well, we'd really like to add the dwarven fortress levels to the game + the random endless dungeon crawler, but we don't have the resources to do so (at the moment). and no worries about a "cute Companions". won't come. We even started with a graphic update last summer, but had to discontinue the development, because of what I mentioned above. we have to do the casual stuff now, because that's were the money is. when we started, we thought Companions could make us "rich"...haha, what fools we were back then. a kickstarter campaign would be cool, but correct me if I am wrong, you need to live in the US to do that, isn't that so? BTW: the game is still on sale for 4 more days! 0,99$ only!
It's a real shame that you say you have to do the casual stuff now for the money, I think the idea behind your games are great. Really meaty deep stuff. Hopefully you can continue to make awesome games that really suit themselves to the iPad. In the meantime, anything you guys make, I'll buy it straight away based on your previous stuff and to support a fantastic developer.
In my opinion, this game should have got you at least 6 cyphers earnings; it´s a very well crafted game, interesting storyline (sometimes even funny) and overall almost everything feels right about it. This made me lose all my sunday, haha. I would gladly pay more for this game. A shame you can´t continue developing this kind of games right now, but... in a future, I´m sure you will do a wonderful strategy/rpg game again, and I´ll be buying it
thank you CrunchyGamer! with the knowledge we have know, the game would become even better, I'm sure of that. we put 10 month work in it, with no experience regarding iOS games - the things we learned since 2010/11...quite a lot of stuff. let's hope Nosferatu, our endless runner, continues to be so well received. the money we generate with the game could well be the foundation for a Companions 2 or some such thing...
Pretty bummed that the random dungeon component never saw the light of day, but you can't argue with economics. I guess... <SNIFF>
Can I get some help: (a) some what near the beginning, I found a secret room to a "library". There's 4 books the mage finds interesting with the titles "Detex" "for" "my" "life". I can't figure out what this means. I originally thought I'm supposed to read them in some sort of order, but I couldn't get it to work. And I'm also supposed to be able to pick something up, but when I try it, nothing happens. what gives? (b) aside from the achievement / fame, is there any additional bonus to finishing this game on a harder difficulty? (i'm playing normal right now) (c) what's the drop rate on the loot? I remember playing this once long time ago and I barely found any loot. I only got into about 2 hours into the game... then stopped for a while, and I restarted just today. But I'm finding a lot more loot than before. Was wondering if I did something different, or did the developers change the drop-rate in one of the versions... thanks.
hi stbassy, sry for the late reply. I was away for a few days. Spoiler 1.) The correct order is "My life for Detexx". "Press" on the words ONCE in the correct order to solve the riddle. 2. No, no additional bonus. Just the fact that you are one of the few hardcore dungeon crawler guys! 3. Pure luck. we changed some minor things over time, but not that much. Hope you enjoy our game!
hey friends! we didn't had the time to really finish our debut game. the last year was filled with lots of new impressions and learnings for the smuttlewerkers, I can tell you. as told in an earlier post, Companions was not what you'd call a financial success. we overestimated the size of the "hardcore gamer" community on mobile devices. from an economic viewpoint, it's totally senseless to continue working on our game...but we wouldn't be who we were if we did abandon our game. for all of you who love our game, I have good news: Ralph an I decided to finish the game in our spare time (this will take at least three month, perhaps even longer, but we will do it as promised when you kill Raartaark). I don't yet know how many dwarven fortress maps we will add (at least 3, perhaps even more, but at the end you will fight the fiend Umbahan ot Smorgwar, that's for sure alongside the new maps, we also plan on doing some graphical updates, so even if it may take a while, be assured that we will do what we can to make Companions even better. on a side note: on 5th July we release a new lite version, with only single player maps to play on (the ones already in the original game - to tell the truth, we added ads to it, to get at least a few bucks more out the game). hope you like the news, have a great time!
Hey guys, wanted to thank you all for the updates that you're working on, but this comment worries me a bit. I'm a fan of Companions, and have enjoyed it since it hit the iPAD. That said, I think that it's pretty safe to say that Companions' lack of success could probably be due to a number of factors that add up to more than, "we overestimated the size of the "hardcore gamer" community on mobile devices." 1. You were an IPAD ONLY game EARLY in the system's cycle, and your premium price didn't go on sale for a while. While I have NO problem paying more for real games, and I did, you must admit that you decimated your audience immediately just by those two factors alone. 2. I've recommended your game on numerous gaming message boards whenever anyone is looking for a deeper iPad experience. However, I've found that when I try to push the game on people, I confess that I do so with two major caveats. a. The gamer has to look beyond the graphics because, frankly, the game isn't very pretty. And, b. the game has a tough learning curve. It took me several attempts to put myself in the mind to start playing Companions after i bought it. I wanted, say, Diablo, but the experience of playing Companions was altogether different and tougher to grasp as you aren't actually directly moving your party as freely as you would think that you could. Because of the camera positioning and the micromanagement, the game takes a commitment to get into. I finally did, and enjoyed it. However, Companions comes off as 'hardcore' not because of subject matter but because of some really unintuitive design choices. Companions is a very flawed game which i really enjoy, but take a little offense that the lesson that you guys took from the game after all this time is that 'the audience wasn't big enough'. GameLoft, and ESPECIALLY Crescent Moon Games would argue otherwise. In fact, even MORE companies are jumping in on the hardcore market with games that have great iPad interfaces, and seem to be achieving financial success. Hero's Call is one such game, and even though many dislike IAP...and there are others coming down the pipe, too! Baldur's Gate II is right around the corner, right? There is a HUGE market that is HUNGRY for hardcore RPG experiences on the IPAD. The failing of Companions - and this might be a tough pill to swallow - was in the game. It's not too hardcore at all. It was an early casualty of trying to figure out how to get these games to work on the system. Companions made a great go of it, but needed polish and tweaking. Time of Heroes had similar issues. The first impression that one gets from the game, no matter how deep it is, is that it looks so unpolished! The art is uninspired, and compared to other games in the same genre on the idevices, the graphics look rough! I remember that you guys made a comment on another board about pursuing casual games because the hardcore thing didn't work out. This made me sad because you guys really have the concepts down, with really intriguing universes and - at the core- really good gameplay. However, look at the competition...and i don't mean Angry Birds and Endless Runners. Heroes Call, Bard's Tale, Sword & Sworcery, Pocket RPG, Waking Mars - all STUNNING looking HARDCORE games on my iPAD that i HAPPILY paid FULL PRICE for. More, even Cubemen, Kingdom Rush, and Land Air Sea Warfare, are all great iPad showpieces that i paid the top price for with no regrets about sales that came afterwards. The games not only played fantastically, but the immediate impression is that the games LOOK great. Companions? To be brutally honest...not so much. Come on, I love the game and love you guys...but don't blame US.
hey sakinnuso! some of the points you mentioned are of course true, like we targeted only iPad, which in itself shows how much we knew about the market back then: next to nothing. and that the game would take commitment to get into was something we did want from our game. to understand this you must know what kind of games influenced us: mostly 4x strategy games and war games (turn based) and other "deep" games which took learning to master them. that the game needs more polishing is true. but hey, we were two guys working on that game. the graphics were either outsourced (most of the tilesets) or done by our graphics guy who (back then) had never done this sort of thing. we learned a bit in Time of Heroes, but we also managed to implement severe flaws in this one, like the ugly interface or lazy gameplay. the 3D graphics were btw. the first our artist did, so for a 21 year old guy who has never done these things, they're actually pretty good. and he learned while we made the game and so did we. we will give the 4 companions a full graphical overhaul with the update, but don't expect wonders. there's only so much you can do for a game in this perspective. so, I agree, there is a huge market for big RPG's and stuff like that, but only if you can pay for the time and quality needed to produce such games for a large audience. the customer wants high polished AAA games. we will be in this position in a year, perhaps two (hopefully ) it took us 10 month to complete the game, btw, and we did not pay us loans. that was the only way to produce the game. imagine if we had to pay for seasoned artists or more programmers...impossible. the hardcore gamers thing: for me "hardcore" gamers are guys who play Dwarf Fortress or other crazy difficult, high learning curve games. and all these games doesn't depend on great graphics, it's the gameplay that counts. I mean, there are guys saying that Diablo is hardcore, which it is not, by my definition. that, of course, is only my opinion and in itself absolutely questionable. but I never wanted to blame anyone (not our customers and not even us) for Companions not being financially successfull. If we did away with the 4 party system, if we implemented auto group movement, if we made it iPhone compatible, did make the maps smaller (but more of them), if, if, if, if anyway, I hope you hold no grudge against us. we try our best (with sparse resources) and we will continue to do so. Atm we HAVE to produce casual games, because it's much easier to do and leads to income which secures that we can go on. enough ramblings, back to work
No Grudge. I buy whatever you guys put out...until you go casual Actually, if by 'casual', you still mean games that aren't puzzle games, endless runners, or angry bird physics games, then I'll continue to buy whatever you sell! Have you guys considered making an actual RTS based in your universe? Or, even better, a really polished TOWER DEFENSE game (which always sells well), with characters in your universe and big effects? That's a middle ground, right? Even if you guys made a top down run-n-gun twin-stick shooter but based in your universe, that could still appeal to your core audience. BIG action, BIG effects, cool fantasy setting... ..also provides incentive for people to play the other games in your library if they're based on the same mythologies.
we already talked about a tower defense game back in february, but canceled the idea when so many high class TD games were released back then. I mean, why play another TD game when you have Kingdom Rush (by far the best TD game in my opionion). but you're right of course, there's always a middle ground and we had some great ideas lately. but all these ideas (which always incorporated RPG elements) are currently to time/cost intensive to produce (if we want to be a concurrence for Gameloft or Crescent Moon etc.). and, alas, I could imagine a butchering minotaur in a cool dual stick mayhem...perhaps one day. take care!
I think a TD could be *vastly* better than Kingdom Rush. KR lets you level everything up, and then there are just a few types of towers to use. There's really very little variety. You could have many orders of magnitude more different choices and strategies. I also think that TD games based on random levels with some sort of overall campaign (so that some levels are randomly easy or hard, but the overall average is what matters) have enormous potential.
How does this game compare to Wesnoth? I'm looking for a similar experience, and not sure if Companions offers that.
