- Joined
- Jun 1, 2017
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Civilian
Rank: Overlord
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Hey guys,
I want to take the time to clarify some of the issues we were unexpectedly confronted with moments before the planned playtest. We want to maintain a certain level of transparency with our community.
It is bothering us because we had it all carefully planned out, but due to GameSparks changing its pricing without prior announcement along with sudden critical bugs that are out of our reach since it's on GameSparks' end and not ours, development of Mankind Reborn was brought to an abrupt standstill. And consequently, we had to consider other available options within the team. We thought of a few:
That being said, we are going to allow those who supported us financially access to Mankind Reborn. We will grant access to High Command first and branch over to the other donators once we have finished up our web development project, as it's also the platform which will distribute our game keys. We will be stocking the in-game markets with every single item available so that players can quickly re-gear and merk each other out for a few days. It's a little different than what we had planned, but this is the stablest alternative given our current circumstances. During this time, we will be working on building a pitch deck so that we can offer potential investors an excellent presentation of the game while we wait until May to give the new backend platform Epic Games will be releasing a try and see how that goes. It should be the best one supported compared to any other platform.
So, we have decided to just focus on the visual aspects of Mankind Reborn until we get the annoying bits of the backend debacle out of the way. Finishing and adding in new worlds, character design, cosmetics, etcetera.
There is no ETA and considering our poor track record with providing you guys with ETAs, we'll refrain from doing so this time around. It can be a week, it can be a month— we'll give more information as it becomes available but we are working as fast as we possibly can. It all depends on how fast we can switch over to a new GameSparks region and can complete the new user web portal. It's become some sort of waiting game, unfortunately, as most of the things we require in order to go forward are completely out of our hands.
I hope this at least clears up some of the vagueness and uncertainty which surrounded us lately. If you have any questions, please do let us know. Let us know your thoughts in our Discord server or through a thread on the forums. We will answer them to the best of our ability. The entire Mankind Reborn-team is still 110% committed to the project— we are absolutely hell-bent on delivering the best cyberpunk experience we can.
Kind regards,
Necidious and the Mankind Reborn team
I want to take the time to clarify some of the issues we were unexpectedly confronted with moments before the planned playtest. We want to maintain a certain level of transparency with our community.
It is bothering us because we had it all carefully planned out, but due to GameSparks changing its pricing without prior announcement along with sudden critical bugs that are out of our reach since it's on GameSparks' end and not ours, development of Mankind Reborn was brought to an abrupt standstill. And consequently, we had to consider other available options within the team. We thought of a few:
- Stay with GameSparks, wait for a response from them and potentially smash the bugs. Our main concern with this option is that we think GameSparks has become a neglected platform now that it was taken over by Amazon, which is also developing its own "GS 2.0"-platform called GameTech, which is considerably more expensive. So, we assume Amazon is perhaps deliberately shelving its competition.
- Scrap GameSparks entirely and shift over to Playfab, which would effectively result in at least 2-3 months delay in development just to switch the backend code to the new platform.
- Cancel all playtests in order to keep the development going by shifting our focus from backend to visual aesthetics such as level design, etcetera.
- Wait until May 2019 for Epic Games to launch their own online services with data storage and switch over to that.
- Halt development entirely and focus on building pitch decks to present to potential investors we met during GDC in order to try and inject some cash into the project.
That being said, we are going to allow those who supported us financially access to Mankind Reborn. We will grant access to High Command first and branch over to the other donators once we have finished up our web development project, as it's also the platform which will distribute our game keys. We will be stocking the in-game markets with every single item available so that players can quickly re-gear and merk each other out for a few days. It's a little different than what we had planned, but this is the stablest alternative given our current circumstances. During this time, we will be working on building a pitch deck so that we can offer potential investors an excellent presentation of the game while we wait until May to give the new backend platform Epic Games will be releasing a try and see how that goes. It should be the best one supported compared to any other platform.
So, we have decided to just focus on the visual aspects of Mankind Reborn until we get the annoying bits of the backend debacle out of the way. Finishing and adding in new worlds, character design, cosmetics, etcetera.
There is no ETA and considering our poor track record with providing you guys with ETAs, we'll refrain from doing so this time around. It can be a week, it can be a month— we'll give more information as it becomes available but we are working as fast as we possibly can. It all depends on how fast we can switch over to a new GameSparks region and can complete the new user web portal. It's become some sort of waiting game, unfortunately, as most of the things we require in order to go forward are completely out of our hands.
I hope this at least clears up some of the vagueness and uncertainty which surrounded us lately. If you have any questions, please do let us know. Let us know your thoughts in our Discord server or through a thread on the forums. We will answer them to the best of our ability. The entire Mankind Reborn-team is still 110% committed to the project— we are absolutely hell-bent on delivering the best cyberpunk experience we can.
Kind regards,
Necidious and the Mankind Reborn team
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