Hello everyone! Heart of Darkness has now been out for a while so I thought it was time to do a post-mortem dev diary.
Reception of Heart of Darkness has been really good! Victoria II is one of our smaller franchises but, Heart of Darkness was our highest day one seller expansion ever which makes me really happy! It tells me that our hard work on having games polished and stable on release is working, and that people trust us and don't feel the need to wait for a patch worrying about bugs. Not to say we can't improve more, but I feel like we have come a really long way over the last 3 years. It also tells me that the Victoria fans are extremely loyal, its one of our games with one of the highest player retention rate (how many players of the original game stick around and buy expansions) and a really high average playtime that could put some MMOs to shame
We wanted to try something a little different design wise for Heart of Darkness. Normally we pick something like 6-8 major features as the core of an expansion, this time I decided to instead pick 4 and make them larger. I think this worked really well, something like the crisis system would have been too risky and big to include as part of a normal 8-feature expansion, but because we had more time to spend on each core feature we could tie it in as much as it is now. Either of these targets don't really affect how much time is spent on smaller features and improvements, so we decided early that we wanted to spend a lot of time on AI improvements. This is really hard to market "on the box", but usually very popular among the hardcore fans. I think we made great strides with the AI for HoD, especially diplomatic and naval.
Usually we have a lot more ideas than we can squeeze into the time frame for an expansion, and we keep them around in case we somehow get extra time, or something else goes faster than planned. Many of them also survive to get implemented in later expansions. In A House Divided one such feature was Great Wars which we managed to squeeze in because we got some extra time waiting for a release slot.
For Heart of Darkness we had an idea for re-doing the whole election system and adding in dynamic parties. The idea was to base elections around one major election issue (as an example, the US 1916 election which centered around involvement in the war in Europe), something the player could care directly about and see results depending on who won. We didn’t want to half-ass it though with too little time, so we had to put it back in the idea box. I hope we'll see it pop back up some time in the future
Lastly I am going to thank the beta testers. A project like this is very much a collaborative effort between developers and the beta testers, many who spend as much of their time as we do working on the expansion and help out with finding bugs, balancing the game and submitting extra content, and their only reward is a slew of dubiously funny cat pictures. Thanks guys! We couldn’t do it without you!
Oh, in case people missed it, we have since release produced two patches. One huge one, and one smaller to sort out a crash bug. As far as I know these fixes any bigger issues people have reported, but we always keep an eye out in case of future reports from the community.
Reception of Heart of Darkness has been really good! Victoria II is one of our smaller franchises but, Heart of Darkness was our highest day one seller expansion ever which makes me really happy! It tells me that our hard work on having games polished and stable on release is working, and that people trust us and don't feel the need to wait for a patch worrying about bugs. Not to say we can't improve more, but I feel like we have come a really long way over the last 3 years. It also tells me that the Victoria fans are extremely loyal, its one of our games with one of the highest player retention rate (how many players of the original game stick around and buy expansions) and a really high average playtime that could put some MMOs to shame
We wanted to try something a little different design wise for Heart of Darkness. Normally we pick something like 6-8 major features as the core of an expansion, this time I decided to instead pick 4 and make them larger. I think this worked really well, something like the crisis system would have been too risky and big to include as part of a normal 8-feature expansion, but because we had more time to spend on each core feature we could tie it in as much as it is now. Either of these targets don't really affect how much time is spent on smaller features and improvements, so we decided early that we wanted to spend a lot of time on AI improvements. This is really hard to market "on the box", but usually very popular among the hardcore fans. I think we made great strides with the AI for HoD, especially diplomatic and naval.
Usually we have a lot more ideas than we can squeeze into the time frame for an expansion, and we keep them around in case we somehow get extra time, or something else goes faster than planned. Many of them also survive to get implemented in later expansions. In A House Divided one such feature was Great Wars which we managed to squeeze in because we got some extra time waiting for a release slot.
For Heart of Darkness we had an idea for re-doing the whole election system and adding in dynamic parties. The idea was to base elections around one major election issue (as an example, the US 1916 election which centered around involvement in the war in Europe), something the player could care directly about and see results depending on who won. We didn’t want to half-ass it though with too little time, so we had to put it back in the idea box. I hope we'll see it pop back up some time in the future
Lastly I am going to thank the beta testers. A project like this is very much a collaborative effort between developers and the beta testers, many who spend as much of their time as we do working on the expansion and help out with finding bugs, balancing the game and submitting extra content, and their only reward is a slew of dubiously funny cat pictures. Thanks guys! We couldn’t do it without you!
Oh, in case people missed it, we have since release produced two patches. One huge one, and one smaller to sort out a crash bug. As far as I know these fixes any bigger issues people have reported, but we always keep an eye out in case of future reports from the community.
