“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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