RSS Feed Dev diary number twenty three : Hey, get back to work!

Original Blog Post...
Hi fellow Bricktrons!

YES! We are back on track with regular dev diaries! This means news about the actual game development, soundtracks of the week, and a pinch of humor for extra seasoning.
Lots of things have been done this week. In fact we had trouble fitting everything in our schedule. We’ve been running left and right talking to dozens of people and trying to fit some quiet time to work on the game. One thing we haven’t done, however is update you with what’s going on. The reasons are multiple. We will explain below, but before doing that, here’s what we actually accomplished this week:

• Transferred the quasi-totality of the Kickstarter funds into our canadian bank account, where we can actually use it. Hurray! Much care has been taking in doing that in complete legality. Most of the Paypal funds, however remain inaccessible because they still don’t trust that we will deliver what we promised. More on that further down.
• Established a unified user account and login system for every single person who backed us either through KS or Paypal. This is a crutial step before doing anything. We have in our hands a large amount of personal data from people all over. It is our duty to keep is as secure as possible. So that necessitates creating a secure system to register yourselves into our system. It’s almost done, we will launch it next week. Again, more about that further down.
• Started working on a newsletter system. Right now most of this is handled by Kickstarter, but it is necessary to include our Paypal backers, who are right now dearly lacking in updates. This will also help on the long run, as we will start to separate ourselves from the Kickstarter infrastructure.
• Acquired the domain www.castlestory.net for future use. It will redirect to www.sauropodstudio.com for a while until we decide to create a dedicated website for Castle Story. Why didn’t we buy www.castlestory.com you ask? Well, back in January, almost as soon as our game started getting interest. Some bot, somewhere probably picked this up, and most keywords related to castle story were instantly acquired by various people, with varying levels of reasonability. We did not react fast enough and soon enough all the domain names containing castle story were taken. www.castlestory.net turned out to be owned by someone more reasonable that the average, and we recently managed to buy it from him. Don’t count on www.castlestory.com, though, that dude is asking for 5 digit figures, and we don’t want to give him that. There’s nothing we can do about that for the time being.
• Signed the lease to our new office! We won’t be moving in for another month at least, but we found a really cool spot in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Montréal. Hopefully we will make it a really nice place, it’s right in shouting distance of Ubisoft Montréal’s studios. We’re thinking about building a little trebuchet to shoot eggs on their roof terrace (har har har!) More info in the coming weeks.
• We started working on a more refined heads-up display interface. I daresay it will have some very nice features that have probably never been done in RTS games.
• Wednesday François was interviewed by the local version of MTV at a pretty popular TV show about video games. We will probably have a video link for you in the coming weeks, so if you can understand french, this should be a pretty cool thing to watch!

So this is pretty much what we’ve done this week. Now we have a few announcement we would like to do.

Why we will no longer reply to our Kickstarter inbox

Some of you probably sent us messages through our Kickstarter page. You might have noticed that it takes a while for us to answer. Well, know that you’re not alone!
In fact you guys are so numerous that we simply cannot continue answering each person personally. It causes us to neglect every other platform (we feel for you Facebook :S) and distracts us from precious time we could spend actually working on the game. In fact, for the last two weeks of the Kickstarter, François spent every single minute of every day not working on business related things to answer thousands of emails.
At that time, it was worth it, because a lot of those replies led to actual pledges. But now it simply doesn’t make any sense to continue answering emails personally instead of working on, say, a FAQ that could answer most of those questions (assuming people will actually read it :S ).
So, we will now begin to redirect to our business inbox (contact at sauropodstudio dot com) to make it easier for us to answer since the Kickstarter messaging system is painfully slow.
Now please, don’t crucify us! We are just expressing a desire to move away from the Kickstarter platform towards one we build ourselves. We will still answer all the emails we get through the sauropod email.

User accounts and Beta registration

Paypal has given us a deadline of Tuesday the 11th to deliver on our promise of giving the Paypal backers the Beta registration we promised them. It is in their policy to allow a maximum of 20 days to deliver and we intend to keep that promise. So expect everyone (even Kickstarter backer) to receive an official login request early next week. Again, this system is very sensitive since it will contain personal information, so we are taking extra steps to making it as secure as we can.
We hired and expert to help us with that, and this brings me to my next topic.

Meet the team: Thierry

This is the man behind this website. I may write the words, but the only reason you can read them is because this guy exists.
He’s been helping us since day one, taking time off his other jobs and studies to create various magical things that keep this website going. He’s been clocking in so many hours we’ve lost count long ago. So obviously one of the first things we did after the Kickstarter was to call him (if we weren’t already talking on Skype) and tell him: “Bring your ass back to MTL! We’re hiring you!”.
So he finally arrived after moving from Québec city last weekend. And since this week he’s been working with us in person.
He’s currently working on the user account system, so you got him to thank for when you get to log in next week.


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FRACT on Steam Greenlight

Finally, we’d like to end this already pretty long update by spamming your face with more shameless advertising.
But seriously…
This really important. We studied game design with Richard E. Flanagan (aka. Phosfiend) and are honored to have him as our friend. He’s a true artist and is partly responsible for giving us the motivation to go indie; he jumped head first in independent game development just a few months before we did.
Anyway, what he and his acolyte Henk Boom have been creating continues to amaze us every day. FRACT is a game that could be described as Myst meets Tron. The most awesome feature is that thanks to live audio synthesizing, FRACT will allow you to compose music (real music!) in the game world without being limited by loops or samples.
Simply put, FRACT is unlike any other game ever made, and just because of that, it should be on Steam. Please vote for it!
VOTE FOR FRACT ON STEAM GREENLIGHT!


Soundtrack of the week


I know some of you have been anxiously waiting for a new soundtrack. Well, I’ve been saving this one for a special occasion, so it’ll be a treat, hopefully.
Tales Of The Coin Spinner by Easily Embarrassed.
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That’s it for this week!
Team Sauropod

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Curious how they figured out to buy castlestory.com. It was registered originally in April-2011 did you have videos before last December?

castlestory.com is for sale at 60,00€ on GoDaddy...

I missed the kick-starter will i be able to get a copy of the game at some point?

thanks for the massive update on whats been going on hope you sort your selfs out in the long run and dont panic. Wishing well for this game thanks.

Is it Kickstarter or Paypal who don't yet believe you can deliver? If it's Kickstarter why have they allowed the project to appear on their site if they have doubts you can deliver and if it's Paypal why have they been allowed to take money for a project they think is questionable. Has this Kickstarter and/or Paypal issue been going on for long or is it only a recent development?

The CS.com dude should jump off a bridge.
And also, Thierry is one of my heroes as of now.

Nice work Sauropod! Keep it going

The Devs have said the game will be distributed on a Humble Store, so yep, you'll be able to get it at some point.

It's PayPal. They are requiring the Devs to put out the registration system soon as proof they have something concrete to offer people.

Also, on the KS'er when they announced Paypal, people were warning that they often take a long time to release funds for projects. So I don't think they find this project necessarily "questionable," it just sounds like policy for every project funded with them.

It is really great to see how a game is really created, includding all the behind the curtain stuff. I never knew there can be so mutch crap in trying to get a game out there.
As for the CS.com dude let him rather jump of a castle story islands, never to be found again. Also maybe they should name the chief corruptron after him. Thierry " the heroe" let us know when we can move to your new site.

Hi, I'm a kick-starter backer. I am also a fat person. I backed $55 for a t-shirt but the largest size listed on your survey was XL. Will there be an option for a larger siaze once the t-shirts are printed or did you think every one on the internet looks like every one on TV?

I'm seeing the same thing "Domain Buy Service: Just $69.99 per domain name + commission! *" or $80 with the commission. Seems like they still might have the chance to get the .com site. Maybe the squatter dropped it right after they said no.

This is only a headliner. In later points they stand that this is price for domain and their help in buying this domain from actual owner "if the owner is willing to sell their domain". So they probably allready did that, and we can now read about results.

Im so excited!

I don't mind the .net ending for it. if only they could buy a top-level domain name and get castle.story or castlestory.cs or something. ah well. cheers for the update! I hear big things are in the works too. can't wait!

im just naturally assuming they are getting the emails from paypal for all the backers who used paypal to fund them, i ask this cus i noticed there wasnt a whole lot to tell how these guys would get the info to send out any emails,and cus the sooner id know the better, also my paypal email was different from the email i used for this account, that shouldnt be a problem should it?

Minecraft also has a .net. It never bothered anyone. And it certainly didn't have any effect on the popularity! So nobody should complain about it