mac version will be updated to 1.0.49 with achievement support.... eventually. Maybe next week!

[Hollow]

I don't suppose you can tell us how many new sales you've gotten over the past week? It would be nice to know how many new people are enjoying the game on Kong+Desura+GoG+Steam combined. Hopefully enough to keep you guys from starving.

[larsiusprime]

Things are going pretty well. We will release all the final numbers eventually, but I'll probably hold them back for a few months so I can leverage a featured article or a GDC talk out of it.

In the meantime though, I'll talk in general terms.
So far, so good. We've had a lot of sales on Steam, but still less than our lifetime direct sales by a good margin. So we haven't doubled sales overnight or anything on epic Minecraft level proportions.

I will share these numbers:

Demo->Sale conversion rate is 22.5%

That is stupidly high. That means that 22.5% of everyone who touches the demo goes on to buy the game. In certain contexts, 5% is considered a huge conversion rate.

Average play session length 62 minutes
Average time played 6 hours 49 minutes
Median time played 5 hours 17 minutes
Time played range 1 hour 22 minutes - 11 hours 49 minutes (one standard deviation of playing time)

Those playtime numbers are also scarily high, too. Compare that to the legendary Cliffski's Democracy 2.

Remember to sleep and eat, people!

[DarthFly]

As was told a long ago on one site

Just don’t blame me if you end up missing meals.

So probably we all should blame this particular Adam... ))

[larsiusprime]

Okay, did customer support for three straight days. All the keys have been mailed out, and now it's time to get to work with some patches and stuff.

The plan is to roll out new versions for Monday. So, right now that means updating the game to version 1.0.49 across the board. Here's what I still need to do:

• Update Kongregate build, add DRM-free downloadable game link + soundtrack
• Update Steam Mac build, integrate achievements and stuff
• Fix dll dependency in Steam build
• Roll out global 1.0.49 build to public update server (covers GOG/Desura/Impulse/GamersGate/Direct)

[coyot]

Demo->Sale conversion rate is 22.5%

That is stupidly high.

As I wrote on GoG - this was the first demo to which my reaction was "Shut up and take my money". Glad to see there's so many of us.

[larsiusprime]

Launch has been insane. I've been doing non-stop support for the past week.

My last task is to synchronize all the versions. Right now I'm compiling version 1.0.50 and packaging it for the public update server. That will be going up today if I'm lucky. Also, the kong version should get downloadables soon.

After that, I'm going to try adding achievements to the mac steam version and fixing some of the minor bugs specific to the steam build.

[nyambe]

Where is there a change log. You had mentioned changes to healers and I was curious how that was going to effect the game.

[Olson.dev]

Average play session length 62 minutes
Average time played 6 hours 49 minutes
Median time played 5 hours 17 minutes
Time played range 1 hour 22 minutes - 11 hours 49 minutes (one standard deviation of playing time)

I hope you're using your own metrics from within the game code. If you're using Steam stats, you can throw those away. Steam says I've played 58 hours. My save file says around 24 hours. Not sure if you've fixed it yet but when I was playing this weekend, Steam had to be restarted in order to relaunch the game. It always thought the application was running after the 1st launch since Steam started.

[larsiusprime]

From now on, every Friday I'm going to scale back my Defender's Quest time and work on something, anything, else, so I don't go insane. Rest assured, I'm still here to support the project and stuff, and I'll still answer your emails and posts, but I'm going to give myself some "20% time" now that the main grind is over.

Here's what I'm doing this week:
http://www.fortressofdoors.com/2012/11/ ... quest.html

Permanent thread for that project here:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=587

[coyot]

Lars, gonna tweak healers more? Even in 1.0.51 the first dark level is a pain for level 8 party , simply not possible to get perfect unless I get very lucky.
How about making Ether flash 100% light without damage (and points increasing duration), and Holy Light 100% light with small damage to all and BIG damage to dark? (Big as in "on par with ice mage")

[larsiusprime]

Yeah, I think we can do something like that. I'll keep you posted when I start working on the next patch.

[larsiusprime]

Hey guys! Quick update, it's been a while.

I'm working on a new build which will hit the test server in a bit. This will be the GOG-variant of the game, which just has some different default settings for the auto-updater and metrics tracking since they seem to be really particular about that over there.

New stuff in this build includes an in-game achievement interface, as well as some slight tweaks.

-Healers now have 100% chance of light on ether flash.
-Explosive start/end have been given a slight buff - explosive end is a bigger boom now, and explosive start scales with boost level, so successive boosts do more boom.
-Fixed a mistake in the "shock lightning" book that erroneously says it's only a 50% chance.
-Fixed the regular sheep achievement
-Changed Hero-Mode++ requirement to 180 stars

The next major project I'm going to be working on is localization support and steam workshop integration. I'll also be paying some more attention to the bug database and see what I can do there. Eventually we need to move on to our next project, but I think there's still some maintenance to be done.

[coyot]

Thanks for the healers! Now it's time for me to go and pwn the game in linear mode again

[larsiusprime]

New builds are up.