The Archotek Project · @archotek
2nd Dec 2017 from TwitLonger
Hello everyone, Levia here!
It's only the beginning of December and most teams post a summary, statement or whatever you want to call it, at the end of the month, but I believe it's always better to do something sooner than later and most of us will probably be busy fighting the Christmas food coma instead of spending their holidays reading Facebook posts. ;)
Some of you might remember Archotek starting out as a business tycoon (not a park tycoon, as many people believed), where you had to "create" and sell animals based on your customers needs, e.g. with specific skins, stats, etc.
In summer 2016 the idea behind the game changed and turned it into the ecosystem management simulator, that we are still holding onto.
A few players asked, if it the ecosystem mode will be based on different time periods. The short answer: We are not against the idea, but we don't have the financial resources to do that.
A good amount of work has already been put into the creation of the dinosaur models, when the concept changed and we believe, we can have a working ecosystem even if we have different animals from different periods in the same place.
Option B would have been scrapping some of the models and sticking to one time period, but we love our animals even if they are only a bunch of polygons & textures and even caused us headaches in some cases (Damn you, Galli!), which is also the reason, why the "Be the Dinosaur" mode exists - They deserve more attention than just being watched through a top down camera. We are aware, that there have been a lot of debates, when Archotek launched on Steam with only the BtD mode and there have been players, devs and content creators trying to manipulate this project simply because of that (and there still are) and some even went so far, that they tried to destroy my personal life and the life of former team members. Beast of Bermuda is currently undergoing the same "treatment".
However, ATP wouldn't exist anymore, if it wasn't for this decision.
It is known, that the dinosaur community is - unfortunately - incredibly toxic. We are not exactly sure why, but the reasons are not really relevant. We do understand, that some people go through hard times and can't always be happy or simply positive, but there is a line that has been crossed many, many times, which forced us to be rather strict when it comes to excluding people from our community.
I personally think everyone deserves a chance, but there have been individuals, who set a world record at crossing this line.
I am not sure if these actions have left a negative impression on the game or team in any way, but we had to do what was necessary to avoid more drama and damage.
The year 2017 has been filled with struggle, worrying, calculations and lots and lots of work. I often spent 24-33 hours straight working on Archotek, feeling incredibly exhausted during the few days I took off from work. In August I picked up a second job in town (for those, who don't know: I work as full-time dev & artist) to keep myself and ATP financially stable. We still had to slow down the dev process. Our animator works on Prehistoric Kingdom and is currently going through his final year at Uni and I am surprised, he hasn't shot me yet for the amount of times I had to bug him to do work on ATP.
A lot of friendships, relationships and connections suffered this year just to prevent ATP from dying.
One or two people mentioned Kickstarter as "solution", but I personally do not believe we would have reached the required goal, alone for the reason that I took over the project in December and there are people out there, who do almost everything to see me or the project fail. Besides that, statistics show, that Kickstarter is not really that helpful anymore as it used to be a few years back. We will still give it a try though, when our next project (Draconia) is developed enough to be shown there, since the interest in that project is way higher.
What is our plan for the coming year?
As I mentioned in one of the last posts, we have a new programmer, who will hopefully stay with us during the entire year and improve the game significantly (a lot of things/mechanics had to be rushed and are just super clunky). Especially the aquatics will need extra treatment, since I absolutely hate the current controls. haha
I will undergo a larger change in my life to have more money that I can throw into the ATP pot. It still won't be easy, but it's a step in the right direction.
Players also keep asking for flyers and specific animals.
We really would like to have all these requested things in-game, but we all have bills to pay and still need to work on the promised content like the Ecosystem.
However, if one or several people decide to throw some money together to have something added to the game, they can contact me privately about that on Discord/here on Facebook. Like I said, it's not like we don't want these things.
And of course our main plan is not to give up. It's not an option. Never will be! No matter what life throws at us! 2018 will still be filled with a lot of grinding, but I am positive!
Now back to the part about creating a working ecosystem: We did some work on the Tiers & Points for eco mode. The document I linked below is still heavily work in progress. We would still appreciate some feedback: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_vvVpoQAv_m3w7HccHGzFIkFaa5tXyhWaf4aYyqa6Ng/edit?usp=sharing
Congrats, you made it to the end of this post! :)
Thanks for taking the time to read it.
- Levia