I wonder 'artful slaughterer' skill of Adipose Fiend works correctly. Its description says 20~30% of damage dealt to player converted to his mana, but it seems that mana increases more than it says. (maybe 200~300%?! ) Anyway, love this game again. Now my protecter reached at Lv.64(skill Lv.54)!
not really I fear. we're working hard on our next game. I talked to Alex, the programmer of Hell Quest, but haven't heard back from him for 3-4 weeks.
How much does the premium account cost? is it a 1 time IAP or more of a subscription? Stumbled on this thread last night and downloaded the game and am pleasantly surprised with it
A subscription, and an expensive one at that. It had a lot of potential, but they never listened to feedback and it didn't generate income (surprise surprise) and has been abandoned by all signs. Enjoy it for what it is, but don't waste your time on IAP for "premium".
It did, which is the sad part. A Farkle based horror lite-CRPG with deck building elements and dice was a cool idea. And if they'd just followed the basic idea of "give them something to pay for instead of give them something to pay to avoid" it probably would have done decently. However, they could never let go of the idea of using their particular FTP model, an awful, awful fit for the target audience, and then they went and made it even worse by "making it more casual" by removing so many time limits to reach boss fights BUT increased the difficulty in getting dice several fold, the result being that they took a game that was already a time intensive grind to get ahead and turned into an even more time intensive grind to get ahead, thereby not just negating any benefits of removing the time limits to reach the bosses during quests and crusades, but actually making the whole problem of people wasting their time to get nowhere that much worse. JoshCM (the publisher) could probably use this game's history on the app store for a good post mortem on what not to do in free to play gaming Perhaps one day they could relaunch it with a sensible monetization scheme, most of the work is done for them and it's still an underserved genre.
I know there are problems with the programmer team.. But it's a bit sad to see a freemium game with real money ingame purchases, that was claimed to be expanded with more levels and classes.. It feels like being a little ripped off, since the game is not even half way finished.. I feel i played the demo.. And payed for it. It's okay to add purchases ingame, but in a full game.
First of all, if a little late: happy new year everyone! Second: sorry for the delay in answering. We had a hard time the last half-year, loosing two of our guys (one of them the programmer of Hell Quest) and nearly falling apart altogether, because of serious money issues. Just to give you an idea of how bad things were - in December, just before Christmas, we were basically without any money left on our bank account. On top of that Ralph and myself passed on our salaries since August, so that we could pay our artist and the ongoing costs. Good thing is: tenacity prevails. Through all the hard times we never lost faith and once we decided to focus on the sequel of our thus far most successful game, Nosferatu, new possibilities arose. In late December we were able to sign an agreement (without having to sell our souls, mind you!) with a strong partner here in Germany, who believes in us and the little vampire. 2014 is secure, we can pay our salaries and we have clear goals. I will try to give you as clear a picture as possible of the mistakes that we made. I won't and can't tell you all the things that happened on a personal level within smuttlewerk and that heavily influenced how things went (nothing overly dramatic, just the usual "Human, All Too Human" stuff that happens when people work together). Please note: in hindsight many things become clearer - you surely know that when you're in a situtation, things can be quite different. The biggest mistake we made was that we worked on too many different games at the same time. On top of that we had to regulary update our old games, too. We didn't focus enough. The second biggest mistake was that we were too "democratic" when it came to decision making - too many cooks spoil the broth - we wasted many a working hour discussing and made too many compromises. The third mistake resulted of the second one: the game was too hardcore and too time consuming for a wider (mobile) audience to feel attracted to. Both in terms of theme and in terms of gameplay mechanics. Not all of that was our fault, since we had to work for a third party with whom we signed an agreement before even thinking about HQ (look for "Wendy Wetter" in the store), thus draining our ressources. We would have needed 3+ month soft-launch phase to see what works and what not, but our financial situation made this impossible. In May/June it was clear that none of the games we released, would at least be minor commercial successes. HQ and Garden of Fear didn't produce significant income, retention and engagement was bad. And Wendy Wetter, while having good retention values and showed some promise, did suffer from lack of players. I love Hell Quest and I'm sure the game has potential to be really awesome. But with only one programmer left, we had to decide on what to do to save us. So we started Nosferatu 2 and put all our energy into it and will continue to do so. I deeply apologize for how things went and hope that we can continue with the game once we have the money to pay someone to do the development work. We can't at the moment and we won't be able to do so in the near future. If you happen to know a good Unity3D developer willing to work on the game in his spare time (on a revenue share basis), feel free to PM me. C.Hannum: believe it or not, I listened to your feedback. But back then (and it'll be the same in the future ) I sometimes won't (because I don't agree) or can't (because there are other things going on that you can't possibly see) react on feedback the way a player might wish. I appreciate your thoughts, please keep them coming. Pgs3000 (and all the others that might feel ripped off), please PM me and I give you promo codes for our other games or something along that line. We'll find a solution. Sorry for the long read. I hope that you have had (or still have) some fun hours with the game. See you in hell (sorry, I had to make this joke )!
Thanks for the reaction m8! In the end we are All just humans. Gonna check out nosferatu Hopefully in the future hell quest Will be finished, because this game has the potential to stand out to other games. Good luck with everything and Please keep us posted! Hopefully 2014 Makes a change in the positive ditection. Regards bart
Late to the party on this one. So much potential. Hate to see this abandoned, seems like smuttle is leaving money on the table. Great concept (dice mechanics), questionable theme (art is good though, great in parts) but game is absolutely frustrating. Even so, I could see this mechanic being very successful. Hope the devs apply lessons learned to future projects.
i lost hope So here we are.. years later.. Stil remembering this game with it's great atmosphere because of the great graphics and suspense music.. what a waste of game.. it had everything! it just needed completion.
that's the way it goes sometimes. we have all the art (4 or 5 hell circles weren't done when we stopped development) & code for Hell Quest here. we talked more than once about a re-release, but always come to the same conclusion: we don't have the time to invest in a game that didn't work properly when it was still live in the stores. we also pondered about making it a steam PC game instead of a mobile game, but this is just talk right now, nothing to be excited about. it's great that you still remember it Pgs300ß. it was a good game. the hours of work we put into this little beauty, the endless design talks. feels like it was a hundred years ago.
