People cooperate and in general the community is better because of it.
#Valkara ironfell update
The Alliance update has been live for 5 months now, and I think it’s helped Ironfell a lot. It’s a fun game, I still like playing it. Over 30,000 people have tried Ironfell and lots of those have become addicted to it. I started Ironfell in December 2011… 3 years ago… that is a long time. Financial reality means that Ironfell has been closed down, but hopefully I can take what I’ve learnt from Ironfell and make an even better game one day. Ironfell was incredibly ambitious and I’m happy so much of it worked as well as it did. Unless I win the lottery I will never be able to spend that much time on a non-paying project ever again. The dollar value of that time is absolutely horrifying. And that does not include my time.ĭuring the 3 years I worked on Ironfell, I spent over 4000 hours on it. It had $13,648 in income from selling in game resources but subtracting artwork, servers and advertising… Ironfell made a loss of about $8000. The most effective piece of press was on Rock Paper Shotgun from simply sending out a press release.įinancially Ironfell was a failure.
And I don’t think I spent enough time on this. Easily a third of the time I spent on Ironfell was marketing. Marketing a game is a huge effort and it takes an enormous amount of time. Next time I would make dealing with the worst people a core part of the game design. I underestimated the amount of damage a single person could do to a community. I wasted almost 400 hours on this one person – that’s 10% of the total time spent on Ironfell! That time could definitely have been better spent improving Ironfell. When his account was deleted, he kept coming back with aliases and spent 14 hours a day 7 days a week trying to destroy Ironfell. One psychopath intentionally forced most of the long term players to quit Ironfell. Those few players were able to ruin the game for everyone else. It was retro cute and of such a high standard it made me proud to show people Ironfell.Ībout one in a thousand players were complete assholes. What he came up with was absolutely perfect. I’m a terrible illustrator, so getting Damon Keen to draw the character artwork worked incredibly well. Player quote: “I think I have enough resources to completely cover the islands in wood walls so nobody could move” Then allies, strategy and and skill became what mattered most. Players reached a point where they had so much of every resource that resources stopped being important. But most effective was having an end game plateau.
Safe newbie areas and realms that only advanced players can use helped control the divide between the rich and poor. So players who had been playing for a long time and players who payed for resources had an unfair advantage. Ironfell did not have instanced or tiered battles, you always had all your resources available to fight with. Ironfell’s lack of balance was a huge experiment (and risk). Also developing on OSX and using OSX for the server operating system greatly simplified testing and deployment. Ironfell’s servers had high CPU and memory requirements, so being able to buy the server hardware up front and the fact that the servers were needed long term made the MacMini’s half as much as the Amazon cloud equivalent. This was an unusual choice for servers, usually I’d use Amazon Cloud servers. The server’s behind Ironfell were four MacMini’s (quad-core i7, 16GB Ram, SSD) hosted at MacMiniColo. “i miss ironfell soo much, especially the community :(“ Months after the game was shut down players still send me emails like this: They made it fun for me to hang out in the game and talk to people. Having a sociable and supportive community was the best thing about Ironfell. This meant that the core players were older and able to communicate well. Early advertising targeted at role playing gamers (from stumbleupon) worked incredibly well for Ironfell. With any massive multiplayer game and the quality of the the community is critical. But financially it failed and was closed down in December 2014. Ironfell was creatively a huge success, fun to play, people loved it.
#Valkara ironfell full
With Ironfell I hoped to build a game that captured the same feeling as early Civilization and Ultima and be profitable enough to become my full time job. Ironfell was an indie hex-tile MMORTS where conflict happens massive persistent universe spanning all of time and space.
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