You see that screenshot up there? Yup, that’s the news. That’s right, Master of Fortresses now has a badge on Kongregate. I actually kinda wished I got this to you guys sooner,as there was also a Kongai challenge up, one which, unfortunately, ends today. When I saw the challenge up, I had decided to wait until they had a permanent badge to accompany it, unfortunately, that took a tad longer than expected, hence the delay. Regardless, Master of Fortresses now has its first Kong badge and is also featured (for now) on the front page. Hopefully, this badge will not be the first, and over the next few days, more badges will become available for you lot of achievement hunting fans which I KNOW are out there (somewhere).

Now,  Chris is way more used to this whole “making games” thing than I am and even he considers getting Kong badges to be a pretty friggin’ big deal.  I was, to quote a certain faux-Kazakh reporter, “very excite”. Needless to say, getting player ratings high enough to be both featured and badged would have been pretty much impossible (without the help of an eccentric billionaire and the Chinese Army of course) without you lot, the players, the fans, and the people who dropped by just to try some new fortress defence game for a few minutes. Once again, I find myself thanking you, all of you.

In other news, I’ve been thinking about names for our new project and the name suggestions which have come in already (which are great by the way). However, I’ve been thinking more about the technology which seems to run not as much on steam as it does on “luminiferous aether” (a thoroughly debunked hypothetical state of matter which made the rounds in the late 19th century, more on that in a future update).  This of course, moves the setting away from steampunk and more towards something like “Aetherpunk” (which would be a great name in it’s own right, I admit). Just a thought to keep in mind. We’re still accepting suggestions until we come up with a final name, so we highly welcome more (hopefully many more) ideas for a name.

The most interesting set of comments I’ve gotten so far, especially on Kongregate, were those regarding the inclusion of the Prussian Army as a faction Master of Fortresses. These comments ranged from people who (perhaps understandably) thought that I had managed to typo “Russian”, to people who were simply confused, to a handful of folks who tried to correct aforementioned people. To clear up any confusion on the matter, I’m going to give a (relatively) brief explanation:

The Duchy of Prussia was an independent German state which originated in what is now Northern Poland. During the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, the German Teutonic Knights imposed their rule on the Baltic coast, gaining more and more power in the local area and exterminating the pagan “Old Prussians” before taking their name for themselves. After losing several wars to the Poles, the Grandmaster of this Catholic knightly order was convinced to turn his realm into a secular, protestant Duchy. During the next two centuries, Prussia would absorb other territories, including the Margraviate of Brandenburg and its capital, Berlin. Eventually, in 1701, Prussia would be elevated to the status of a fully fledged Kingdom of the Holy Roman Empire.

This is the Kingdom of Prussia which Master of Fortresses concerns itself with. Under a series of competent, and sometimes even brilliant (Frederick II comes to mind) soldier-kings, the Prussians used fearless officers, brutal discipline and innovative tactics to build the finest land army in Europe. During the Seven Years’ War of 1756-1763, the Prussian army under King Frederick II (best known as Frederick the Great) held off the armies of Russia, France, Austria and Sweden at the same time. Prussia’s military was controlled by the Junkers, military aristocrats who also controlled the government. Prussia’s blatant militarism and violent aggressiveness didn’t win it many favours, especially not when it helped gobble up Poland in the late 18th century. It was often said that Prussia was “not a country with an army, but an army with a country”.

It is this remarkable, capable, brutal, disciplined, despotic and throughly militant state which presents itself in Master of Fortresses, with its massed conscripts drafted from jails and poorhouses, the disciplined cantonists who formed the backbone of the army, and the elite Grenadier regiments, whose recruiting guidelines required new inductees to tower over normal men. Limited to the small number of factions which we had the resources to allow, I couldn’t have thought of a single, distinct army which I would have rather pitted against France and Britain. I still stand by that decision, and hopefully, after reading this post, the rest of you will too.

That’s right. Master of Fortresses has one million (that’s the one with six zeroes) plays! Despite the rampant bugs, horribly unbalanced gameplay, redundant units and complete lack of a unified design plan, our game has managed to exceed our wildest expectations (well, mine anyways.) Once again, a big thank you to anyone whose played Master of Fortresses, and another free internets to anyone who offered any criticism. We hope you stay tuned for more news about our next project.

Wow, this site’s been up for nearly a month now, and what’s more, SpaceCat Studios, as an entity has been extant for more than a year! That’s right, it was fourteen months ago when I, clueless as I was, popped up on the Kongregate forums with a few perfunctory art samples and an idea for the most awesome flash game ever. That was when Chris and I teamed up for the first time and began work on our first game: an abomination of code and art, one which would claim the lives of both my parents, Chris’ entire extended family, and several adorable and helplessly endearing puppies…

…Nah, just kidding, Our first game was Master of Fortresses, and none of that bad stuff happened.

We did, however, learn quite a few lessons, and as Master of Fortresses inches ever closer to the long-awaited and long hoped-for millionth play, I’ve decided to do a post-mortem, to show to you, the literate public, exactly what went right, what went horribly horribly wrong and what lessons we’re taking from this, first and imperfect effort (on my part anyhow) and how we’re applying those lessons to our next great undertaking.

…but only if you swear not to lynch us.

What Went Right:

-Compatible Skills: You’d think this one would be obvious, but it isn’t. All too often, you see a not-quite professional team with ludicrously massive redundancies like six writers or nine million “artists” with crappy pencil sketches on DeviantArt. (and exaggeration, but sadly not a massive one.) This leads to problems, especially when you have a team with no clear leadership (like ours), since that means you have half a dozen artists and writers who funnel their questionable product to the one poor harried soul who bothered to learn C++/VB/AS3/Whatever language you kids are using these days. The artists fight with each other, all trying to submit the “final” version while the programmer is overwhelmed. Everything spins out of control and flies apart. That tends to be rather unconducive to a productive work environment. Meanwhile, on our side, Chris is the genius with AS whose art skills leave much to be desired, while I’m the artist, writer and actor who doesn’t know a lick of code. No redundancies, no overbalanced team structure and surprisingly few gaps in competence (music comes to mind). This was what kept us working, this was what kept us united as a team at ALL.

-Modest Goals: Chris will disagree with me on this one, but I honestly went forward on Master of Fortresses with what I believed to be pretty achievable goals. Granted, much of what we did was cut, and still much more was added, but in the end, we did the most important thing; we shipped a game that wasn’t half bad. My game ideas tend to be grandiose things, flights of fancy more suited for a big budget movie or AAA project than the humble resources at my disposal. In my opinion, the two things that allowed us to get stuck into this project at all were Chris’ candour in telling me when something was just too hard or impossible to implement, and my ability to just swallow my pride and concede that the fellow mucking with the code probably had a better grasp on the reality of the project than I did.

-Passion: The main reason why I’ve never been able to finish a project before this one is pretty simple: I gave up. When I worked alone, I would eventually lose interest and the half-done project file would moulder amongst the grandiose ruins of other attempts on my hard drive. When I worked with a team, it tended to fall apart, whether through power struggles, lack of commitment or the simple realization that our task was impossible. What was different with this project was that both of us constantly wanted to make this happen. Granted, there were times when I would slack off or lose focus, and then Chris would show me the new build and I would be galvanised into making more art. I’m sure it worked the other way around. It was almost like the secular version of a religious experience: we were tested, we were tried, and sometimes, we despaired, but in the end, we kept the faith, and we made it HAPPEN.

What Went Wrong:

-No Unified Design: This was the big fuck-up. This was why Master of Fortresses took a year to complete instead of six months or even four, as we had originally planned. Believe it or not, we didn’t even start with a design document, just a disparate collection of unit stats, concept art and publicity blurbs. Hell, we didn’t even have a real NAME (Master of Fortresses was formerly known as Vauban, a perfectly good reference for a military history buff like me, but not for people with actual lives.) How we were able to make it into a game at all was a wonder in itself. In addition, we had no actual art design, and frankly, playing through the game now, it SHOWS. We changed GUI designs and Map art styles halfway through development, we changed a few basic assumptions about the art, and even now the whole thing looks a little bit too disjointed.

-Form Before Function: This was somewhat less important, but only by a little. The truth was, we only solidified basic gameplay in February. Most of the art was already done, the GUI was finished, and once we realized that what the GUI needed to do, it needed to be redone, twice. Tooltips and other bits were added to make the whole thing more intuitive than a pit of giant scorpions (but as you’d probably know, only by a little bit). This took us three months. By the end of it, we were so anxious to get the damn thing finished that we quite brusquely booted it out the door, leading to the problem which you lot probably recognized the most;

-Too Little Beta Testing: When we shipped Master of Fortresses, it was full of bugs, and this was after we spent two months fixing bugs during bidding, and a two months before that in beta testing. The fact is, we were so bloody preoccupied with getting this damn thing RELEASED that we didn’t spend enough effort debugging it, or balancing the factions, or even testing out all the gameplay elements throughly. Granted, when it was only a handful of sponsors and friends playing, it wasn’t so bad, but when we released to the general public, it kicked us in our faces in the worst possible way. I feel the lack of polish and insufficient bugtesting was what made Master of Fortresses merely a good game, rather than a great one.

Lessons Learned:

-Prototype First: Most of the problems with Master of Fortresses stemmed from the fact that we didn’t have a master plan. We didn’t know what the gameplay was going to be like, there was no unified art style, and we weren’t working on a timetable, just a vague checklist. That hurt us in the end. This time, we’re prototyping gameplay, developing an art style and THEN we’re doing fluff like menus.

-Fear the Feature Creep: The problem with having no master plans means that we allow new ideas to creep in, While they might be good on their own, they detract from the general plan and slow down development on important things as we indulge our own private whims. This time, I’m thinking of coming up with a final design, and then locking down the idea factory, we won’t add new stuff unless it becomes absolutely necessary.

-POLISH: I’m going to say this now, so you can hold me up to it later; we are going to polish the SHIT out of this game. Everything’s going to be tested until it breaks, repaired, and tested again. We’ll use a wider beta tester pool (Master of Fortresses had something like a total of four beta testers) and we’ll give them more time. We’ll also start them earlier so they can catch stuff before it gets buried under mountains of other code and art and therefore, too difficult to change. SpaceCat Studios’ next game won’t be merely good; it will be GREAT.

So, now you know the dark secrets which have rested in the recesses of our minds. (well, not really) We’ve both taken away a lot from this project and hope that the lessons we’ve learned will make us a better team and more skilled individually. I’d personally like to thank the fans and friends who brought the flaws in our freshman effort to our attention. You guys know who you are, by doing what you have, you’ve hopefully made us better developers from the lessons we’ve learned.