Originally Posted by mwryu View Post
TL;DR
1. A little bit about Tenbirds.
2. Feedback to comments:
- Premium: no
- IAP: yes
- Devices: iOS (iPhone 5 and up), Android (KitKat 4.4.2 and up. CM/custom mods have issues).
- Network: yes
- Multiplayer: no
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Hello, everyone. This is OP.
Firstly, I really appreciate the replies. Time is a precious thing for everyone, and I am grateful that you took the time to take a gander at my post. I wanted to reply earlier, but I needed to take a step back and process.
Please allow me to tell you a little bit about us before the game. Apologies if I seem inarticulate. I am always a little unsure of my footing for the English language.
Tenbirds is a fledgling independent development studio and Ire is our first game. We started in February 2014 with 4ppl. New people are moving in, and that will bring our production to 9ppl. Tenbirds is still looking for an awesome UI/UX designer. We received no institutional investment up to now, just money out of our own pockets. We are also cautious about major publishers, though they offered large tasty chunks of cash. The vast majority of the companies that we met for publishing/investments wanted to acquire us and make us just port their IP, put in gameplay autopilot, IPA at every user action point (quintuple what we have right now), and put in interstitial ads in many of the intervals. We're not against ads and such, but it just didn't work with the flow of getting directly into combat.
We stayed away from the above the best we knew how. We can't say we know everything. That is where you and our previous testers come in. Our testers have been chipping in from the start. For example, the UI: We think we can make it a lot better, and are working on it internally. But, the cool thing is some of our testers feel they can do better. Several are sending us UI concepts, all overseas testers we don't know. Someone wants to help us with branding. That's amazing! These are all things we need. "Keep them coming, please and thank you." We're excited, and frankly a bit scared, that there are people out there as excited, and we want to make something worthy of your time. After all, we are gamers too!
We love showing up for work to make games. This is a dream come true. No it's not perfect, but Ire is that passion appified, gamified, and amplified. And we will stick to it, for better or for worse. We don't expect the path to be all flowers and sunshine, and it never was. Still isn't. One step at a time, right?
So that is a little bit about us. Back to the game.
Yes, we referenced a lot of DeS/DaS/MH, especially tight combat and controls. These are games we love! I've personally logged in more than 8000hrs on DaS. My colleagues won't let me play Bloodborne! You know, priorities. We wanted to bring a small part of that delicious experience to mobile, but we haven't met a large publisher-developer willing doing it [with us]. We will cite where we got clues from, not for sensationalism or to attract attention, but because we respect and revere them. And if you play Ire you will find that we've digested what was learnt and felt from superior games and interpreted things in our own way. We pay homage to our forerunners, our sunbaes. We also have to thank the people that we bought Unity Assets from.
We are all about games. But games don't make themselves. We need people who are interested in the game to be in the fold from Day1, much like some of our testers, and perhaps you. "One of us! One of us!" It's not as demanding as it sounds. I'm just saying what you say or do counts. Our gamers are part of us and solutions down the road. Look at the mobile game industry as a whole. I mean, many of you do agree that it could use a swift kick in the behind to shake things up. There are some things we had to stick to, until there are better ways of getting stuff done. So to answer some of the questions:
- Premium: Idea was swiftly crushed. "No one knows us, no one knows enough to care." That is a fact. Having a price point is a huge hurdle. That is a fact as well. The game is free to download. We wanted to get as many people to jump off the fences as possible. Give it a chance and decide.
- Monetization: Yes, there will be IPA, but most of you are not going to need it anyway if you utilize Challenges well. We blocked billing from our scheduled rollout and tested the balance to see how that affected gaming, and also between testers who had used IPA. We were thought of a Donation button but realized that it would be silly not to give you something for donations. We're not going to call it something it's not. Our rev model is exactly that: Microtransactions, In-App Purchases. /u/Spock4Pres, /u/Based Xatu called it.
- Supported devices: iOS (iPhone 5 and up) & Android (KitKat 4.4.2 and up. Won't run with CM12.1.)
- Network: Yes. 3G/LTE/Wi-Fi. You won't be using a lot of data, but still check your data plan.
- Multiplayer: Not at this time. If things go well... This is up for debate, because we already have a Player Vs. Player AI mode. Again, this depends on a lot of things.
- /u/dudewelcome: I see you removed your post. Thanks for posting. Reddit is a hard place to post.
Again, thank you all for checking this post out. Words cannot describe my gratitude. Have a great Labor Day and enjoy your weekends. DM me if you have any further questions! Cheers!
) It is indeed a fantastic port.