FortressCraft: One Year On

Today the creator of Fotresscraft said down and released a press release looking back on how his life has changed one year on.

“Exactly 365 days ago I released FortressCraft: Chapter 1 onto the Xbox Live Marketplace, and, in doing so, managed to (more or less) single-handedly steer XBLIG down a completely new path.

At the time when FortressCraft was released, 80MSP games were the only games. To consider 240 or 400 was generally considered absolute commercial suicide. (Case in point : Steam Heroes only shipped about 150 copies!)

When FortressCraft was released, it was considered that cross-promotion with the web was useless, that Xbox owners simply didn’t go onto Youtube or gaming websites.

When FortressCraft was released, it was widely held that, if your game wasn’t a Zombie or an Avatar-focussed game, it wouldn’t sell.

It took FortressCraft about a month before it became the highest-grossing XBLIG of all time, knocking I Maed a Gaem With Zombies In It!!!!111 off the top spot – I’ve seen a lot of people claim that it was going to be there forever. (I’ve also seen a lot of people claim FortressCraft would never be beaten, well, that didn’t last more than about 10 months before it was!)

Check out OnekSoft if you want some pretty graphs.

These days, of course, people shout “If it’s not a Minecraft clone, it doesn’t sell!”. What these people fail to realise is the basic fundamentals of writing a game to make money – “Write the game that people want to buy, not the game you want to sell”.

Me, I happened to get lucky. “Set out to write a game to rip off Minecraft and make loads of money”? Seriously, if I had that sort of foresight and clairvoyance, I wouldn’t be sitting here in my PJs, eating cereal, fluffling my cat, and writing this post. It just so happened that the game I wanted to write, and the game people wanted to buy matched up. Hopefully that’ll happen again before I run out of money!

Exactly 1 year ago, I had a highly-paid job in the AAA industry, working on audio code. It annoys me greatly when people say “FortressCraft was only written to create a quick buck”. As I’ve said before, writing a voxel landscape engine is one of those awesome challenges that certain types of people love to overcome. I’m one of those odd people. 😉

I should probably touch on money, actually; as I said, I was very highly paid; having been in the games industry over a decade, and having worked on some of the best respected (i.e. ‘selling’) franchises there are. I certainly didn’t want for money, more for creative freedom. Now, FortressCraft has made a great deal of money, well over $2,000,000. But Microsoft need a cut of that. And so does the tax man. I’ve also (sadly) agreed to a very generous royalty-cut for the team (8 people helped out in total, to differing amounts), so at the end of the day, I actually end up worse off than I was when working full-time – with the added level of stress that if I sit in the garden and watch squirrels, I will actually run out of money quite quickly. Oh, you rascally squirrels, you.

Over the last year, FortressCraft has seen 8 major patches. It would have been 9, but I’m currently moving down from the North of England, back to the Midlands. It’s taking a very long time – I’m not just sticking everything in boxes and dragging it down, I’m going through 20+ years of detritus, and considering if I really want to keep it. Anyone who’s been to my house will know what an epic task this is! I actually have a stack of PSP games and UMD films some 4 feet tall, to take down and trade in. :/

It’s amazing to see how much has been added to the game, looking back. I was going to re-release Version 1 for download, so people can compare, but a few highlights:

• World Generation takes about 6 minutes, down from 2 hours
• Added 32 new blocks
• Added the Workshop, allowing in-game construction of animated mini-blocks
• Added literally billions of world customisation options
• Added a dozen new items as server rewards
• Automated builder and diggers
• Copy-and-paste
• Several game mode
• And each raft of new features was backed up with an optimisation drive, to keep the FPS up 🙁

For a more complete feature list, check out : Feature List. I can barely remember the entire feature list these days, it’s so big.

So where next? Obviously, Zombies and Gun Turrets.“

[Source – Press Release]