Inside ‘FortressCraft Evolved’

“FortressCraft Evolved” creator Adam Sawkins discusses the game’s development cycle and the bevy of changes in the newest version of the game.

Patrick Hickey Jr.: What was this development cycle like?

Adam Sawkins: In a word – “interesting.” I come from a traditional AAA background, pre-dating silly notions like ‘patches’. You write the game, it gets pressed onto a disk, it gets tested to hell and back, then it’s shipped, frozen in time, never to change at all. This means that in Burnout 3, in an 8 player network game, if you boost hard, the game locks up… my bug. I discovered it about 2 hours after the final code left the building. These days, however, I’m a huge fan of what’s known as “games as a service”, the concept that a game is an evolving and growing entity.

I’ve embraced Early Access hard with this – I’ve stood my ground and argued for hours with the community about how I felt things should be, but when people tell you that you’re wrong (and back it up with some quite accurate graphs and numbers), the flaws in your your original ‘perfect’ vision become clear, and you begin to change things. This has led to a much better game!

In the olden days, of course, you just wrote the game, finished it, threw it over the wall and hoped you’d managed to guess what your player base wants – in FortressCraft’s case, I’ve spent the last 3 months ensuring I’ve directly addressed player’s concerns about the game – this is something I’m going to continue to do after release!

The amazing thing about using Steam is how quickly I can turn fixes around – I’m a huge fan of watching people on Twitch stream the game, and I’ve seen issues and had a fix live within 10 minutes. Beautiful!

Continue Reading This Article From Review Fix Editor-In-Chief Patrick Hickey Jr. at Examiner.com

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About Patrick Hickey Jr. 14230 Articles
Patrick Hickey Jr. is a full-time Assistant Professor of Communication & Performing Arts and Director of the Journalism program at Kingsborough Community College and is the chairman of the City University of New York Journalism Council. He is the Founder and Editor-In-Chief of ReviewFix.com. He's also a former News Editor at NBC Local Integrated Media and National Video Games Writer at Examiner.com where his work was mentioned in National Ad campaigns by Disney, Nintendo and EA Sports. Hickey was also the Editor-In-Chief of two College Newspapers before he received his BA in Journalism from Brooklyn College. Hickey's work has been published in The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Complex, The Hockey Writers, Yahoo!, Broadway World, Examiner, NYSportScene Magazine, ProHockeyNews.com, GothamBaseball.com, The Syracuse Post-Standard, Scout.com and the official sites of the Brooklyn Aces and New York Islanders. His first book, The Minds Behind the Games: Interviews With Cult And Classic Video Game Developers was released in April 2018 and is chock full of interviews with legendary developers. His second book in the series, The Minds Behind Adventures Games, was released in December 2019. His third book, The Minds Behind Sports Games, was released in September 2020. His fourth book, The Minds Behind Shooter Games, was released in March 2021. The Minds Behind Sega Genesis Games and The Minds Behind PlayStation Games were released in 2022 and The Minds Behind PlayStation 2 was published in January 2023. Hickey is also a contracted comic book writer, currently penning his original series, "Condrey," as well as "The Job," "Brooklyn Bleeds" "Dem Gulls" and "KROOM" for Legacy Comix, where he serves as founder, owner and Editor-in-Chief. Hickey Jr. is also a voice actor, having starred in the 2018 indie hit and 2019 Switch, PS4 and Xbox One release, The Padre (also serving as English language Story Editor), from Shotgun With Glitters. The sequel, The Padre: One Shell Straight to Hell was released in February 2021- Hickey also served as a Story Editor and Lead Voiceover performer. He has also done narration and trailers for several other titles including The Kaiju Offensive, Relentless Rex and Roniu’s Tale. Hickey is also the lead voiceover performer on Mega Cat Studios’ upcoming title WrestleQuest, responsible for nearly 90 characters in the game, as well as Skybound's Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood, where he voices both Dracula and Renfield, as well as several other characters. He also stars in Ziggurat Interactive’s World Championship Boxing Manager 2, where he performs the VO of nearly every male character in the game. He also worked on the Atari VCS’s BPM Boy.

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