BraveTree Responds
by Joe Maruschak · in ThinkTanks · 09/16/2003 (11:33 am) · 25 replies
Whew. Back from vacation and it took me a few days to read everything that has been posted. I am going to attempt to respond to all the concerns that have been rasied in the past few weeks, provide context for our response, and outline a rough roadmap for the future.
Context
BraveTree is a small company. 3 guys. Me (Joe Maruschak), Clark Fagot, and Mike Jahnke. When you refer to 'the developers', you are referring to us. That is 3 guys doing all the development, business, support, etc...
Clark has been spending the last month or so preparing builds for distribution channels and on the Active X version of ThinkTanks. We are up on shockwave.com right now, and you will be seeing us go up on other channels in the future. This is a necessary step for us to grow the community and generate enough revenue to make it possible to make additions to the game.
ThinkTanks is selling well, but we are not yet in a place where we can totally forget about paying work. We have taken on a few small contract jobs that can keep one of us occupied from a day to a week. When one of us is working on a contract job, we are not working on ThinkTanks.
The explosion of new players and the enthusiasm of the community took us a little by surprise. We knew it was a fun game, but the overwhelming growth in the past month is exactly that; overwhelming. We are not yet into a postion to hire new employees, but we are definitely being strained in terms of resources to do everything that we would like to do and that we feel the game needs.
I read everything posted. The volume of posts is starting to take up a significant portion of my time. We want to be accessible to the community, but it is starting to interfere with our ability to move forward and work on new things (either another game or on upgrades to ThinkTanks.
Modding
As a very young company, with ThinkTanks being our first game, we are concerned about the public perception of our company and our games. We do not want the first impression someone has of our game to be a poorly done, poorly balanced mod with art that is not up to par with the released title.
Internally, we feel as though we are still in the release phase, getting the game out into the channels and growing the user base. At this point in time we fear that mods may have a negative impact on sales and slow community growth. The current rash of modding does not seem to have had a negative impact on sales (nor has it appeared to increase sales). We are proceeding very carefully in this area, as we want to make sure we do it right.
The rash of mods as of late is forcing us to accelerate our plans in this area. The plan for us is to make it so the new player can only see the default games, and by flipping a switch in the prefs, one can then see all the mods. Once this is in, we will feel comfortable that the new user is experiencing the game as it was designed, and also allow for modding. With this in place, we would then feel comfortable releasing the scripts, the terrain editor, and possibly the tank models to the community.
Another concern of ours is support. We do not have a dedicated support staff, so having others introduce bugs into the game (in mods) is something we have to be very careful about. We also want to make sure the tools are in a good enough state to release to the public. Right now they are pretty touchy when you are using them, so we want to make sure they are stable enough that we don't spend a lot of time doing support for the modding tools.
As I have noted above, we are still working on creating different builds for the various distribution channels. Once these are done we can focus some energy on getting the game 'mod ready'.
Context
BraveTree is a small company. 3 guys. Me (Joe Maruschak), Clark Fagot, and Mike Jahnke. When you refer to 'the developers', you are referring to us. That is 3 guys doing all the development, business, support, etc...
Clark has been spending the last month or so preparing builds for distribution channels and on the Active X version of ThinkTanks. We are up on shockwave.com right now, and you will be seeing us go up on other channels in the future. This is a necessary step for us to grow the community and generate enough revenue to make it possible to make additions to the game.
ThinkTanks is selling well, but we are not yet in a place where we can totally forget about paying work. We have taken on a few small contract jobs that can keep one of us occupied from a day to a week. When one of us is working on a contract job, we are not working on ThinkTanks.
The explosion of new players and the enthusiasm of the community took us a little by surprise. We knew it was a fun game, but the overwhelming growth in the past month is exactly that; overwhelming. We are not yet into a postion to hire new employees, but we are definitely being strained in terms of resources to do everything that we would like to do and that we feel the game needs.
I read everything posted. The volume of posts is starting to take up a significant portion of my time. We want to be accessible to the community, but it is starting to interfere with our ability to move forward and work on new things (either another game or on upgrades to ThinkTanks.
Modding
As a very young company, with ThinkTanks being our first game, we are concerned about the public perception of our company and our games. We do not want the first impression someone has of our game to be a poorly done, poorly balanced mod with art that is not up to par with the released title.
Internally, we feel as though we are still in the release phase, getting the game out into the channels and growing the user base. At this point in time we fear that mods may have a negative impact on sales and slow community growth. The current rash of modding does not seem to have had a negative impact on sales (nor has it appeared to increase sales). We are proceeding very carefully in this area, as we want to make sure we do it right.
The rash of mods as of late is forcing us to accelerate our plans in this area. The plan for us is to make it so the new player can only see the default games, and by flipping a switch in the prefs, one can then see all the mods. Once this is in, we will feel comfortable that the new user is experiencing the game as it was designed, and also allow for modding. With this in place, we would then feel comfortable releasing the scripts, the terrain editor, and possibly the tank models to the community.
Another concern of ours is support. We do not have a dedicated support staff, so having others introduce bugs into the game (in mods) is something we have to be very careful about. We also want to make sure the tools are in a good enough state to release to the public. Right now they are pretty touchy when you are using them, so we want to make sure they are stable enough that we don't spend a lot of time doing support for the modding tools.
As I have noted above, we are still working on creating different builds for the various distribution channels. Once these are done we can focus some energy on getting the game 'mod ready'.
#22
I was hosting one a few days ago (Sty's Oregon Shanty). If need be, I can setup another server and host it for you. Float me an email (tnfrans@hotmail.com) of date and time. Also if there are certain maps or whatever the majority needs, include it in the email.
09/22/2003 (11:49 am)
Quote:There are currently NO team scrum servers to be found.. we can't play at all.
I was hosting one a few days ago (Sty's Oregon Shanty). If need be, I can setup another server and host it for you. Float me an email (tnfrans@hotmail.com) of date and time. Also if there are certain maps or whatever the majority needs, include it in the email.
#23
I think reverse enginering is bad and the selling of maps and mods from a 3rd party is also bad because it abuses the hard work you did. But you shouldnt crack down on mods, custom mapping, and skinning too harshly. These increase a games replayablity a lot. I think its good as long as its good to Brave Tree financially and there reputation.
09/22/2003 (9:44 pm)
My post is pointed at the modification and mapping question.I think reverse enginering is bad and the selling of maps and mods from a 3rd party is also bad because it abuses the hard work you did. But you shouldnt crack down on mods, custom mapping, and skinning too harshly. These increase a games replayablity a lot. I think its good as long as its good to Brave Tree financially and there reputation.
#24
cpt Rik
09/23/2003 (8:19 am)
Dux will u shut it plz, u waste space on the forums, and no1 will help u, unless u ask without makeing 10 forums at once.cpt Rik
MAX
Dude your trippin. It doesn't work that way. What are you saying? When you create your own server you can't see it when you shut it down and then go online and try connecting to it. Of course you can't see it, you had to shut down the server you created in order to view the "online server list". The only way to see your own server on a the "online server list" is to access it from another computer running Think Tanks.
Concerning the Bot name or any modifying for that matter.
1. leave Bravetree out of it, ask one of the half dozen or so people who created this monster, Bravetree has much better things to do with there time.
2. What you modify can only be viewed when you "create" a server. If you think about this it makes sense. You changed the server files on "your' computer not "somebody else's".
3. Except objects ("skins") which modify how you view the objects in your game. Sort of like sun glasses. You see pink but not everyone else, unless they've got pink sunglasses on too.
4. NEVER MODIFY THE ORIGINAL, ALWAYS WORK WITH A COPY!
Does that help?
MAXCR