See that fellow up top, the one in the top hat and overcoat, the one holding the walking stick and the death ray? Yeah, that’s our next project (I told you Death Rays would be involved. Aliens will be along shortly), well, alright, thats concept art of our next project, but you know what I mean! Chris has been doing a lot of prototyping work to get the gameplay down while I’ve been generally being a good university student and studying for my summer exams. I did, however, manage to squeeze out this piece of art and a few scrawled felt pen drawings of some other things which are far too messy and unpolished to show here.

In other news, Master of Fortresses has just hit 500 000 plays! I’d like to give a big thanks to the folks at Max Games, who were kind enough to back our game with their hard-earned cashey-money, and Kongregate, which has given us roughly 45% of our players. (Chris is also working on adding the API needed should they give us badges in the future) Of course, the biggest thanks goes out to you folks, our constantly growing (I hope) fanbase, who have played MoF and have been good enough to offer suggestions on how we might improve a second effort. Just a reminder that we have both been keeping tabs on the various comment threads, and we are squirreling some of those ideas away for future use.

Lastly, I (Paul/Cataphrak) will be at Anime Evolution from Friday to Sunday. If you live in the Metro Vancouver area, and aren’t allergic to UBC (as many SFU students seem to be), then you might run into me there.

I just checked MochiBot, and it seems that Master of Fortresses has just topped 250k plays, that’s right, our game has been played a quarter of a million times! I’d like to give a big “Thank You!” to anyone whose played the game so far and encourage anybody who’s liked it to recommend it to their friends. The amount of people who have played our first and imperfect effort has been surprisingly high, and as I’m writing this, I’m still kind of giddy over it.

I would also like to thank anybody who piped up with a bug report or a suggestion on the comment threads on Kongregate and Newgrounds. We know the game isn’t exactly bug-free, but Chris is working his hardest to try to keep up and put up fixes, or at least work-arounds as fast as he can. There are a few problems which we can’t fix for technical or logistical reasons (read: it would take hours, or involve re-writing everything from the ground up, and neither of us have the time), but we WILL be keeping them in mind for a possible sequel. ;D

Good news everyone!

Our first game, Master of Fortresses has just been released on Max Games and Newgrounds. The culmination of a year’s hard work planning, creating and finally polishing our first project as a team has finally come to an end. The release is going about as well as I had hoped, we’re getting a lot of votes and ratings already and although the reception isn’t exactly ecstatic, it is definitely favourable. Granted, we learned a lot of lessons from development and we both know full well that we pushed MoF out the door with a few flaws which we caught too late to fix, or ended up being too embedded in the game’s design to work around. Hopefully, we’ll have less of those with our next project.

You can play Master of Fortresses at Max Games here or at Newgrounds here.