All,
For the past few weeks now I have been monitoring this thread and patently waiting for my account to be fixed so that I can post. This is taking too long so I’m going through a proxy but I wanted it known why this has taken so long for an official reply.
I’ll go through the thread in order and respond in kind to at least give an account from the side of our newly formed company.
To anyone from the community that wishes to lend a hand in the new company, we welcome honest, no strings attached help from anyone willing to land a hand. There is no payment as of now and we can’t promise it in the future, we are all working on a hope and a dream at the moment.
First, the opening comments by Psyringe are by and large spot on. The biggest issue for us was and continued to be lack of basic control issues such as hover and mouse aiming. These are corner stone pieces to a game.
To the email posted by LtFEED from Psyringe I am not privy to and won’t comment further on. To the REST of the stuff he posted, I can and will. The named people who left the project did the following:
- Ran the Facebook, twitter, Steam and Desura pages, in the entirety – including production of promotional materials for them.
- Had started and nearly completed the process of recovering some lost accounts on same said sites, Fb and twitter. (sorry about that one Psyringe, at least you kept them in the end)
- Got the game on Steam greenlight, greenlit, and on its way to an early access release.
- Got us on an early access bundle pack through Desura and onto the store front, generating nearly 5k in game sales and 30% increase in steam greenlight numbers.
- Worked with Desura to fix a bug that made it impossible to play for the people that bought the game on that site and get the money that was owed the game through that site.
- Got the game on youtube channels for added promotion.
- Reached out to and secured several online articles for the game.
- Pushed to create several new features on the website such as a dev blog for fans to follow back office progress on the game.
- On top of this, the “do nothing” team essentially ran the front office, building a webserver for SharePoint files, a website, and the email system related to the project.
- Covered operating costs out of our own pocket, for such things as Greenlight fee and FB advertising.
Since the breakaway team left, the website is still down last we checked, FB is the only active area of promotion and fan interaction that we can find and Desura and Steam continue to sit languishing despite what should be an impending release to early access.
It should also be noted that when the team that left did so, we packed all our files up and sent them to LtF in a nice neat package that simply needed unpacked and displayed for the public to view. The fact that this hasn’t been seen yet should speak volumes to any who are watching.
While most of the things the breakaway team worked on where tools to make the development go a little smoother, these have come with us when we left. As soon as word got to LtF that we had left, all people who may or may not have left where immediately removed from all communications within the team structure. Let me make that last bit perfectly clear, EVEN IF certain individuals hadn’t committed to leaving the bionite project yet, they were removed for simple affiliation reasons.
We did our best to keep LtF off the public forums because it almost always created a PR nightmare of promises we couldn’t keep. As to the customer that bought from Desura, I can offer you no guarantees I’m afraid. You have read by now why we left, I leave you to your own conclusions.
Michael “twichy” Thompson
Marketing Manager
Dancing Panda Studios (DPS)
https://www.facebook.com/DancingPandaStudios
https://twitter.com/DPandaStudio