Massive Update to Add New Features

Folks who have previously tried out Dark Vale Games' Forge will want to swing by the game for another look at the end of April thanks to four months of crunch work by the dev team to implement features that were unable to be included at launch.

Wrong: We launched too early

We know we launched an incomplete game. Being an indie studio we did not have the luxury of spending four more months developing Forge without seeing any revenue. While Forge is an indie, it’s not like we’re 4 guys in a garage living on Top Raman and KFC Bowls. We had 50 team members at one point during development, and a regular skeleton crew of 25. These are all talented and industry-experienced people with families to feed and bills to pay. We raised enough money to ensure we could recruit and maintain the team we wanted. Our funding was finite though, and we had no choice but to launch the core game on Steam in December. At that point, we believed we had enough of a game to get people hooked so that by the time they were fully vested in the game we would have updates ready for them. While we did get people hooked early on, we still felt some backlash from players who wanted a bigger game at launch. We don’t blame them. If we had our way, we would have waited to ship in April instead of December so everything after that could have been gravy, not biscuit. Gravy takes time, however, and money, and we needed to start seeing a return from sales or risk starving. We had to hold off on some of the biscuit and ship it with the gravy. We took our chances on an early launch and felt some of the pain from that. Thankfully it was relatively mild pain and our community is still just as behind us as they were when we launched the beta. We stand behind that choice, but it wasn’t ideal for sure.

Read the refreshingly candid developer blog on the Forge site.