DE 2.0 State & Progress

[Mr. D]

Hi all,

I've decided to post a small update on our state of things not to leave you in the dark.

Some of you read the following post I made recently:

This is still the case and I'm afraid I cannot promise any progress in the next few weeks, as I am currently sitting on a bunch of boxes with all my stuff in transit to a very remote part of the world that I hope to start calling "home" after the 20th of November.
I also have no clue as to when I regain internet access and get back to the normal work schedule, so it's hard to predict how soon exactly the development will resume.

There are also both good and bad news regarding DE 2.0:

Unfortunately, our initial plan didn't exactly work out and the development team we brought on-board to build a brand new game using Unity failed to deliver the anticipated level of quality.
We've had to terminate our relationship early as I noticed that the product we were receiving was inferior in terms of functionality and contained even more issues despite a much more complex code base that was becoming harder and harder to maintain and develop.

I am fairly disappointed in the outcome and the amount of time / funding invested into this fruitless side-project, but on the upside I got myself a break from development so I'm just going to have to treat this as an "unplanned holiday".

Yes, this means that you are once again stuck with me as a sole developer and we are proceeding with plan B as I implement all the new designs in the existing game engine.
The obvious drawbacks of this solution is that we probably won't see any 3D rendering capabilities in the game for a while and Android support will remain at version 4.4+ ("Domination: Earth" 1 just can't function on Androids below 4.4 anymore).

However, this also means a lot less development in total as I won't need to rebuild the game from the ground up.

Last month before I started the "grand move across the ocean" I managed to transform a number of existing screens and implemented roughly 20% of the new designs already, and would like to share with you some previews on what exactly we are working towards:

 

Of course, every device and screen are different, and many things are yet to be finalized so the actual results may vary, but you can get the sense of the overall picture.

As always, and feedback and questions are welcome.

[Republic of America]

I have to say, I'm not much of an optimist and I'm very disappointed that it's just you deving it (because more = faster, not that you've done a poor job). 

However the update is welcome and makes me extremely excited to see what we will be seeing soon. The graphical redesign looks incredible and way way better, and we are excited for the rollout later this year. 

Thanks for the update.

[Grizzlyfilms]

I'm happy that you still work with the game.

Have you seen my feedbacks on the IDEA lately?

[Ruvox]

11 hours ago, Mr. D said:

I am currently sitting on a bunch of boxes with all my stuff in transit to a very remote part of the world that I hope to start calling "home" after the 20th of November.

Are you aware that you fuel our curiosity with terms like that?

11 hours ago, Mr. D said:

We've had to terminate our relationship early as I noticed that the product we were receiving was inferior in terms of functionality and contained even more issues

Better early than lately 

11 hours ago, Mr. D said:

I am fairly disappointed in the outcome and the amount of time / funding invested into this fruitless side-project

Very sad to hear. 

11 hours ago, Mr. D said:

I got myself a break from development so I'm just going to have to treat this as an "unplanned holiday"

Which is something you'd deserve one way or another.

11 hours ago, Mr. D said:

Yes, this means that you are once again stuck with me as a sole developer

So what's the point? We were "stuck" with you for a long time now and it was amazing

The new design looks very interesting and is maybe so refreshing thing the game needs. I'm curious to see everything live someday. The new Unobtanium icon remembers me of minerals from StarCraft. Lastly, to be very honest: I don't like how that new green flag looks like but that's just my personal crazy feeling.

[Grizzlyfilms]

Possible to customize our own flags?

I mean, it would be really cool we could customize more.

To make the country be a little different from the others. 

[AntKeeper]

I like new design but I think the old one was Ok too. Usability should be improved though. Honestly, I think the problem with the game it not the design. It is gameplay. Now when I merged my home-circle with work-circle I almost have nothing to do in the game. Building structures like communication stations and silos gives almost nothing. No satisfaction, no feeling of expanding territories. I need to go to the distinct parts of my city to add new lands but because of 15-minute delays I cannot do too much there too. When I move to 100+ km from my city I place the new base there but it happens rarely. So I just start loosing interest to the game and looking to the number of active players (reduced from 2500 to 350) I see I am not alone. There is probably only one more active player in my city. We didn't war. I believe it is unfair to attack him as I have been playing much longer. But we also don't have any ability to communicate as there is no ingame communication and Discord is not popular in my country.

So the game needs complete re-thinking. Internal communication is must-have feature for this game, it should be more dynamic with more in-game activities.

[Republic of America]

48 minutes ago, AntKeeper said:

I like new design but I think the old one was Ok too. Usability should be improved though. Honestly, I think the problem with the game it not the design. It is gameplay. Now when I merged my home-circle with work-circle I almost have nothing to do in the game. Building structures like communication stations and silos gives almost nothing. No satisfaction, no feeling of expanding territories. I need to go to the distinct parts of my city to add new lands but because of 15-minute delays I cannot do too much there too. When I move to 100+ km from my city I place the new base there but it happens rarely. So I just start loosing interest to the game and looking to the number of active players (reduced from 2500 to 350) I see I am not alone. There is probably only one more active player in my city. We didn't war. I believe it is unfair to attack him as I have been playing much longer. But we also don't have any ability to communicate as there is no ingame communication and Discord is not popular in my country.

So the game needs complete re-thinking. Internal communication is must-have feature for this game, it should be more dynamic with more in-game activities.

Yeah. Your pretty much dead on 👌

[Mr. D]

 

On 06/11/2018 at 4:07 AM, Ruvox said:

Are you aware that you fuel our curiosity with terms like that?

Haha, well... I guess there is no reason to keep it secret: we're moving to Perth, Western Australia.

At the moment I am still stuck with zero internet; I am online through my mobile hotspot in roaming mode, so can't really develop anything since DE is 100% cloud-based.
Hoping to get back to normal asap!

On 06/11/2018 at 4:07 AM, Ruvox said:

The new design looks very interesting and is maybe so refreshing thing the game needs. I'm curious to see everything live someday. The new Unobtanium icon remembers me of minerals from StarCraft. Lastly, to be very honest: I don't like how that new green flag looks like but that's just my personal crazy feeling.

Glad you approve of the design!
Regarding the flag: we'll have a discussion about that, but I'd personally prefer it to the old ones!

On 12/11/2018 at 6:00 AM, AntKeeper said:

So the game needs complete re-thinking

This is something we've been doing a lot recently (especially since I can't do any actual development yet ); I am not sure how much will be changed in the initial 2.0 version as we want to keep things backwards compatible for a while, but it is likely that some core features will be adjusted with "more activities for local veterans having large lands" in mind.

I have mentioned it in the past that I do agree our game is just too confusing in the current state; perhaps even "hardcore" in terms of user experience.
So although I do not have answers to all our problems yet, rest assured that we are working on resolving these one at a time.

On 06/11/2018 at 12:11 AM, Grizzlyfilms said:

Have you seen my feedbacks on the IDEA lately?

Yup.
I don't have any comments on them yet as my task list is overflowing (and no actual progress is made on 2.0 development with me being offline), so I'm hesitant to make promises on any secondary features.
But I will respond once I have something to say!

[DSEGTeam]

One question,

once DE2 is released, will our overall progress from DE1, such as current stats, notoriety, leaderboards positions, all our accumulative lands ...etc..xetra,

Will all our time and effort from DE1 be roll compatible with DE2 or will we all have to start DE2 from scratch?

[Grizzlyfilms]

It's all saved.

He told us this before

[DSEGTeam]

Cool thanx..I personally didn't know that..but I yabba Dabba do now!