Each change took a monumental amount of effort and time, delaying work on additional features. To do this we redesigned the core gameplay several times. In an effort to salvage the project we attempted to address the primary problems with the game. However, this greatly damaged company morale, further slowing development speed and progress, which was already slow from the platform we were using. It would have also made more money which would have been put towards development.ĭue to our mistakes, player feedback was understandably negative.
#Clicker heroes bumblebee free
Had we made the game free to play, it would have been more acceptable to our audience. We wanted to try a new monetization model, but doing so with Clicker Heroes 2 was not a wise decision. We even received more than a few death threats. It felt especially offensive to the players who were expecting a complete game. The initial price was too high for many players, but even when we lowered it later on, and had significant sales, the price was always the biggest problem for the players when they reviewed it. Mistake #4: We charged money for a sequel to a free game. Many players simply bought the sequel without any research, expecting a finished game (for an idle game – this means “infinite” content), and they were terribly disappointed. Some who purchased it didn’t know what “Early Access” meant, and it was their first time installing Steam. We should have realized that many players would assume the product was complete before they bought it. It had a few days worth of content at the time we launched it. However, especially considering the game was a sequel, we vastly underestimated how complete the game needed to be for Early Access. We like developing games with a community, and we had felt we had kept the game behind the scenes for long enough and wanted to get real player feedback to validate our game design. Mistake #3: We underestimated how complete the sequel needed to be to launch in Steam Early Access.īefore launch, we were very excited to get the game out to the community so we could start interacting with them and getting feedback. A lot of the new game mechanics were risky decisions, which in the end, turned out to be the wrong choices for our audience. For many players, Clicker Heroes 2 doesn’t resemble Clicker Heroes 1 enough. We did what we felt would be fun, but it is likely we went a little bit too far. When designing it, we weren’t sure how novel we should get.
Mistake #2: Clicker Heroes 2 was too different from Clicker Heroes 1. This noticeably slowed down our development, in part because maintaining CH1 (which is also Flash) took up more of our time than we expected, and CH2 became increasingly difficult to develop. Many high quality development tools that most developers take for granted on other platforms (like Unity or Unreal) just weren’t available for us. We should have started from scratch, with a new platform, or we should have kept the scope as small as we initially planned for.Ī few years later, with a rapidly declining community of Flash game developers, modern tools and supporting products became difficult to find. In retrospect, continuing the larger scope of development with Flash was our biggest hurdle, and possibly our biggest mistake. But we kept with Flash, because we had a reasonable prototype.
We could have started over from scratch, once we realized the scope needed to change. We hired some developers and grew the scope of the project. So we decided to spend a lot more effort on the sequel. It slowly became more clear to us that we had big shoes to fill, and that it would be a challenge for us to live up to expectations. Once we launched CH1 on Steam, we realized how massive the audience would be, and how much revenue we were going to make from the project. At this time, Flash was still a popular development platform for games on the web. For those who aren’t familiar with it, CH1 was written entirely with Adobe Flash. Our ambitions with CH2 were similarly small, and we used CH1 as the project base. At the time, Clicker Heroes 1 (CH1) was still a relatively small, unknown project. In 2014, when we began work on CH2, the idle game genre was still in its infancy.
#Clicker heroes bumblebee series
We are outlining a series of mistakes we made and learned from, and hope our players can forgive us. At release it was the result of 3 years of hard work by a small team of talented developers, designers, and artists.Ĭurrently, the game is not in a state that we are very happy with, and this is mostly a post about what went wrong.
Clicker Heroes 2 (CH2) is an idle game that we released in Steam Early Access on July 16th, 2018.
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