Hey all
So I know we have been a bit quiet lately so we thought we needed to come back to you.
Over the first half of the year we were gearing up for our soft-launch in June, which we managed to acheive! BUT! that’s when the hard work started. Going into soft launch we discovered that there were issues with our swipe controls, dance creation and the first time user experience. There isn’t any real excuse for this. Sure we had a tight budget and were trying to compromise in order to get the game live in front of mass-market players but we didn’t have the kind of polished flow that is needed for the hugely competitive mobile games market.
Despite that given our experience watching people playing the game (and how competitive they got) we still believe we have something with great potential – if we can fix those three issues.
However, we also know that without a fresh set of eyes, from people who have worked on Dance games, we couldn’t make the changes needed. So over the last few months we have reached out to friends and contacts in the industry and there under my nose I realised one of my friends worked on the original Guitar Hero! It’s strange the way things happen…
Alex (Thanks matie!) introduced me to two of the designers who worked on the UI and Dance creation of Guitar Hero. They gave us some incredible feedback as well as sharing some of their own experience getting the balance right for that amazing classic title. Seems they went through a similar set of issues getting the balance right for UI and highlighted that we need better ways to create predictable patterns of dance moves. This was invaluable for us to work out how we can turn what we have around. What’s more we are delighted that one of them has agreed to work with us to help fix the control scheme and approach to creating new dances.
We also discovered a great UX designer who has a flair for First Time User Experience whilst consulting on another game… and who also agreed to work with us on fixing the flow in the game.
That left us one major issue. How to fund the additional work. We have been working on other projects to gain some funds for the game but although this helps it wasn’t going to cover what we need to do next. So we had to go back to the investors to ask for more support. The great news is that they have agreed and we start the design work in the new year!
Some of you may have noticed that we have been a lot more quiet on social media recently; sadly Aaron was offered a job he couldn’t refuse (and we wish him all the success possible – he deserves it!!). However, with the support agreed with the Investors we hope to be able replace him in the New Year.
In other news we have managed to deliver the majority of physical rewards to our backers, but we know a small number of people had problems with missed deliveries or who unfortunately didn’t reply to our original survey until quite recently. We have attempted to fix this (in some cases we have sent out 3 times) but hit a snag in October when our courier lost a whole batch. These late and lost deliveries have been quite costly for us but we are determined to get our backers their rewards!
Whilst things have taken longer than we have planned; hopefully you can see that a lot of work continues behind the scenes.
So as the Holiday season arrives Dr Frank’n’futer’s servants are preparing the Castle for seasonal indulgences and we hope that you give yourselves over to absolute please…
Watch out for what comes in the New Year!