Adventure Craft News

We are very happy to announce that Adventure Craft is now a Free game on Steam! From this stage forward Adventure Craft will be developed as a Complete Free Core Game, that offers fully optional Paid DLC.

Thank you to our Paid Customers

We would like to thank all of our initial Paid Customers for helping us get the game to this stage. Your monetary support as well as all of your player feedback has been invaluable to us in forming the game into what it is today.

As a way of saying thank you, we are preparing a "Founders Pack DLC" that will be Free for all Paid Customers who bought the game before the price change went into effect. This first DLC will include a selection of Unique Items, and other awesome goodies that are exclusive to the pack.

We will give more information about what the Founders Pack will contain over the coming weeks.

Note: In the spirit of fairness, the Founders Pack will be made available for purchase for $14.99 USD (the original price of the game) for folks who would also like access to this cool extra stuff and who want to support the game's development.


What's Next?

The fabled 1.05 update

Now that the game is Free, we must prepare the HUGE 1.05 update for release, which will add NPC towns, new recipes, items and Fishing, as well as significant gameplay updates. This update is already mostly complete, but we need to make sure that nothing in it breaks the game in an unexpected way before we release it, so we need to spend a bit more time working on it and then we will release it to a "testing branch" of the game for a week so that anyone who wants to test it can help us find any bugs that might come up. After that week we will move it into the main game.

This update is a core game update so it will of course be a Free update for everyone. More details on how you can participate in the testing of the update if you would like to will come soon.

A few personal words from the Game's Lead Designer
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Adventure Craft has been an amazing journey for me since I initially thought of the concept for the game way back in 2012. As the game's development went though it's ups and downs, it was the many kind words of the people who were playing and enjoying the game that kept me working on it.

I was always blown away when I read any of the many super positive things written about the game and it's potential, and spent many nights staying up late watching "Let's Plays".

I am so grateful for everything that I have learned about game development and even more so for all the amazing and supportive people that I have met along the way. I won't mention names here but if you are reading this you know who you all are. Thank you.

Hi,

Thanks so much to everyone who responded to our "Fate of Adventure Craft" announcement! I was very touched by all the kind words about our game. It felt really good to read that.

We have been communicating with Valve about the change over the past couple of days and we have been approved for Free to Play! We have also been advised that we will indeed be able to reward our existing paid players which I am really excited about.

They also advised us on our plan about setting up a subscription model which has informed us on how to move forward with monetization.

Here's a rough overview of my plan moving forward.

Obviously this is all subject to change, but this should give you a general idea of what's happening in the short term.

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Deploy Price change on July the 11th. From that point forward, the Core Game will now be offered PERMANENTLY for Free. All content updates to the Core Game will be free. Once the price change goes into effect we will...

Finish configuring the 1.05 update and get it ready to deploy.

Deploy 1.05 to the testing branch for one week.

After the test week Deploy 1.05 to the main game package.

Address any issues with 1.05.

From this point we would like to release an update every 1-2 weeks to the core game. First to a testing branch for a week of testing, and then moved into the main public game. (You will be able to opt in and test the patch and provide feedback before it gets deployed to the main game if you would like to.)

...........................

Monetization

Rather than the subscription model...

All updates to the core game will remain Free. New recipes, items, Tile Maps, monsters, gameplay refinements etc, will be continually added to the core game to foster its continued evolution.

We will periodically release Paid DLC in the form of "End Game Dungeons/Item Packages", the first of which will be automatically Free for existing Paid Players.

The End Game Dungeon DLC will be high level "non persistent" worlds that will mainly appeal to people who have put enough time into the base game to have a set of weapons/equipment/items capable of surviving them. (I'll tell you more about how we plan on doing the DLC's and our plans for how they affect the Core game for Free players and Vice Versa as we move forward).

If you want insider info on this or have a question follow me on Twitter @iENDERi and I'll answer your questions.

Hi everyone!

James here from Edible Entertainment.

As of today we have made the request to Valve for Adventure Craft to become a Free game on Steam and we are now just waiting to hear back from them with word as to if/when the price change can occur.

But what if I already paid?

For anyone who has already paid for the game, we will reach out to Valve to find out how we can reward these players to say thank you for the support. Ideally all players who have purchased the game before it became free can be given some unique items and free access to the game's eventual paid content which I will talk about below.

So is Adventure Craft becoming a LAME, "Free to Play" game?

I want to reassure everyone that going down this path doesn't mean that we are moving to a 'free to play' model where people are expected to play a game that's gameplay is built around micro transactions and monetization where the core gameplay suffers as a result. I consider myself a hardcore gamer and Adventure Craft must remain a game that I myself enjoy playing.

The gameplay for the game and our vision for it will remain intact and as it currently is even though we are going to offer it for free.

So why are we doing this?

Even though we haven't deployed an update in forever, we have continued to work hard on Adventure Craft. But the reality is that there are two people working full time on it. And it has only sold about 700 copies on Steam! We have been working on the game full time for nearly 6 years and at this point we NEED revenue to continue. I feel like Adventure Craft is the best game I have worked on in my career so I can't imagine leaving the game incomplete but with the arrival of my 3rd child, I have to be realistic.

Our intention in making the game free is to increase its player base. And while the Steam version of the game has only sold 700 copies, we had a pre alpha demo of the game available on Game Jolt which is far inferior to the version available on Steam, but has 30,000 players. This is obviously a massive difference. We feel that people love playing the game, but the price tag of $15 is a barrier to people doing that.

So how will we make money with it being Free

We will be offering an optional low-cost subscription to the game which
initially will allow players to support the continued development of the game and will eventually let paid players access the game's Endgame Dungeon areas.

However people will not have to pay anything and will still be able to enjoy Adventure Craft as a complete game, minus the End Game Dungeons which are planned to be for hardcore players looking for a challenge and who have put enough time in the core game to be able to survive inside a dungeon.

A final few words

Gaming and game development means everything to me so I sincerely hope that by removing the cost of admission and allowing everyone in to enjoy Adventure Craft we can build a large and strong community of players that can take the game from a single player survival game into something much more!

Thank you for taking the time to read this. As always I am available to answer any questions you have about Adventure Craft via Twitter @iENDERi and we would love to hear from you.

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for the warm welcome back! It feels so good getting back into some serious game development and interacting with you all.


Simultaneous iPad/PC debugging action!

When I come back to the project after a break it always takes a little time to reacquaint myself with the development systems and the current state of the project and whatever module that I am working on. So this time I restarted work by getting reacquainted with the work being done on the fishing pond tile map.



One of the new mobs recently named "The Sabertooth Bubbler" by one of our players Ragnar6645, needs to worked into a more vicious and terrifying swimming terror.


Here he is in the character creator. This is the place where we adjust most of a character's behaviors. The green circle is his aggro range, so he will begin running his attack ai if the player enters it.


I also spent some time adjusting things like the population and spawn rates of these fish as well as their nemesis, during specific times of the day. FISH FRENZY!

I have also set up a new Adventure Craft Twitch Channel to try my hand at a little live dev blogging. You can check that out here!

Thanks so much for reading!
James
Follow me on Twitter: @iENDERi

Hi Everyone!

We are just posting a quick update to let everyone know that normal work is now recommencing on Adventure Craft. I had to take some time off of the project at the end of 2018 through the beginning of 2019 to deal with some family issues including the recent birth of my 3rd daughter which happened 3 weeks ago!

The time away from the project has been a refreshing break that we needed to begin the next phase of the project which is finalizing and releasing the 1.05 Update and beyond!



But now it's time to recommence the creation of our crazy little world.

We have some big plans for the game moving forward. Thank you for your patience and we look forward to speaking with you all soon!

On a side note, I had a lovely conversation with one of our players a few weeks ago and they were kind enough to make a forum post about it. You can check it out here.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/624890/discussions/0/1840188800795957202/