We’d like to thank all of you who have downloaded the demo version of Passageway of the Ancients. We appreciate your constructive feedback and are hard at work on implementing your suggestions. After nine years of development, our small team is at the five-yard line in terms of putting the finishing touches on the game.
Development-wise, our main focus right now is enhancing the real-time special/particle effects. Forexample, we want a visual cue that indicates when weapons, armor, and shields receive a stat enhancement or elemental magic bonuses.
In today’s isometric CRPG environment, there’s a tendency to increasingly shrink the size of player characters on screen, which makes the implementation of special effects ever more challenging. You want the effect to be eye-catching and believable, but not totally obscure the detailed texture of the underlying surface.
Above all else, we remain passionately committed to quality in all aspects of the game – from the storyline and graphics to (of course!) the gameplay. Passageway of the Ancients is a large game with 34 levels and numerous story branches, shops, quests, and puzzles, so maintaining quality is a major challenge – but it’s one we take very seriously. We have never believed in words like “mediocre” or “good enough”!
Along those lines, we are especially indebted to Novy Unlimited, which is our marketing firm. They do much more than assist us with our messaging. One of the key services they provide is an in-depth quality control review of the game. In addition to finding the obvious bugs that we somehow managed to overlook, they have also provided excellent guidance on the features that should be included/enhanced in the game, game mechanics, UI, and the flow of the game, etc.
As we continue our march toward launch, we promise to update this blog periodically. Again, thank you for your interest in the world of Aieryon. Your response to the demo has been truly gratifying – not to mention helpful! We greatly appreciate it.
– The Team at Passageway Games