In Dragon Fantasy: Book II, Ogden now has over 120 frames and that number continues to grow as we finish off and begin to polish the game. These include everything from walking animations to attacks, casting spells and using combat abilities, and of course, taking damage. In comparison, Book I’s Ogden had ten frames: two for each direction (up, down, left, and right) plus a squat and a sleeping pose.

Another one of our goals was to stay true to the homage of the 16-bit era without being a slave to 16-bit practices. In Book I’s original release, we kept strictly to the 8-bit palette. What we hadn’t realized is people don’t remember as well as they think what 8-bit games actually looked like. When we released Book I for PSN, we added some additional palette colors.

We’ve carried this lesson over to Book II and are working with additional colors and fewer strict rules. Most sprites from games like Chrono Trigger have a four frames while characters walk. Book II boasts a whopping 50% improvement over this, and instead has a massive six frames per walk. The ultimate question then is: will Book II be 50% better than the games that inspired it?”

Got any questions for our resident artist? Feel free to leave a comment or question here and we’ll whip Kevin into answering them shortly.

Patch 1.10 – PlayStation 3 & Vita

• A run button. Not to be mistaken for a rum button, this will allow players to move a little faster in towns and dungeons.
• In-game clock, so you know exactly how long it took you to earn that gold sword, before realizing it’s not actually a better weapon.
• Choose music independent of graphics. Want 16-bit looks but 8-bit chiptunes, or 8-bit graphics and melodic SNES style music? You can do that starting this patch.
• Start moving immediately after battles and scene changes while holding arrows.
• Selector will no longer pop up during battle animations if you accidentally hit a button. Nor if you deliberately hit a button. Take that!
• The quicksave will no longer allow you to respawn from your current location. While cool, that was actually unintended. No progress will be lost with this update to quicksaves.

Patch 1.10 – PS3-specific changes

• Fixed more crash bugs, notably the ones in Jerald’s Chapter (Chapter 3) and at the end of the Minecraft Adventures (Chapter 4)

Patch 1.10 – Vita-specific changes

• Update to the hit formula. Details can be found here. 

We’d love your feedback and are happy to provide any help we can. Please don’t hesitate to drop us an email at support@mutekicorp.com, tweet us @mutekicorp, or follow our Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/mutekicorp

OLD FORMULA
0.85 – 0.10 = 75% chance to hit

NEW FORMULA
(0.85 – 0.10 + 1.0) / 2.0 = 87.5% chance to hit.

Thank you everyone who submitted a bug report — it was extremely helpful in nailing down the issue in a rapid fashion.  Please continue to report any oddities along with the system you experienced them on to support@mutekicorp.com or drop us a line here on Facebook,  or tweet us @mutekicorp

Oh, I don’t know…how about redrawing almost every single piece of art in the game! Crazy? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely!

We decided to approach this in the style of a SNES special edition of a previously released NES game. We wanted to take the art we had, and just bring it forward a generation and make it shine better – after reaching what we feel was the best of what “8-bit” could be, we decided to bring this to what we’re calling “8-bit as we remember it” instead of “8-bit as it was” – just mouse over the images below to see the difference. For those on touch devices, tapping the images should show the “after” images – there’s also a full gallery below.

First, we updated the overworld map. The map (and all of the maps) are unchanged – just better defined, cleaner tiles everywhere.

The interface’s look has been upgraded as well, with clean gradients, while the monsters have more shading and detail.

We added shadowing and detail throughout the maps (see the ambient shading on the floors where they meet the walls) – who says AAA FPS games are the only ones that should feature ambient occlusion!

Finally, so many poor vendors were stuck in their little shops with tiny walls and no roofs, beaten down upon by the hot sun! Well after negotiations with the NPC Vendors’ Union we’ve given them some much-needed shade. Just walk into the shops as always and the walls or roofs fade away.

The full gallery of images can be viewed here, for those with less mouseover-friendly browsers:

Now we realize some people actually prefer the simpler, original 8-bit style. And to those people, worry not! The graphical updates can be turned off and on at any point in the options screen. It was important to us not to take anything away fans may prefer, and just offer updates for those that will appreciate them!

So what comes after UI and dungeons and trophies and graphics? After the holidays we’ll have more posts, talking about audio, and platforms. Lots of platforms. Including releases on a number of platforms where the game isn’t currently available.

So this week we’ll look at what we’re doing for Trophies, as well as some new content being added to the game.

Everyone Gets a Trophy

First, the basics. Yes we’ll have trophies, and no there won’t be a Platinum. It’s ok, we’ll wait for the “whaaaaaa?!?” to finish. Done now? Great. Why no Platinum? Well there are requirements for that, and with the multiple small chapters we just don’t meet them.

What will we have? About a dozen Trophies (or Achievements as we call them on the versions for other platforms) covering a range of feats, from completing each of the chapters of the game, to finding that one hidden scene in Chapter 2 that we’re pretty sure no one outside our office has ever seen. Ever.

We really hope these will give people a reason to enjoy another trip through the game’s chapters and give some hints of what’s there that people might not have been aware of. More than anything we’re just listening for what people want most and trying to make this the best version of Dragon Fantasy it can be.

But Wait, There’s More

Improving what we have is important, but so is giving players something new! Chapter 2 has always been the chapter we’ve felt needed the most help, which also explains why it’s gotten the most updates since launch. And with this big update, we’re adding more.

To help smooth out the leveling and better guide players we’ve added a new dungeon to Chapter 2: The Tower of Trials. Inside this five story tower is a wealth of treasure and gear for Anders and his allies – and for those who haven’t played in awhile, we added recruitable allies Punchibald “Punchy” Hammerstone and Casterella “Casty” Von Magicpants for Anders in the previous update.

And Then?

So far we’ve covered the revamped interface, the addition of Trophies/Achievements, and the Tower of Trials that was added to Chapter 2. What’s next? We’ll be back next week with another blog post to let you know what else is coming – and like we’ve said, things only get bigger from here.

With the awesome response and a large demand for the first game on those systems, we knew we had to make it happen. We didn’t want to just push a port of what we already had – this was our chance to really make this game shine.

So where to begin…

This blog series will cover a number of changes we’ve made to the game in this big update.

We’ll start with replacing what was in our opinion the most frustrating part of the first game: the inventory UI. No longer do you have to scroll through a page of herbs to find that one lone antidote to cure your poisoned allies. We took the whole main interface we had been working on for Book II and brought it home to the original!

First, let’s look at what we had:

The main interface filled the entire screen keeping you from seeing much of anything. Four massive buttons filled the view keeping any useful information at least a page away.

Items were even worse. Each item in your inventory took up a separate line, and there was no support for stacking items to save space. Trying to find a single item buried in between pages of herbs and antidotes was a pain!

So what do all of these look like now?

Your party is visible at a glance immediately when pulling the screen up. The navigation is now handled with the tabs across the top instead of four huge buttons filling the screen.

The inventory now supports stacking, making it a lot easier to find the item you’re looking for.

What next?

This is just the first of many changes we’ve made to make this the best version of Dragon Fantasy Book I available. We’ll post about the changes we’ve made every week until the update is finished, so check back and see what’s changed next… it only gets bigger from here.

More Dragon Fantasy updates…

Well first of all, we’ve had a few Dragon Fantasy updates, including the recently released Dragon Fantasy 1.2.0 update. We added another new chapter in that update with another ~10 hours of gameplay. And other than a few typical complaints (omg it’s more than $0!!!) the reception has been great.

On top of that, we just recently released this same version for PC on Indievania! Standard arrow keys / space / escape controls on that version, but we’re testing out the popular-on-PC “pay what you want” method…we’ll see how that goes (and maybe do a post about what people actually choose to pay after we get enough sales to make some useful speculation). Mac version will be out any day now once we get around a few Mac App Store requirements…

Minecon

Along with that update, we were one of the indies showing our game at Minecon last month. It was a blast, both in getting to see so many kids playing (and loving) the game, and in getting to hang out with some fellow indies. Speaking of the kids…WOW. Never would have guessed any gaming convention, especially one in Las Vegas, would have been so full of young kids but hey, we won’t complain. Plus, it seems that Minecraft is getting them into the retro-style of games which is all good as far as we’re concerned!

Moving

Lastly we just moved out of our old offices and into our new so-much-more-indie digs. Instead of a very bland office surrounded by lawyers and finance people (no offense to any of you, you were great neighbors!) we’re now in a much cooler building surrounded by design firms and architects.

We’ll post some pictures of the new office once we get the rest of our furniture in place (you know, the necessities…arcade cabinets…kegerators…etc.)

So yeah…it’s been a lot going on (plus adding in the just-passed and upcoming holidays) and we’ve been keeping busy. More fun Dragon Fantasy (and other games?) updates, updated web sites, and a lot more to come in the next months…we’ll be better about our regular posts!

So that’s today’s post…creating value by keeping the game going…

Coming from the world of “traditional” games, this whole business model took me a long time to get behind. The idea that you could charge a user a small amount of money once, and then just keep giving them new stuff, for FREE. Or even crazier, the idea that you could go ahead and give away the entire game for free and still make money. When this company first started…those ideas were about as foreign to me as Zimbabwe (note: Zimbabwe just happens to be my random “fill-in” location when I need to think of somewhere far away…plus it’s fun to say. Try it. Zimbabwe… Zim bob way. You know you love it).

We even tried to get behind this idea in the past. In 2009 we released both Master Jumperton and The Battle of Pirate Bay. We even went so far as to add a menu in the game where users could vote for what new feature they wanted in the next update. But it didn’t work so well…Master Jumperton was sadly a failure financially and while The Battle of Pirate Bay did well for us it fell much more quickly than we had hoped. Looking back, the why is sadly obvious…

We stopped too soon

That pretty much sums it up. We did like 2 content updates, didn’t immediately see any real huge spike in sales and made the call FAR too immaturely that it was time to give up and work on something else. We had this grand idea of “let’s just update continuously” and then we’d update…2 or 3 times and say well that’s that, I guess this doesn’t work. In reality doing 2 or 3 updates isn’t news…it’s standard…it’s expected, so it gets you nothing.

And honestly, while the voting seemed like a good idea…we did it wrong. We’d release an update, and there’d be a new poll up on our server, and people would start voting. But that meant instead of working on the next update (other than bug fixes) we were waiting to see what people voted for before we got to work. This ate not only a week or so of Apple’s review time, but also a week or two of waiting before we’d start on whatever new feature won. Plus, we were fairly convinced Harbor Master was just watching our poll and implementing whatever won…and they to beat us to getting those new features out! No we’re not actually accusing anyone here…just saying there were a few consecutive coincidences…

And with Dragon Fantasy…

And now we’re trying this method again with Dragon Fantasy. But instead of these content updates being small things like a new power up or a new enemy they’re much bigger, like here’s an entire new RPG adventure to embark on. And we’re just getting started. The game launched with a 6-10 hour quest (we’re hearing numbers in that range). We just added another 2-3 hour quest for free. And we have 10s of hours of additional quests we still plan on adding. Why? Because we love RPGs, and the people who have bought this game love RPGs. And we honestly believe that if we continue adding value to this game, more and more people will find it.

And then there’s the question of why are we adding this for free. Honestly at one point we had thought about adding these extra stories as in-app purchases but the call was made to kill that. The reason? Because even if we assumed high percentages of users to buy each and every content update we do, we wouldn’t make their cost back. Adding a bunch of for-cost content means each piece of content needs to justify the cost. Adding it for free on the other hand simply increases the value of the overall product, which means over time it’s going to appeal to more and more people. There’s a huge difference between a 10 hour game (with 30 hours of additional for-cost content), and a huge collection of 40 hours of gameplay. It’s different to the people considering buying the game, and honestly it lets us think about it differently.

The importance of adding value

So why is it so important to keep the game going…to add constant value to a game you’ve already released? Because there are a ton of people who chose NOT to buy your game. They didn’t feel it justified the cost, or it just wasn’t so compelling they had no choice but to click the buy button, or honestly they just didn’t care enough to find out enough about it. Your game offers what it offers, for whatever you choose to charge for it. We released Dragon Fantasy offering 10 hours of old school RPG love for $3. And there are people that looked at it and said wow…$3…that’s way too much. Seriously, that happens. It STILL baffles my mind, but it does. So people feel a 10 hour RPG isn’t worth $3 (that they’d have paid $40 for 20 years ago). Well what about when it’s 20 hours? 30 hours? 40 hours? There are tipping points for people where at some point they’ll say wow ok I don’t care what it costs there’s so much awesome here, I just have to break down and buy it.

The more value you add, the less people can say no. And when you’re competing with the hundreds of thousands of other games on an overly crowded platform, you can’t leave people a reason to say no. And when they do, you push an update making your game an even better value proposition until they don’t.

So today let’s look at how the game turned out, what we’ve done since launch, and most importantly, how much more there is to come!

The Love

More than anything I think we’ve been overwhelmed by the hugely positive response. As of this morning we have a 5 star rating for the latest version, and a 4.5 star rating overall. This just validates what we believed from early testing – pretty much everyone who plays the game has loved it. From that early point we knew one thing was going to be a challenge still – getting people to play it in the first place!

We contacted no less than 30 media outlets, ranging from smaller app review sites, to bigger RPG sites, to the biggies like Destructoid and Kotaku. While we did get some good reviews (such as this one from TouchArcade) most sites never got back to us. As in maybe 10% response. This means other than the TouchArcade review, the majority of our sales have come from the TouchArcade forums, our Twitter and Facebook pages, and the live shows done by our musician, crashfaster. We just had an interview posted on RPGamer.com that will hopefully drive some interest as well.

The Business

This part’s about to get a little businessy…we’ll be talking sales, CTR, CPC, and UAC. If you don’t know (or care to know) what any of those are – scroll down to the next section about what’s coming next!

So how did this minimal coverage we got affect our sales? Well here’s a quick peek at the first 2 weeks of sales, in handy but unrevealing bar-chart form:

On the 24th the game started to go live (11pm eastern, 8pm pacific) and sales started coming in. We had a pretty huge jump on the 25th when it was properly released, along with various reviews and posts about the game. And then the falloff started. Our assumption was that as reviews were completed, we’d get more sales bumps along the way. The problem is, those reviews never came.

So then we decided advertising should go into our mix. We went with 2 avenues, BuySellAds.com for placement on TouchArcade, and Facebook ads. Why these two? They were easy to setup, and cheap to get started! So how’d the ads do? Well I suppose there are a few ways to measure performance:

Click-Through Rate

Our CTR was either good or depressing depending on what you believe to be the “averages”. Our TouchArcade ad has a CTR of over 0.4% – with the “average” being a reported 0.2-0.3% this is supposedly good. Our Facebook ad had a CTR of 0.02% (sadly typical for Facebook due to the HUGE number of impressions) but a Unique CTR of over 0.7%! That means of all the people targeted, after seeing the ad enough 0.7% of them eventually clicked it (and each person saw the ad on average 26.1 times).

Cost per Click

This is another area where the TouchArcade ad seemingly bested Facebook. The CPC on TouchArcade ended up being an estimated $0.66 (this is estimated because our ad run is only 60% completed…so we’re assuming we maintain roughly the same CTR. On Facebook, our CPC is $0.73 according to their own Insights reporting.

The great unknown: User Acquisition Cost

And now the downside to advertising your iOS game: you have no clue how many ad clicks actually turned into sales. That is to say, we haven’t found any way to track this yet. Apple doesn’t’ seem to give up any data regarding sources for sales which means that if your had as a CPC or $2 or $0.02 you still have no way to know if any of those clicks are turning into sales! With Dragon Fantasy selling for $2.99 (meaning our cut is $2.10), we could theoretically profit even with a CPC of $2, if 96% of those clicks turned into a sell (no, we don’t assume anywhere NEAR this rate) whereas at $0.02 we’d need less than 1% of clicks to turn into a sale to make it profitable. With the current CPC’s we have (approximately $0.7 on average) we need 1 out of every 3 clicks on our ads to result in a sale. That’s pretty unlikely by traditional web marketing analytics but again, this is a space where no one really knows the analytics because Apple shares nothing with us!

So with sales declining, ad profitability unknown, and a lack of response from most media outlets, does this mean we give up? No way! We’re going to keep contacting every site on our list until we get their interest (or happen to hit them on a slow news day where they need filler – being indie means sometimes you take what you can get). Luckily, we’ll keep having new things to tell them…

The Updates and The Future

We came into this game knowing there was a lot more story to tell, and we fully plan to keep telling!
So far since update we’ve already released one minor feature update, 1.0.2. In this we added support for pre-iOS 3.2 devices, improved performance, added little things like quick-save, and fixed up a bunch of bugs.

About a week ago we started teasing the next update, 1.1:

This is the first real content update. We’re adding a whole new (short) quest line following Prince Anders, the “other” prince from the opening sequence, knocked into the castle by the Dark Knight. You’ll follow his adventure, see his story intertwine with Ogden’s and begin to see that Ogden’s adventure is really part of something much, much bigger! Anders’ story will feature new locations, new enemies, new puzzles and a brand new feature in Dragon Fantasy: multiple people in your party!

And this is just the first content update! We have a number of adventures planned for this game to continue adding more content, more features, and a maybe even a little conclusion to why a game named “Dragon Fantasy” doesn’t have any dragons…yet.

Our latest internal project, Dragon Fantasy, was recently submitted to Apple. This brings with it a lot of joy here because for a couple of us, this game has been around for over half our lives. And here we are, 16 years and 14 revisions later, our RPG has finally shipped.

Once upon time myself and one of the other people here @mutekicorp, Adam, met in an IRC channel dedicated to emulation. There we found our love of classic RPGs, and the mutual desire to make one of our own. Now there was a problem – namely that neither of us REALLY knew how to make a game, but that didn’t stop us. And so, with him in Montana and myself in California we decided to team up and make a game. How hard could it be?

Keep in mind, at the time we were both high school students with no real programming education. So how hard was it? Very.
We started over and over again, always on the same game, always with the same characters and same basic story, and always we’d get a little farther than the time before. The game existed as a DOS 2D game, as a Windows 2D game, as a Gameboy Color game and even as a combo Windows and SGI 3D game to eventually put on the Gamecube. And time and time again it got put down.

That Gameboy Color version landed Adam (and later myself) our first jobs in the game industry. At that point we actually began learning what it took to make a game, but then suddenly didn’t have the time to do it anymore. Later on between jobs we picked it back up and started on the 3D version, even to the point of a small demo where you could travel between towns, fighting little monsters in 3D, and we showed it to a few friendly publishers at E3. Needless to say it didn’t go anywhere, and the game was again shelved.

At this point we “knew” well enough that an RPG was simply out of reach for us to do and we continued on in our careers. 5 years ago Muteki Corporation was born, and a couple years later Adam joined the group here. We both knew at some point the idea of making this RPG would creep back up but time and time again we shot it down, because again we “knew” we simply couldn’t do it right. RPGs are too epic and too long of projects, right? After all, if it was too hard so many times before, it’s because it’s simply too hard, not because we didn’t know how to do it, right? That’s the funny thing about when you “know” something…a lot of times what you know is really just what you assume.

And then one day the game came back up. It wasn’t a pitch, or a hey we should do this. No, it was actually a test of our cross-platform UI system. We decided that single columned table views wouldn’t cut it so we needed multi column table views. Well to create those we needed a test, and Adam being Adam, he decided he’ll test a table view full of images…which looked shockingly like a tile map that we’d use back in the olden days of making these RPGs. So Adam decided let’s make a tile map, using our UI system and see what happens.

As soon as I saw it I told him we had to make the game… It was just time. Everything we thought we knew about how difficult it would be had been wrong. It turns out when you take a game idea…and add over a decade of game development experience to it, that idea gets a lot easier. The game quickly came together and we all enjoyed getting to finally make the game we had spent over half our lives wanting to make.

Then beta time came. I’ll be honest we were scared. We loved it…but would others?
Well I’m SO happy to say the feedback has been TREMENDOUSLY positive. Apparently we’re not the only people loving this game.

And so after the majority of our lives, we’ve finally done that thing we started doing as young, dumb teenagers in high school.

An RPG is born.