Darkest Greetings Underlord,
On the 31st of May we undertook our third ever Reddit AMA. We invited all members of our community to participate by asking us anything that came to mind, and we have to say we were incredibly impressed with the turnout.
For those who missed it you can read the whole thing here. Otherwise sit back whilst we regale you with some of the highlights.
Highlights
Dr Kersh kicked us off with the big questions
Q: Do you regret releasing the game in a beta state and getting not so good reviews vs what would you get now?
Do you have plans to re-release it as a goty edition to try to get new reviews?
How many more big DLC have you planed for the game?
Scott: Most definitely. It has been the single biggest failure in our short history so far. Even today if you search for our game on YouTube you’ll find TotalBiscuit’s harsh but completely fair preview of the release version as the top result. There is no doubt that kind of initial reception hurts us even today, over a year later.
Those are the cards we played. We’re on the other side of it now and pushing our hardest to recover from it. This latest release goes a long way from the games’ perspective, but possibly more importantly I think it has improved our relationship with our fans – We’re not here to make a quick buck and run. We want to build a reputation for a quality dev house.
Josh: 1. Yes and no. Yes because, well, it was pretty awful all around. There’s no denying that and no excusing it. But we simply had no other choice other than not releasing the game at all – the entire team had gone several months without pay and various other things were already in motion, the boxed release being one.
We attempted to do that when releasing this DLC and get very little traction with the press, both traditional and enthusiast. A ‘complete’ edition later after all planned content is released may be something else we try, but that’s still a while away!
Can’t say for sure right now. We’ve got some free content already in the works though – more info in this answer.
Shazzam606060 looks for some advise on how to kickstarter his career as a voice actor.
Q: How did you do the voice work for the game? I was/am looking to get into doing some voice acting, specifically for video games, and frankly it seems that the barrier to entry is quite daunting, so any tips or advice for someone to either get into game design or VO would be amazing.
Dante: For VA, we worked with an arseload of incredibly talented people. Richard Ridings, Lani Minella, Stephen Fitts, Lauren Synger to name a few. They made bringing these characters to life an absolute pleasure.
I got into acting on an amateur level back in 2009. I don’t think I actually recorded anything that didn’t make me cringe until this time last year.
As with most things, it’s really about practice, and hurling yourself at the work for as long as it takes to hone your craft. A couple of general things:
You don’t need an extravagant mic to record something worth listening to.
Listen to yourself. If it makes your testicles shrivel back up inside your body, get used to it. Being good is on the other side of that wall, and the only way is through.
Dick around. Experiment with voices. Learn accents. Go psychotic on car rides. Mastering the vocal apparatus is an extended learning process, and one of the best ways is to play with it. Have fun with performance, it’ll keep you going.
As for penetrating the industry: send demos to people! Take a look around subreddits like /r/gamedevclassifieds or/r/recordthis, the indieDB boards, the TES/Fallout mod communities, whatever it takes to get practice in while making connections. If you’re good, you enjoy it, and you try, you’ll inevitably find something.
I wish you the best of luck. It’s a riot.
Arscortica takes an interest in the artisitc side of development and Pat’s all too happy to answer.
Q: As far as visual design goes:
Was it your intention to have WftO appear a little bit darker/mature than the original DK games? I.e., in the design of design of the torture chamber (and the actual pained screams coming from it), the blood-filled sanctuary, and the spirit chamber?
I’m curious about the visual design ideas behind the Beastmaster and the Behemoth. For the former, most people probably would have expected some kind of minotaur rather than a micropiglet of unusual size. Meanwhile, the Behemoth with its enormous tusks sorta reminds me of a mix between the Demon of Doom Classic and a (very large) zergling from Starcraft 1.
Just in how far was the Huntress inspired by the Demon Hunter class from Diablo three? Or was it more of a case of convergent evolution?
Pat: Both the tone and the lighting have been intentionally made darker to push the flavour of our vision for this game. It’s been challenging balancing these aspects to a level we were happy with, making sure we kept in mind both our audience and the performance of the game. Making sure the atmosphere we intended to create worked in conjunction with the readability of all the units and rooms, was something that also took multiple iterations and much consideration.
It’s been really interesting gauging the suitable balance between gore and humour across the whole game. It was important for us to pay homage to this genre of game whilst pushing it out further with our ideas. Certainly the characters are indicative of this mixture of classic designs and more unique ones. The Behemoth is a personal favourite of mine, developed by our concept artist, Bobby. I can see the aspects it draws from different designs which make it feel very suited in the War for the Overworld setting, but it has a freshness which makes it really different from the traditional dungeon creatures.
I like the likeness in your description of the Behemoth. I see it more as the lovechild between a cat and a mutated dinosaur. I think a convergent evolution has been common in the process of most designs since we wanted to mix familiarity and recognisability with our own style.
Meanwhile Dante asks all the questions you needed to know about Richard Ridings.
Dante: Does Richard Ridings have a firm handshake? Is he as awesome as he seems? How did he get to be so big and strong?
Lee: Richard Ridings handshake is as firm as a steel girder.
He is even more awesome than he seems, so awesome that his voice will melt you if you’re exposed outside of protective gear.
He became strong by voicing the Mountain in Game of Thrones and eating Peppered pigs.
There’s so many more questions that we answered; many about the state of the game, upcoming content or even a little on future projects. Be sure to drop by and read it all!
For now we’ll be leaving you with news that Patch 1.4.1 will be releasing tomorrow! There’s a few small features requested by the community included as well as dozens of fixes and other tweaks, we hope you’re looking forward to it!
Cheers!
– Brightrock Games Team
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