Hello everyone, this is possibly the biggest news we’ve ever announced on this project and I really hope you find what is within the post to be good news, and not bad news.
We planned to ask for permission to use the DK IP to EA, we wanted a member of the team’s connection to tell EA at a meeting they were having just a week or two back but sadly the town the meeting was being held in got flooded and they had to post-pone for a week.
While we were waiting wondering what to do, we had large discussions about the future of the game and where it is heading. After long meetings and many options being evaluated we decided that we should not be using Dungeon Keeper’s IP and instead developing a completely new game that does not step on EA’s toes. Reason being is that we believe we have very little chance of obtaining the IP from EA especially considering the Dungeon Keeper MMO coming out and we might be considered as being a project to take attention away from their own DK games.
If we were to get refused permission, it’s very likely EA would put a stop to this project altogether and we would have to shut everything down and lose all progress and work put into the game. This is something we would never want to happen.
Thus starting the design from scratch, coming up with our own ideas and original characters we are able to avoid possible infringement and also have so much more freedom to explore ideas we would of never before due to the fear of trampling some people’s nostalgia.
I hear what you are all thinking.
but Kyle, Dungeons tried to be a Dungeon Keeper game and the game was terrible!
I believe the problem with dungeons was that it deviated too much from the core gameplay, and focused more on prettying up your dungeon than the actual god game aspect of it all. I promise, as the leader for this project, to remain true to the spirit and gameplay of Dungeon Keeper and bring you a game you’d love as much, if not more than EA’s Dungeon Keeper series.
Does this mean the alpha will be delayed?
I doubt it actually, when I said we were starting the design from scratch, we hadn’t started really nailing down on the design properlly yet, we were more of less just implementing a lot of Dungeon Keepers features and tossing around some ideas. Since the decision to change we have been really getting on with design, there is now a dedicated design team all working away who have already came up with so many good ideas it makes me wonder why we never did this before. The story we had started writing out actually contained very little of Dungeon Keepers original plot or elements and was mostly our own doing, on the programming side nothing at all has been lost. Mostly the modelling side is going to be set back a bit, however, not soo much that it is a problem. So no, we still expect alpha to be on track, or at most, to be delayed to Q2 instead of Q1.
What does this mean for all the art assets?
Art assets is the portion of the project hit the hardest in terms of workload. We’re going to have to discard the old models, and a lot of the concept art, even some of the ones of our own characters.
The reasoning for discarding so much is that on WftO we’ve had so many concept artists come and go, they’ve drawn things for us and then took their leave when life becomes busy, a few of them have settled in here and continue to pump out lovely work. but a lot of the work being produced was very inconsistent with other designs and the general art direction we were going for, also not all processes of concept art was being followed. To remedy this I have assigned lead roles to each section of the project, one being the art side. The art side now has a lead concept artist who will oversee all art being produced and ensures it all comes out using the same process and fits well with the universe and the character description.
The modellers can actually modify a lot of their existing models to aid them in the change.
Will the project become commercial?
This is something we are still deciding on, we’re leaning towards more yes, but we don’t want people to think we are in this for the money. We talked about what we would do with the money and everyone agrees on hopefully taking the money to purchase a UE3 license and setting up a studio to create more games. This would mean we could support WftO to a much greater extent and if you really liked how we handled this game, the possibility to play more games made by us.
This is something we really want to hear your voice on as it would directly affect you, the gamer. So please, give your thoughts on this, and the rest of course.
What is going to come of all this?
It may have seemed I answered this question above, but I guess I should summarise.
- Far more creativity and originality from our team
- Complete freedom with our game and what we do with it
- Because of the above things like Steam support can become possible
- Our project will no longer be unwelcome to certain game websites who frown upon copyright infringing games, meaning we have the opportunity to spread the word about our game further and attract more possible team members.
- We can explore ideas we never could before
So we thank you all for supporting the game while it was a Dungeon Keeper game, and we really hope that you will stay and continue to support it as its own game. There’s really no amount of thank you’s we could give for how patient and supportive you people have been through-out our slowest years. I swear I will fill your stockings with so much Dungeon Keeper-like greatness you’ll be crying over how spoiled you are.
Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be focusing on removing our dungeon keeper infringing material from different sites and then spending some time cracking down on our design. You will still get regular development updates.
Until then, stay strong everyone.
-WftO team
![Presenting: The Dumbs [See also: "Dummy Crew"]](http://warfortheoverworld.com/wp-content/gallery/creature-of-the-week/dummy-crew.jpg)
