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DescriptionEIGHT DRAGONS is an old-school side-scrolling fighting game that takes the classic beat-'em-up action from the eighties and pushes the gameplay and story to a whole new level!

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Some thoughts on iterative improvement in game asset creation, and a little progress report.

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Those who have been following along at home will know that we've delayed the release of Eight Dragons to make some improvements. I think what may be of interest to some people, especially developers who are 'nearly there' is that pretty much all of the work we've done in the last year has been improvements...

xherowalk0 1


and I for one think this is no bad thing.

"Would we have sold units if we'd shipped last year? Of course! So why wasn't done good enough?"

Fundamentally, Eight Dragons was ready for release last year.

Downtown level, Iterative improvement


There was a complete, playable game - the mechanics were good, there was a complete graphics set, a complete set of audio assets and like all good stories, a beginning, middle and end (several actually) - so why didn't we release? Would we have sold units if we'd shipped last year? Of course! So why wasn't done good enough?

"The answer is feedback!"

The answer is feedback! I'll caveat this by saying that you can't please all of the people all of the time, some people are just dicks and some people just plain aren't your target audience, but with that all said, user feedback is invaluable. Taking the game to conventions has given us hundreds of player interactions, many of which thought the game was wonderful, they went to steam and added it to their wishlist right then and there, others however had suggestions and some outright hated it.

"We realised we could meet the expectations of the 'I can see what you're going for but maybe...' crowd without alienating the 'This game is perfect take all my money' crowd."


What to do? We could have released last summer and mopped up all of the people who were interested at the time and continued to market to that demographic... Or.. we could dig deep and recognise where improvements could be made without changing the nature of the original vision.

xherowalk0 2


We realised we could try to make Eight Dragons meet the expectations of the "I can see what you're going for but maybe..." crowd without alienating the "This game is perfect take all my money" crowd.

So that's what we've been doing...
Since the game was "ready" we've replaced the menu screens, replaced the bulk of the music, redrawn/improved all of the levels and this latest delay is about improving the player characters.

xherowalk0


We're glad to have you along for the ride. Please let us know if we're going in the right direction, and please go add Eight Dragons to your steam wishlist.

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