It’s been almost two weeks since the end of the Kickstarter already and we thought it was about time for an update.
Firstly, the winners of the final stretch goal! Welcome to the game Coptotermes formosanus – Formosan termite!
In the end their victory was marginal!
Over the past few days we have been sorting through all of your Stomt feedback, implementing bug fixes and upgrading to Unreal Engine 4.12. We are also re-working the ant job allocation system so that ants can now ‘steal’ jobs from others, which should increase efficiency and prevent ants from wandering away from tunnel-digging jobs that they have already begun. Additionally we have been tackling issues that have caused long compile times in the code. The next big things on the list are code profiling (finding out which parts are slowing things down and need to be optimized), streamlining path-finding for ants in crowds and making demo builds for both Mac and Linux.
We can confirm that of the £18,087 pledged, £17,385 has been successfully billed, which is fantastic news. For those of you not familiar with Kickstarter, backers are not billed until the project is successful so some payments inevitably fail. We have heard this can be up to 10% of the final amount so we have been very fortunate. Kickstarter will take their fee of £1,590.40, leaving us with £15,794.60 to fuel Empires of the Undergrowth. This will see our lead programmer through 9 months of development and contribute to sending us to Develop Brighton, leaving just enough leftover to buy the cheapest Mac we can find, so we can finally bring the ants to our Apple players.
If you wanted to pledge to Empires of the Undergrowth but were unable to because of issues with Kickstarter’s online payment options, or you were just late to the party, you can still help us out and pick up some of the original backer rewards via paypal. Just head to our Late Backers page: http://www.eotugame.com/paypal/
In other news, we have now set up a subreddit for Empires at https://www.reddit.com/r/eotu/. We are not sure exactly how this will be used yet, and the posting rules are likely to evolve over time. If you want to discuss demo tactics, ants, or even other ant/simulation games, this seems like a good place for people to gather. Note that if you have feedback on the game, especially related to the demo, we would still like you to post it on our Stomt page: https://www.stomt.com/empires-of-the-undergrowth.
Finally we would just like to thank again all of our backers, demo testers, youtubers and other patient fans. You are all antastic.
