Repeated intro
Hello again everyone. I hope you've all been having a good start to your spooky month. This week has been stressful, but rewarding! While the team has been away focusing on catching up with life, I've been pounding away at Verdant and been making some really great progress. At the same time I was able to bust out the Hallowing Event and develop an entire Public Dungeon with a bunch of new loot. Anyways, this week we have a lot to go over it so I won't yap here too long.
What changed
0 fixes3 additions1 change0 removals
addedHello again everyone. I hope you've all been having a good start to your spooky month. This week has been stressful, but rewarding! While the team has been away focusing on catching up with life, I've been pounding away at Verdant and been making some really great progress. At the same time I was able to bust out the Hallowing Event and develop an entire Public Dungeon with a bunch of new loot. Anyways, this week we have a lot to go over it so I won't yap here too long.
changedIs ManaSoul Dead?No. ManaSoul is not dead. It hasn't even been born yet. Despite what the larger gaming community may think thanks to hundreds of publishers and games abusing it, Early Access is NOT a channel for you to release your basically finished game and have a shield for glaring gameplay issues. Early Access is intended as a relationship between the core players who are interested in your idea, and you as a developer. When working on such an ambitious project such an indie mmo, its foolish to think that you would just get everything right on the first try, and by developing so much of your game privately before it touches player's hands, you leave yourself open to unfixable core problems later down the line. We are striving to use Early Access for its intended purpose. To actively develop the game alongside players and use their feedback to shape the development process from Alpha all the way through to a final realized product.
addedIs ManaSoul Dead?"But you said that we would have a bunch more players for 0.3!" You would be correct, we definitely did not pull as big of traction as we expected from the 0.3 push, and that actually ended up being a very good thing. While I can't speak for the entire development team, I at least was extremely excited and bouncing off the walls with all of our progress, new features, tools, and developer-side stuff, as well as our new levelling formula and other things. But what most players want is a complete experience, and with an MMO that includes a replayable endgame, which 0.3 completely lacked.
addedIs ManaSoul Dead?As for *why* 0.3 didn't pull in many players, there are a few factors that we'll be working on as we approach full release. 1) We need a new trailer of a professional quality that showcases the best ManaSoul has to offer. 2) We need to plan a coordinated advertisement push alongside a Steam visibility round and let people know about ManaSoul. And 3) We need to streamline the onboarding experience to better acquaint long time RPG enjoyers with some of ManaSoul's more unique systems and provide a more clear path for new players through
ManaSoul changes
addedHello again everyone. I hope you've all been having a good start to your spooky month. This week has been stressful, but rewarding! While the team has been away focusing on catching up with life, I've been pounding away at Verdant and been making some really great progress. At the same time I was able to bust out the Hallowing Event and develop an entire Public Dungeon with a bunch of new loot. Anyways, this week we have a lot to go over it so I won't yap here too long.
changedNo. ManaSoul is not dead. It hasn't even been born yet. Despite what the larger gaming community may think thanks to hundreds of publishers and games abusing it, Early Access is NOT a channel for you to release your basically finished game and have a shield for glaring gameplay issues. Early Access is intended as a relationship between the core players who are interested in your idea, and you as a developer. When working on such an ambitious project such an indie mmo, its foolish to think that you would just get everything right on the first try, and by developing so much of your game privately before it touches player's hands, you leave yourself open to unfixable core problems later down the line. We are striving to use Early Access for its intended purpose. To actively develop the game alongside players and use their feedback to shape the development process from Alpha all the way through to a final realized product.
added"But you said that we would have a bunch more players for 0.3!" You would be correct, we definitely did not pull as big of traction as we expected from the 0.3 push, and that actually ended up being a very good thing. While I can't speak for the entire development team, I at least was extremely excited and bouncing off the walls with all of our progress, new features, tools, and developer-side stuff, as well as our new levelling formula and other things. But what most players want is a complete experience, and with an MMO that includes a replayable endgame, which 0.3 completely lacked.
addedAs for *why* 0.3 didn't pull in many players, there are a few factors that we'll be working on as we approach full release. 1) We need a new trailer of a professional quality that showcases the best ManaSoul has to offer. 2) We need to plan a coordinated advertisement push alongside a Steam visibility round and let people know about ManaSoul. And 3) We need to streamline the onboarding experience to better acquaint long time RPG enjoyers with some of ManaSoul's more unique systems and provide a more clear path for new players through
Is ManaSoul Dead?
There has been some minor discussion and comments here and there about ManaSoul's current player counts so I just want to delve into that a bit and talk about game development, why things are the way they are right now, and how/why they will improve in the future.
No. ManaSoul is not dead. It hasn't even been born yet. Despite what the larger gaming community may think thanks to hundreds of publishers and games abusing it, Early Access is NOT a channel for you to release your basically finished game and have a shield for glaring gameplay issues. Early Access is intended as a relationship between the core players who are interested in your idea, and you as a developer. When working on such an ambitious project such an indie mmo, its foolish to think that you would just get everything right on the first try, and by developing so much of your game privately before it touches player's hands, you leave yourself open to unfixable core problems later down the line. We are striving to use Early Access for its intended purpose. To actively develop the game alongside players and use their feedback to shape the development process from Alpha all the way through to a final realized product.
This has setbacks however that we were more than aware of when going in. Most players DO have the expectation that an Early Access game should be mostly 100% completed with just some small jank. Many players when booting up ManaSoul for the first time are not necessarily prepared for a game that is still in fully active development, nor are many players as interested in helping test games as they are just playing a finished one. We were fully aware that during Early Access our numbers would be low.
"But you said that we would have a bunch more players for 0.3!" You would be correct, we definitely did not pull as big of traction as we expected from the 0.3 push, and that actually ended up being a very good thing. While I can't speak for the entire development team, I at least was extremely excited and bouncing off the walls with all of our progress, new features, tools, and developer-side stuff, as well as our new levelling formula and other things. But what most players want is a complete experience, and with an MMO that includes a replayable endgame, which 0.3 completely lacked.
As for *why* 0.3 didn't pull in many players, there are a few factors that we'll be working on as we approach full release. 1) We need a new trailer of a professional quality that showcases the best ManaSoul has to offer. 2) We need to plan a coordinated advertisement push alongside a Steam visibility round and let people know about ManaSoul. And 3) We need to streamline the onboarding experience to better acquaint long time RPG enjoyers with some of ManaSoul's more unique systems and provide a more clear path for new players through
