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Old 09-11-2018, 09:55 AM   #48
AurochDigital
 
Join Date: Aug 2016
Location: Bristol, UK
Default Re: Survey: Top Priorities for Ogre VG Improvement

Hi all. Tomas from Auroch Digital here.

I wanted to speak with you about the current status of development for the Ogre video game, and what current plans are.

From our viewpoint, Ogre is largely free of major bugs. We define major bugs as Class A and Class B bugs. Class As are crash bugs: hangs and issues that stop a game progressing. Class Bs are major issues that don’t stop a game from being played and / or have a workaround.

We say “largely”, as with any complex system, there will be ones we don’t yet know of, or ones that we think we’ve done but under a new set of conditions may reappear. We are aware there are Class C and D bugs in the game (as in most games), which are minor visual / UI issues that are noticeable sometimes (a Class C) and really minor visual issues that most players won’t spot (a Class D).

There are also of course improvements and additions that we would like to make; new content that either enhances the existing game or brings new content that is not within the current scope of the project.

What is that scope? Basically, it’s what you see now.

When we started the project we had huge ambitions to get absolutely everything Ogre in the game, and more. We had set points throughout the development where we’d assess the current work list, how much of the resources and budget were left, and define what we should focus on and what we should drop into the backlog. We kept the core plan - the base original Ogre game, GEV rules, multiplayer, a new campaign and Steam Workshop.

Backlog content became things that were either a bit more complex to implement or things that we felt were of less importance to have when we had to make choices about our budget. Our hope was that post-launch we’d be able to return to the backlog and start ticking things off. However, none of us knew that Steam Direct was coming...

As I’m sure many of you are aware, the game is sold primarily via Steam. Steam has 90% of the PC games market, so it’s the key platform for anyone creating computer games. A few months before launch Steam decided to change to a new system called Steam Direct where anyone could, for $100, buy a release slot for Steam. This change, only a couple of months before Ogre released, changed the Steam environment dramatically for the worse. In 2016 there were 4,207 games released on Steam and developers were worrying about how this was impacting them - 2016 was a hard year for releasing games. In 2017 this number almost doubled to 7,672.

Ogre did well for the difficult environment it released into, which is a testament to the strength of the original tabletop game and all the hard work that went into our digital adaptation, but it did not nearly do the numbers we had forecast for it back in 2015.

What this means is that Steve Jackson Games and Auroch Digital have yet to recoup our original investment in the title. I believe the game will make its money back and get into profit eventually, but not right now. Because of this, spending additional development money is something both Steve Jackson Games and we have agreed that we just can’t afford to do right now.

We’re also going to continue our ongoing support, i.e. answering questions, investigating problems, and promoting the game to bring new people into the world of Ogre. If major issues appear, we will of course fix them.

I understand this will be disappointing for some of you, and both companies really wish we could pour more time and resources into the title. But it’s sadly not feasible right now, so we wanted to be transparent about the status of the project, and that additional content is not currently planned.

Any questions on this, do please post them and I’ll do my best to answer…
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