I crowd funded on Kickstarter a year ago at the ‘Lord’ level. I have just recently been sent a verification email, (at my request) and have gone through the forum ‘tutorial’ and tried to login on the website but the login link in the top right corner of the ancient-cities.com website just points to a blank page. This whole process is very cumbersome and quite annoying compared to any other game forum or login link. You guys are trying to recreate the wheel for absolutely no reason. I hope that the game development is progressing and we can soon enjoy what we paid for. At the ‘Lord’ backer level, I understand that I will have closed beta-access. At this point I am skeptical, as the website login is broken, the forum is basic, and I haven’t been replied to in over a year, thanking me for funding the project with over $100CDN, or been given a single email confirming my backing and maybe notifying me when things might happen. I hope you prove my skepticism wrong.
As I am a developer know these kind of situations, the main goal is important everything else are not, and what is beginning with development that is hard, painful and sux. But I have to agree with Doyle an, you should or have to give us info, printscreen, small updates etc. I think everybody knows how important are the customers, we all are customers, your customers, who are waiting now for a long time, and you can cheer us up with just small info, or minor improvements.
There is a forum labeled official updates, there is also a VIP-access sub-forum, which sometimes goes into further detail / has standalone content.
They have also stated many times the best way to get consistent updates is their twitter
All important news will be posted in our twitter for the upcoming months.
Please, follow us there to be updated, ask questions or make suggestions!
https://twitter.com/_AncientCities
Everyone can do better and ultimately feedback should always be appreciated. And I agree with user52…, I think more clarity in updates / emailed notifications every now and then would be good. However, I still believe the developer’s priority should be making a good game first. I think there is a plethora of information throughout the forums, while it may not be the most easily accessible, it is there for those who search.
Agreed, it’s not that I’m expecting to be part of the team or be given a gold watch, I’m just expecting that when I send $100CDN, I am hoping that you acknowledge that you received it. When you tell us on the kickstarter page that we will be given forum access, but after a year I haven’t received a verification email and I have to ask for it. That raises questions in my mind. I know everyone has different ideas about how things should be done, you guys want to only update via twitter, I actually don’t care, just that the backers receive some sort of response. I want you to spend more time developing the game than celebrating your backers, just don’t leave us completely in the dark. I believe many of the people who decided to spend money on a project, have spent many hours playing games in this genre and aren’t just typical childish gamers expecting things for free. We’d like to take part in the closed beta when it happens and provide solid feedback for you. I have been a part of the ‘Factorio’ alpha and they have done many things right when it comes to bug reporting and their supporters’ feedback. 3,000 heads are better than 2. There will be things missed by a small team because everyone plays differently. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for the development team to properly respond to a group of backers that have given you hundreds of thousands of dollars in good faith.
Both of these links either say ‘access denied’ when I am logged into the forum. Or says ‘OOPS, That page is private’
Well I’m logged into the forum!
The login link on the website is broken!
I Can’t Login in Firefox since 1. May 2019 (Blank Page after Login). I use Chrome for this Forum now.
I hope that will be fixed.
Hi!
Both links work just fine for me. Perhaps you should try with another browser?
Re development info, although I do check the weekly newsletter the forum sends out, I have found their twitter account to be the most informative.
The dev posted an update in March here explaining why development has been delayed. To cut a long story short, the main reason it has been delayed is because they decided to create their own in house engine. I can understand your frustration but I think the general consensous on the forums is that people are happy with how the game is progressing and will gladly wait until the devs think the game is good enough to be released. I am hoping that a beta drops during the summer.
If you still can’t access the link, here is their post.
Let us address concerns about the development delay and the reasons behind it.
Originally we intended to release the game in 2018. It’s clear that this has not been the case.
AC is a very complex project, way more than we anticipated. We acknowledge the initial optimism we had about being able to complete the project in 2 years. Not anymore.
Yet we have been working full time and very hard, 2 years has been not enough.
We failed our initial estimation, mainly because we never faced a project this big, but also because we want to do it well and because it has grow bigger than initially planned.To have a more clear view of the costs of indie projects of similar scope:
-“Banished” took 4 years to be developed.
-“Before” recently announced its was cancelled after 5 years.
-“The Universim” has been in development for more than 5 years
This doesn’t excuse our miscalculation, but it makes a point about people who claims that 2 years is like Duke Nuken Forever. It’s not. The 2 years we have been working doesn’t look too much when compared to these figures.Of course we keep track about the time employed to be able to accurately predict costs of feature development. This track shows 2 main reasons for the delay:
The first one has been the decision to build an in house engine for the game:
Even worse, a state of the art engine. Literally we are working in 2 big projects at the same time.
The engine alone has taken more than half of the development time, and it still need work almost each time we want to add a new feature that includes graphics. To keep it optimised, streamlined and working with different GPUs and drivers is a very time consuming endeavour. At this point it’s reasonable to ask if the decision was the right one. We knew we were choosing the difficult route here, and we were aware it will consume lot of time. We just don’t expected it to take so much. It’s clearly impacting a lot our initial time schedule but we still think it’s a good decision for the long run, and AC is being built for the long run.The second reason is that the project has grown “a bit” over what we initially planned.
This is related to the platform idea we have in our minds. Because we want to be able to expand the game after its release and to continue building over it we are designing and implementing it with extreme care, preparing it to be moddable and expandable. This complicates the process and leads to frequent refactoring. Yet we originally planned to be more lax code wise for the first release, we realised that could lead to grip the project in the future, forcing a complete rebuild for next expansions. Our experience in pass jobs tell us that rebuilding when a project has been deployed and content has been added is just too tough if realistic at all. So we consider it’s better to take a bit more care now to move softly later even if that pushes the release date even more.We want to make clear that we continue to be fully committed to the project.
It will take longer but we will get there.Our current plan is to release, or at least to reach the beta stage, at some point along this year.
We still don’t have a settled date for it and we will not announce one until we can be completely positive about it because we don’t want to be in a position where we have to push back another announced date.We hope you all understand the reasons behind the delay and we ask for a bit of patience.
We know very well that we are working on this project thanks to you. We will keep this very well in mind in the future to compensate the delay and to make you don’t regret trusting us.
I am becoming very skeptical as well. Although I didn’t pledge at Lord level, it is soon two years ago that I pledged on Indiegogo. The expected delivery was in Dec 2018, and we’ve heard next to nothing about the development of this project.
Website and Log in problems are caused by browser changes and should never worry any one as close to 5,000 of us have little to no problem with the web site.
My guess and hope is that 99% of the process of funding with respect to welcome email and or form permissions is also caned as if AC pays any attention to individual pledges of $100 or for that matter $5,000 the project may never be complete so I would not be overly worried or critical in this area.
One good sign is a April 5 th post asking for help in translations.
This would seem to indicate we are getting closer to a beta release but don’t hold your breath normal software release dates on systems of this size and complexity will typical slip two or three times 40 years experience says a 18 month projected project normal takes 27-36 months.
The developers have gained in wisdom they are no longer giving us a projected release date this is smart they will wait till they are 90% sure they will meet there next release date in other words my guess is within the next 4 months they will give us a new release date of 3 months. (this will slip 30 days) so based on what seems to be very sound judgement on there parts to release a stable platform I do not think there is any reason to worry until mid 2020.
In Short
We believe in you AC take your time you will prevail and provide us with a great game
Let me be clear, my main concern is that up until I emailed support directly a week ago, I had zero idea if uncasualgames received my pledge. I hadn’t received a forum link or password, or acknowledgement of any kind for over a year. Once I initiated contact, everything has now been unlocked, I can login on the website, access the vip forum, etc… The past has passed and all is copacetic. I have been following the progress of development on twitter and see that things are progressing well and I don’t see delays as unusual. I did have concerns about lack of contact and information, and that was not due to computer or browser issues, it was because of the way this entire forum and website design has been implemented. I am confident the developers continue working hard on what seems will be a fantastic final product, I am glad my issues have now been resolved, and quickly. I am also glad it seems the development team are paying attention to their supporters.
We don’t have any problems with the ‘Login’ button with latest versions of Firefox (both Windows and Linux)
Maybe the problem exists with some extension like ‘privacy badger’ that could prevent the forum to load correctly.
Please try to deactivate temporally any suspicious extension that would be interfering with the forum and let us know.
I’ve had the same ‘problem’ earlier, also when using VPN etc., which disappears whenever I disconnect it and then reload the website/forum without any extensions.
In other words, give it a try. 