unfortunately one of our main investors on Kickstarter cancelled his pledge. So we are in a bit of trouble right now to reach our funding goal! This is very sad, since I was sure we are already funded. I did not know that cancellation is even possible so short before the end of a campaign is reached. Anyway I will try my best to gain more supporters through all my available channels to secure the release of Timbertales at October.
If you are interested in the game consider to help me out in this dark time 🙂 There are still 24 hours left until the campaign ends and I am sure we can make it!
after some really hard weeks of promotion and social media effort, I am back to development business 🙂 Meanwhile we got some supporter for our Kickstarter and I am looking forward to reach the goal. Keep it up! But it is not done yet. We are about 80% funded at the moment, so if you want to receive cool rewards you should support the game on Kickstarter! Some of the rewards such as the master account won’t be available after Kickstarter anymore.
Before I start to give a small outlook about the upcoming features and things I am currently developing I want to share the T-Shirt design for the “Representation” – Reward (75 Eur) and the Kickstarter portrait, which every supporter on Kickstarter will receive in game.
As you can see we offer all kinds of colors for the T-Shirt, so you can choose your favorite 🙂
The portrait can be chosen in game for your account and will be shown every time a match is started.
Outlook – what is actually going on and what is up next
I am not sure if I mentioned it already, but in the actual beta build I added translations for english, since some supporter on Kickstarter are native english and got early access 🙂
Also the introduction of the players animation before a match started was added to the last build. Last but not least the spheres, which can be dropped, if a unit dies were also added.
At the moment I am working on the topic “Map diversity”. I already finished the first map with its own mechanic which is explained in this video:
In the second map I want to introduce a new mechanic, which I will also need for the upcoming campaign. Collecting and returning. There will be random spawns of acorns on defined map areas. You can pick up those acorns with any kind of unit by simply moving your unit towards the acorn and click on it, like you would attack normally. If you picked up an acorn it is displayed above your unit, so your enemy can see that this unit carries an acorn. If the unit dies while returning the acorn to a special place, the acorn is lost. By arriving at the special place you can drop the acorn by clicking on the special place. The first player, who returned enough acorns will receive a gift of gods. This gift will help you a lot to win the actual match.
I plan to create 4-5 maps with their unique mechanic for the release, more will follow afterwards. So we will have a map pool for challenge, arena, ranked and unranked mode consisting of 4-5 different maps.
After those maps are done I want to finalise the heroes concept and implement the first heroes. Of course the sylvan and vermin campaigns are still missing, so there is a lot of story and content todo. The rest of the time until October, if there is a rest :D, will be used to stabilise and improving the code and server.
Thats the actual plan for the next weeks, I hope we get funded to be save of course. Please share your opinion or feel free to ask about more details if you like.
After evaluating the feedback, I decided to develop two new feature to become more outstanding. You should definitely want to watch the video until the end for a surprise 😀 These features will be implement in the near future.
Map diversity
To give maps more influence on the game. I want to create more new cool maps with their own mechanics. For example on the map: Plague of insects, you can destroy an insect nest and the insects will hunting down your enemies in return. I have a lot of concepts in my mind. Another example would be a map, where you have to collect acorns and bring them to some kind of god. The first player, who collected the required amount receives a strong unit in return or the god attacks the base of the enemy. There are many ideas in my mind and I need time to sort and evaluate them 🙂
Heroes
With heroes I want to bring heroes into the game. Every race will receive their own unique Heroes. Heroes will be stronger than units and will have two special abilities. If a hero dies the game is lost immediately. This will give a strong focus on the hero. I imagine that the hero will also gaining experience while playing maybe permanent, maybe just for the game. The concept is very raw at the moment and I have to specify it even more.
We reached a closed beta state of timbertales and i try to finish the game as soon as possible. My budget is nearly empty and will definitely depleted this month. This means i need to get some more budget to finish Timbertales. My idea was to start a kickstarter to get the small amount which is needed to finish Timbertales and of course I hope for your support. The big advantage of kickstarter is: I can give out cool rewards for every supporter!
I already receive some funds and appreciate that a lot. It is very important to outline, that only if we reach the goal the money is funded!
So I created some cool rewards for your support and want to tell you more about them:
1€ – 2x random ingame units, you receive news & updates around Timbertales
5€ – You will receive an unique Supporter-Skin for our badger “Rainy” & You also will be listed on the credits page
10€ – You can choose to support the Sylvan or Vermin, this means you get one campaign for free and the rewards before
20€ – You will receive the rewards before + the first two campaigns for free which will be the main campaign for the sylvans and the main campaign of the vermins
50€ – You receive a ‘Master Account’ with the master account you will never ever have to pay for anything in the game
80€ – You receive a ‘Master Account’ and a special Timbertales T-Shirt
125€ – Sponsorship in game with your personal logo and link + Master Account
250€ – Create your own game elemen
1500€ – You are allowed to define a 3rd race for timbertales with all its units and naming them. You can also define their look and feel and discuss it with our graphic artist + Master Account + Sponsorship
I hope for your support to be able to release the game as soon as possible, check out the Kickstarter page for more details
Since 21st of June closed beta is now running! I faced a lot of expected and unexpected problems the last week 😀 My biggest learning was that apple takes several days to apply a beta build if its the first reviewed build :/ Because of this the iOS-Version was a bit later than expected, but in the end everything gone well and apple approved the build.
One major problem the last week was the stability of the server, there were some actions which caused the server to death. I was able to manage those bugs and we now got a much more stable server, but its still not bullet proof.
At this point i want to thank all the testers for reports and i hope you enjoy the game so far! Otherwise don’t hesitate to inform me 🙂
Actual untested areas or blocking content
At the moment there are several walls in game:
After completing the tutorial, there is also a prolog. You have to click on the right arrow to get to the prolog. I think its not present enough so many player haven’t seen it and just thought oh thats all and quit the game here :/
Since you are not able earn acorn points yet many players haven’t checked out challenge mode. You can pay the “Eur” price since we are in beta iOS will not charge anything. On Android i had to add all emails, so all emails i added will not be charged. If you click on the buy popup it should say “its a test buy and will not be charged” if not so please inform me! I also try to give everyone enough acorn points to test things!
Multiplayer this is the biggest untested area right now. We are not that many players in the beta right now, so i think its very difficult to get players for multiplayer or maybe nobody is interested right now in multiplayer?.
Upcoming changes
With all the gathered feedback i want to implement some new features in the next weeks:
Portraits (The reward exists but you cannot actual change your portrait) – This feature was still on my list and i was unable to finish it before beta start.
Profile Window (Same as portraits it is planned but i set the priority relative low)
Arena (Was also a feature i wanted to implement before beta start, but time wasn’t enough)
Campaigns for Sylvans and Vermin – Since everybody played through the tutorial and cleared out the prolog i think the campaigns are needed for more content
Crafting – There will be a feature to salvage units if you have more than 3 of a kind. For the salvage you will get acorn points, which can be spend into new units. To get the whole system work, the units will get new categories and different prices. Of course you can also spend the points in arena, campaigns or challenge mode.
Collectable Items – To get the combats / maps a bit more exciting i plan to give any unit a chance to drop an item on death. This items can be a healing sphere, criting /damage sphere or acorn points. To collect those items you will have to move on the field where they dropped. Healing sphere will heal your unit, criting / damage sphere will increase your units damage or crit chance.
Rewarding – The last point on my list is the rewarding in the game. This means it should be more fun to play the game and to achieve this its always cool to receive cool rewards. They have to be more present and should generate a “want to have” feeling 🙂
Future prospects
I will try to implement the features written above in the next weeks and get every bug fixed which pops up in the server / android or iOS console. What’s then? Simple! We will extend the beta to open Beta and get more players to play with us, finding more bugs and getting more feedback. After that we have another look at the game state and can consider to release the game to actually earn some money :D. If the release is in preparation i also try to extend the game to steam and amazon underground as next step.
Feel free to comment![:de]
Summary last week
Since 21st of June closed beta is now running! I faced a lot of expected and unexpected problems the last week 😀 My biggest learning was that apple takes several days to apply a beta build if its the first reviewed build :/ Because of this the iOS-Version was a bit later than expected, but in the end everything gone well and apple approved the build.
One major problem the last week was the stability of the server, there were some actions which caused the server to death. I was able to manage those bugs and we now got a much more stable server, but its still not bullet proof.
At this point i want to thank all the testers for reports and i hope you enjoy the game so far! Otherwise don’t hesitate to inform me 🙂
Actual untested areas or blocking content
At the moment there are several walls in game:
After completing the tutorial, there is also a prolog. You have to click on the right arrow to get to the prolog. I think its not present enough so many player haven’t seen it and just thought oh thats all and quit the game here :/
Since you are not able earn acorn points yet many players haven’t checked out challenge mode. You can pay the “Eur” price since we are in beta iOS will not charge anything. On Android i had to add all emails, so all emails i added will not be charged. If you click on the buy popup it should say “its a test buy and will not be charged” if not so please inform me! I also try to give everyone enough acorn points to test things!
Multiplayer this is the biggest untested area right now. We are not that many players in the beta right now, so i think its very difficult to get players for multiplayer or maybe nobody is interested right now in multiplayer?.
Upcoming changes
With all the gathered feedback i want to implement some new features in the next weeks:
Portraits (The reward exists but you cannot actual change your portrait) – This feature was still on my list and i was unable to finish it before beta start.
Profile Window (Same as portraits it is planned but i set the priority relative low)
Arena (Was also a feature i wanted to implement before beta start, but time wasn’t enough)
Campaigns for Sylvans and Vermin – Since everybody played through the tutorial and cleared out the prolog i think the campaigns are needed for more content
Crafting – There will be a feature to salvage units if you have more than 3 of a kind. For the salvage you will get acorn points, which can be spend into new units. To get the whole system work, the units will get new categories and different prices. Of course you can also spend the points in arena, campaigns or challenge mode.
Collectable Items – To get the combats / maps a bit more exciting i plan to give any unit a chance to drop an item on death. This items can be a healing sphere, criting /damage sphere or acorn points. To collect those items you will have to move on the field where they dropped. Healing sphere will heal your unit, criting / damage sphere will increase your units damage or crit chance.
Rewarding – The last point on my list is the rewarding in the game. This means it should be more fun to play the game and to achieve this its always cool to receive cool rewards. They have to be more present and should generate a “want to have” feeling 🙂
Future prospects
I will try to implement the features written above in the next weeks and get every bug fixed which pops up in the server / android or iOS console. What’s then? Simple! We will extend the beta to open Beta and get more players to play with us, finding more bugs and getting more feedback. After that we have another look at the game state and can consider to release the game to actually earn some money :D. If the release is in preparation i also try to extend the game to steam and amazon underground as next step.
Recent Comments