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Heroes of a Broken Land 2 - now available on Early Access

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
https://wingedpixel.com





Now with 3D map:

ss_6758bd0333e6fe0e067772507ff65651ca129139.jpg


ss_d5900c9a88ed567d93b5c7b44f0958edd65b5fb7.jpg


The world has been shattered, destroyed by the corruption of the Wizard Council of old. You are one of the few remaining Wizards, it is your burden to correct the mistakes of the past. Trapped in crystal you cannot act directly, you must gather heroes to your cause and lead them in your quest to restore these broken lands.

Explore an Endless Land
Procedurally generated worlds means an nearly endless adventure. Customize the worlds you explore as small or as large as you desire.

Recruit a Team of Heroes
Manage multiple parties of heroes, recruiting only the best and bravest. Train them in dozens of classes to build the perfect party.

Build and Manage your Town
Build and customize your town to best train and equip your party and attract the most skilled heroes.

Why Early Access?
“Heroes of a Broken Land is epic in scope and needs lots of time to get the core gameplay balanced and the pacing just right. The procedural world has a lot of potential, but also needs time to ensure all worlds are fun worlds.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?
“The plan is for Heroes of a Broken Land 2 to be in early access for approximately a year, but ultimately it will be in early access as long as needed.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?
“The full version have over 36 playable classes, multiple playable character races, multiple dungeon themes and many more unique quests, world locations and events. Many more monsters (20+) will be in the final version.

Features such as cloud save will also be available in the complete version.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?
“The early access version will have a single playable race, a about two dozen classes implemented and a single dungeon theme. The initial number of unique quests and world locations will be limited. The total number of monsters is limited to less than a dozen.”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?
“There is no plan to change the price when we leave early access.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?
“The community will help balance the core features and influence the direction of unfinished an planned features. Including monsters, dungeons, quests and skills.

Discuss design and gameplay in the Steam community discussion forums, or just contact the developer directly at andrew@wingedpixel.com.”
 
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Sentinel

Arcane
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Nov 18, 2015
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Location
Ommadawn
why not put the combat log in the middle of the screen? they obviously dont care about the player seeing anything
 

Contagium

Savant
Patron
Joined
Aug 2, 2018
Messages
477
Location
New Hampshire, USA
I loved the first one. Surprisingly addicting. The constant looping piano tracks nearly drove me to suicide though, hope the music is improved upon for the sequel.

The new maps and graphics overall look really well done! The original character portraits we're depressing.
 

Reinhardt

Arcane
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Repressed Homosexual
Joined
Mar 29, 2010
Messages
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Location
Ottawa, Can.
I loved the first one. Surprisingly addicting. The constant looping piano tracks nearly drove me to suicide though, hope the music is improved upon for the sequel.

The new maps and graphics overall look really well done! The original character portraits we're depressing.

I actually liked the piano tracks.

I'm sorry, I really wanted to like this game, and for the dev to realize his dream game... but, there is no way around the fact that since every single dungeon is randomly generated, every single one of them is pointless because there is no rhyme or reason to the mazes, other than having you fetch items at random places.

Unless there are unique dungeon designs this time, it's not going to be any different. Perhaps they could be inserted among other randomly generated ones meant for fetch quests. They could have puzzles, NPCs, things like that.

The formula simply needs something that will spice it up.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://wingedpixel.com/heroes-of-a-broken-land-2-announcement/

Heroes of a Broken Land 2 Announcement

Heroes of a Broken Land 2 is a procedural epic RPG, combining exploration and dungeon crawling with town building and multiple party management.

It will be available in a “early access” state later in 2019 with a full release planned for sometime in 2020.

Heroes of a Broken Land 2 will feature a procedural world that’s highly customizable. The final version will contain:
  • Over 30 classes, hundreds of skills and 3 playable races
  • Build and customize you own town, dozens of buildings and additions
  • Dozens and dozens of unique quests and adventures that are seamlessly woven into a procedural world
  • Much much more!
Join the discussion here



Watch here for more updates!
 

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Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1006140/discussions/0/1743357605564992331/

It's still a town building dungeon crawling retro-inspired procedural RPG.

However the the core mechanics have changed almost completely. The most visible change after the graphics will be that single character classes are replaced by "job" system, where each character choose up to 3 skill trees.

Also the world and dungeon generation has been rebuilt to allow more variety and quests.

There are many many changes, and I'll be describing the game in more detail over the next few months.
 

WingedPixel

Winged Pixel
Developer
Joined
Apr 27, 2013
Messages
84
Location
Toronto Ontario
I loved the first one. Surprisingly addicting. The constant looping piano tracks nearly drove me to suicide though, hope the music is improved upon for the sequel.

The new maps and graphics overall look really well done! The original character portraits we're depressing.

I actually liked the piano tracks.

The game's music was one of the most divisive opinions about the game. Pure love or hate. I personally liked the piano (duh), but yeah it can get really repetitive in a 2h loop of a single track in large dungeons. The second most divisive part of HOBL1 was character portraits, which was a surprise to me, because personally I mostly don't give a shit about character portraits. But that's easy to fix (just let people change them whenever they way, no building needed.

I'm sorry, I really wanted to like this game, and for the dev to realize his dream game... but, there is no way around the fact that since every single dungeon is randomly generated, every single one of them is pointless because there is no rhyme or reason to the mazes, other than having you fetch items at random places.

Unless there are unique dungeon designs this time, it's not going to be any different. Perhaps they could be inserted among other randomly generated ones meant for fetch quests. They could have puzzles, NPCs, things like that.

The formula simply needs something that will spice it up.

HOBL1 was really limited in dungeon quest design, it was a never ending sequence of random mazes. Some (many? The game has decent Steam reviews...) are okay with that. I think that's because the combat/reward loops were short and that keeps some people happy. For HOBL2 I've rewritten the procedural generation to be quest centric and allow for bespoke content to be interwoven with procedural content. I'm not yet advertising that as a main feature of HOBL2 because I haven't really explored bespoke that avenue much yet, but I have accounted for the possibility.
 
Repressed Homosexual
Joined
Mar 29, 2010
Messages
17,867
Location
Ottawa, Can.
I loved the first one. Surprisingly addicting. The constant looping piano tracks nearly drove me to suicide though, hope the music is improved upon for the sequel.

The new maps and graphics overall look really well done! The original character portraits we're depressing.

I actually liked the piano tracks.

The game's music was one of the most divisive opinions about the game. Pure love or hate. I personally liked the piano (duh), but yeah it can get really repetitive in a 2h loop of a single track in large dungeons. The second most divisive part of HOBL1 was character portraits, which was a surprise to me, because personally I mostly don't give a shit about character portraits. But that's easy to fix (just let people change them whenever they way, no building needed.

I'm sorry, I really wanted to like this game, and for the dev to realize his dream game... but, there is no way around the fact that since every single dungeon is randomly generated, every single one of them is pointless because there is no rhyme or reason to the mazes, other than having you fetch items at random places.

Unless there are unique dungeon designs this time, it's not going to be any different. Perhaps they could be inserted among other randomly generated ones meant for fetch quests. They could have puzzles, NPCs, things like that.

The formula simply needs something that will spice it up.

HOBL1 was really limited in dungeon quest design, it was a never ending sequence of random mazes. Some (many? The game has decent Steam reviews...) are okay with that. I think that's because the combat/reward loops were short and that keeps some people happy. For HOBL2 I've rewritten the procedural generation to be quest centric and allow for bespoke content to be interwoven with procedural content. I'm not yet advertising that as a main feature of HOBL2 because I haven't really explored bespoke that avenue much yet, but I have accounted for the possibility.

I will give 2 a chance if you tell me that really is the case.
 

Mustawd

Guest
Sadly, however nice the dev is, I don't have much faith that he can make the game not mind-numbingly boring, repetitive and generic within a few hours.

HHR is 100% right.

There's probably not a lot of things I would agree with him, but HHR is right on this one

I liked the developer as well, but I just hated how the game played. The dungeons felt copy pasted due to the procedural generation.

I honestly don’t know how people enjoyed it. I wanted to cut my wrists after 24 hrs of playtime. I finally gave up and removed it from my library.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
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Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
HOBL1 post-mortem: https://wingedpixel.com/heroes-of-a-broken-land-2-development-log-1/

Heroes of a Broken Land 2 – Development Log 1

I’m planning on discussing the development of Heroes of a Broken Land 2, covering the various design decisions that go into the game, the work that’s already completed and future development plans.

As this is a sequel I thought I would devote the first few posts to Heroes of a Broken Land 1. Specifically what I think went well, what I think didn’t go so well, and how I plan on addressing the flaws on HOBL1 while keeping the sequel true to the goals of the original game. Let’s start by looking at what I think did or didn’t work in the design.

What went well
A retro blend up of strategic town building, exploration and turn-based dungeon crawling in a procedural world.

Genre Blending
I think the high level design – strategic world map with town building combined with retro styled dungeon crawling was a good overall design. I think I pulled off the mix fairly well, providing a nice break between dungeons with world exploration, and controlling character development through town building gave the player a good feel of progression and control. I think multi-party dungeons also brought a unique twist to the game the few dungeon crawlers have tried.

Simply put I’m pretty proud of the game as a whole that was developed. I think it was innovative and interesting and am personally quite happy with what I was able to accomplish as a solo indie developer.

Streamlined Gameplay
While HOBL1 was inspired by the “games of old” I wanted to modernize the interface and remove tedious time sinks. Some examples of this are the global inventory, shared between multiple parties to avoid the tedium of returning to town after each dungeon. The auto-movement and auto-exit dungeons when cleared options from the mini map helped remove some pointless activities.

I tried to not waste people’s time so they could focus on the fun and interesting parts of the game. I think I achieved this and kept the “retro” feel while modernizing the UI.

Combat Pacing
I think I nailed the combat pacing. For the most part battles were quick but deadly, you had to think about your next action, but not too much. I knew there would be lots of combat in this game and I didn’t want each battle to become a long slog. This also carried over into the decision to have almost all attacks auto target based on player and monster position. That decision was a bit divisive, but I think it worked out well and kept combat moving fast.

Main Gameplay Loop
Basically the following sequence of activities was fun:
  1. Explore World
  2. Find Dungeon
  3. Loot Dungeon
  4. Upgrade Town
  5. Upgrade Heroes
  6. Repeat
Each activity wasn’t too long or too tedious or too complicated. This was core to making the game engaging and was really the result of hundreds of small design decisions made through development.
What didn’t go well
Mid/Late Game Balance
A lot of what I think went well above started to fall apart later in the game. Some of the fundamental rules and mechanics didn’t scale properly. Monsters got stronger faster than characters, this worked at lower levels because hero equipment would even the stats but equipment stopped scaling too early. This wasn’t the only issue, melee didn’t scale as well as magic making certain builds weaker over time. The result is the pace slowed down at higher levels, which wasn’t intended.

The whole class system kind of fell apart too. Letting heroes learn any skill via skill books was fine, it’s fun to upgrade your heroes. However letting heroes to learn any skill without limitationbasically broke the class system where eventually you could afford to learn any skill for anyone. This meant that as heroes increased in level they tended to generalize rather than specialize.

Repetition
The game is quite repetitive.

While the individual steps of the gameplay loop were basically fun and well tuned you still repeated them a lot, and they didn’t really change that much. A patch released about a year after the launch of HOBL (version 1.10) brought a ton of new monsters and some other content reducing the obvious repetitiveness of fighting 100 rats, but really if you played enough you’d have seen everything eventually. Many other games do have this same issue, and if the core gameplay is engaging enough this doesn’t really matter, it’s still less than ideal and detracts from the overall experience.

Procedural generation was meant to help reduce the repetitive feel by creating unique worlds and different dungeons play. But at some level it’s essentially generating more of the same. Some fault lies at the limited content – there were only 3 or 4 types of dungeon art, so everything was bound to look similar, but the generation algorithms were limited and were basically generating very similar mazes each time.

Quests and Narrative
HOBL was a very mechanical game. There wasn’t much story other than the intro and a handful of quests. Sure there were some special dungeons and a few unique encounters, but they didn’t really show up until the endgame.

Without a higher level narrative or even strong theme tying together much of the game it can make much of the gameplay feel pointless to the player. Sure, there were some limited world events (little stories and mini-quests) that would pop up and provide some text and such but they were also quite limited. Almost all of these quests ended up as a “go and kill everyone” dungeon crawl. There were some reasons for this, some technical and some due to limited time and resources, but ultimately the reasons doesn’t matter: Narrative was a weak point of the game.

The unfortunate result is much of the gameplay loop lacked any non-mechanical purpose. No plot progression, no character revelation, no unfolding story. For many people that play RPGs the story is a big part and HOBL1 failed to deliver in this regard.

Game Length and World Size
So one nice thing about a procedural generated world is you can make it any size you want. One of my original goals for HOBL1 was to enable the creation of small game so you could finish a complete RPG in a a 4-6 hours instead of 20+ hours. The problem with this goal is I never really tested it until most of the game was completed and I was happy with the pace and core mechanics.

Then I tried a small map.

10 hours later I had to go to bed and was nowhere near completing the game. Not even close.

Shit.

So that was a total failure.

Sure if you like 20-100+ hour games HOBL can still be a great experience, but the start-to-finish pace was totally broken. It was also at that stage in development almost impossible to fix without re-doing so much work, especially since I was quite happy with the dungeon crawling and combat pacing.

Also, I’d like to point out that if you’re a solo game developer testing a game that takes 20 hour or more to complete is a daunting task.

Next?
So that’s enough rambling for now. Next post I’ll discuss whether I consider HOBL1 a success or not, and talk a bit about it’s development highs and low and even the almighty $$$
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
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Codex 2014
Money talk: https://wingedpixel.com/development-log-2-was-heroes-of-a-broken-land-a-success/

Development Log 2 – Was Heroes of a Broken Land a Success?

After breaking down what I think was successful and what wasn’t in HOBL’s design I’d like to take a look at whether HOBL1 was successful as a product. Regardless of how I feel about the project personally, it was meant to be a profitable game that would enable me to work as a full time indie game developer. The simple answer is that HOBL1 didn’t enable me to do so and therefore HOBL1 was a failure as a game product.

I still think it’s interesting to look deeper into why and how it was a failure, because it’s not as simple as “not enough sales”. I also think these stories help inform other indie developers and can help future developers know if a project will be successful or not.

Show me the money!
Let’s get right to the point: Heroes of a Broken has earned $62,039.10 Canadian Dollars in net revenue since it was first available for pre-purchase in April 2013 (it was officially launched in January 2014).

This is number after the resellers (such as Steam) take their cut, but doesn’t include development expenses. Development expenses were about $6,000 to $12000, the exact number depends on whether you want to consider direct expenses only (art & sound) or other stuff like business setup costs, software, hardware, etc. These expenses do not include my time or living expenses. This results in income just over $50,000 CAD.

Where did the money come from?

Sales by Platform

You can see that Steam pretty much dwarfs all other sources. I find it interesting that direct sales are #2 given my lack of marketing or advertising my direct sales channel very well.

My records show 12,454 copies of HOBL1 sold in total. Steam’s current numbers are 15,240total copies, with 10,715 being direct Steam sales. The rest (4,525) are Steam key activations, most copies sold outside Steam came with a Steam key. The average price of a copy sold was $4.98, about a third of the $14.99 full price of the game.

What’s the problem then?
Now $50,000 isn’t terrible money, it’s an okay income in many places. If I lived in rural China I’d be pretty wealthy! However where I lived at the time (Toronto) the average family income is $82,859. So it’s not a great income to support a family with, but a decent income as a single earner. It’s much less than I’d make as a full time programmer at a game studio, but given the freedom it might be worth the pay cut.

One obvious issue is this is $50,000 over 5 years. Now that doesn’t sound that great anymore. I had set aside about one years of living expenses to develop this project and it had taken a full year to make, so I was running out of money by the time HOBL1 launched.

Lets take a look at how the sales were distributed over time:


Sales over time

Wow Steam is a big deal, isn’t it?

It took almost 8 months from the launch day until it was available on Steam. Back in the day (early 2014) not every game was simply made available on Steam. There was a curated queue of Steam Greenlight games, and at the time only a few dozen would be added each month. So while sales picked up a lot once available on Steam, it took a really long time to get there.

2 months after launch you can see the income drops to almost zero. When your development funds have been spent and your sales dry up, you’re not left with a whole lot of choice. This type of cash flow problem is common for small businesses. At this point I decided to stop full time indie development and started looking for a job.

Lessons to be learnt
I don’t have any regrets about how HOBL1 went – I’m happy with the game, and I never expected my first full time game attempt to be a giant success, but I did hope it would be able to sustain me while.

Looking back I sometimes wonder, did I do something wrong? Could I have done something differently? Had I known HOBL1 would have done that well on Steam, would I have held out? Who knows. The past is past and the industry changes too fast for the specifics of launching my now 5 year old game to matter much.

What did I learn from this? A million small lessons in business and game design that are hard to summarize in a blog post.

Nevertheless here are some quick TL;DR points on why HOBL1 didn’t make me rich and what I could do better:
  • HOBL1 wasn’t cool enough to be picked up by social media.
    • This is a combination of developer story (I’m boring), look of the game (it’s not terrible, but not amazing) and lack of exposure (I was new to the indie dev scene, nobody cared about me or my games)
  • HOBL1 is in a poor market that will never (regularly) see great success
    • Turn-based first-person dungeon crawlers died 20 years ago. Legend of Grimlock was a fluke not a rebirth of the genre.
  • I suck at marketing and new to entrepreneurship
    • You can’t ignore it and you can’t ignore advertising even if you don’t want to do it
    • Creating HOBL1 in the first place is proof I suck at marketing because I chose to enter the minuscule market that is retro first-person dungeon crawlers
  • Don’t spend 12 months on what should be a 6 month game, it’s bad for your wallet
What does this have to do with HOBL2?
Quitting full-time development is the main reason HOBL2 has taken so long come together. Part-time development can be a very slow process, but full-time development is too expensive and risky for me to want to attempt again at the moment. As long as you are patient and tenacious enough part-time is much less stressful.

Since the numbers from HOBL1 aren’t terrible, and there seem to be a reasonable number of people who enjoyed the game, I think a sequel has a chance for success. I feel if the game was a bit tighter, more polished, marketed and available more widely from day one it could have been successful. I hope to take my failures with HOBL1 as lessons learned and apply them in HOBL2. However the indie game scene has changed so much in 5 years it hard to say what lessons learned are still relevant.

But Enough about money, the next post will be about how I plan on addressing the design issues from HOBL1 in HOBL2.
 
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Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
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Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Kinda strange post. Bullet point list with a bunch of factors you have no control over --> "But if I made it tighter it might have been successful!"

Holy crap dude it's almost certainly going to sell even less than the first one. If the game isn't a pure labor of love and your goal is to actually make money here then this is a suicide march.

Vault Dweller
 
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Kruno

Arcane
Patron
Village Idiot Zionist Agent Shitposter
Joined
Jan 2, 2012
Messages
11,478
Please add gender bending as a skill. ROTFLMFAO!!!111

Looks good btw. I hope the RPG elements are significantly strengthened.
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
Lessons to be learnt
I don’t have any regrets about how HOBL1 went – I’m happy with the game, and I never expected my first full time game attempt to be a giant success, but I did hope it would be able to sustain me while.

Looking back I sometimes wonder, did I do something wrong? Could I have done something differently? Had I known HOBL1 would have done that well on Steam, would I have held out? Who knows. The past is past and the industry changes too fast for the specifics of launching my now 5 year old game to matter much.

What did I learn from this? A million small lessons in business and game design that are hard to summarize in a blog post.

Nevertheless here are some quick TL;DR points on why HOBL1 didn’t make me rich and what I could do better:
  • HOBL1 wasn’t cool enough to be picked up by social media.
    • This is a combination of developer story (I’m boring), look of the game (it’s not terrible, but not amazing) and lack of exposure (I was new to the indie dev scene, nobody cared about me or my games)
  • HOBL1 is in a poor market that will never (regularly) see great success
    • Turn-based first-person dungeon crawlers died 20 years ago. Legend of Grimlock was a fluke not a rebirth of the genre.
  • I suck at marketing and new to entrepreneurship
    • You can’t ignore it and you can’t ignore advertising even if you don’t want to do it
    • Creating HOBL1 in the first place is proof I suck at marketing because I chose to enter the minuscule market that is retro first-person dungeon crawlers
  • Don’t spend 12 months on what should be a 6 month game, it’s bad for your wallet
- It's a great market and you can do a lot better than 15k copies. While the success of the first Grimrock game was a combination of many factors one can't replicate today (including selling 400,000 keys in a bundle), the second game's sales - much lower but very impressive still - shows you the size of the market (and what a glorious market it is).
- Your game wasn't picked up by the media because you didn't promote it. Simple as that. If you want to do well, you have to get better at it.
- Creating HOBL1 in the first place was proof that you have what it takes to make an RPG (meaning to see a project through to completion which is a no small feat). Think of it this way: you've learned A LOT about game design and gaming industry and got paid 50k in the process. Now you get to do it all over again and most likely you'll do much better. The only question is how much better.
- Take as many extra months as you can and then some. It's not a race and each extra month will add improvements that will make a difference.

Since the numbers from HOBL1 aren’t terrible, and there seem to be a reasonable number of people who enjoyed the game, I think a sequel has a chance for success. I feel if the game was a bit tighter, more polished, marketed and available more widely from day one it could have been successful. I hope to take my failures with HOBL1 as lessons learned and apply them in HOBL2. However the indie game scene has changed so much in 5 years it hard to say what lessons learned are still relevant.
The sequel has a chance to succeed but it's a small chance. I'd drop the name and ties to the first game (if you hope to go well beyond of what the first game sold, don't shoot yourself in the foot by offering a sequel to a bigger audience that didn't play the first game). Hypothetically speaking, if we were to make a sequel to Colony Ship, we wouldn't call it Colony Ship 2. We aren't AAA and we aren't building a franchise here. Neither are you.
 
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