Alpha 9.1
The Alpha 9 Diplomacy Update launch has gone over quite well, so here is just one minor update that fixes a handful of annoying issues and finally adds the Italian community translation!
Fixed Bugs
- Fixed “No Translation” in wishes for rugs
- Fixed a bug where not all rugs properly completed the rug wish
- Fixed a bug where colonists wouldn’t recognize their bedroom as “theirs” if someone else owned a weapon rack in the same room
- Balanced cob wall, making it more expensive and less strong
- Fixed a bug where you couldn’t place hedge corners properly
- Fixed a bug where the forge could clip through walls
- Fixed a bug where the “josa” in the Korean translation was all messed up
Changes in the Development Team
We have been developing Founders’ Fortune full time as a 2-man team for 7 months now. During all this time, we’ve been sharing all the demos and updates with our community. In June 2019 Founders’ Fortune was first actually for sale and since July it’s also available on Steam.
Now, in September, we’re at a crossroads: If you’ve been following us for a long time, you may know that René (RobotK), the artist, actually studied elementary school teaching, not game development. With the new school year starting this September he had to make a very difficult decision: Start the teacher’s apprenticeship (2 years) to finish his degree or continue working on Founders’ Fortune full time. After many sleepless nights and realizing that he can’t have 2 full time jobs, René came to the conclusion to finish his teaching degree – even though he loves developing Founders’ Fortune as well as teaching.
So that’s why this week, René is leaving full time development of Founders’ Fortune. Instead, he is planning to contribute to the project on the side, whenever time allows. This was a hard decision and René will give some more insights into his perspective in a forum post soon. 🙂
We’ve all made our peace with this change and the future of Founders’ Fortune is safe, too. Read on to learn more.
The Future of Founders’ Fortune Development
We’ve developed games on and off on the side for 8 years now, so we’re no strangers to evening and weekend work. Nevertheless, it’s obvious that part-time work can not be as productive as full time work.
That’s why we’re planning to hire an artist to fill René’s role in the future. The sales of Founders’ Fortune have been decent and after long deliberation, we decided it’s ok to take the risk and use the funds to pay another team member.
To this end, I’m going to move to a larger city, probably Munich. This is the city I studied computer science in, and I think we should be able to find both office space and a good pool of skilled candidates there to keep Founders’ Fortune going strong.
This process is going to take time. I’m going to keep working on Founders’ Fortune during the move, but finding an office and an apartment, moving the furniture, hiring and training an artist will take a lot of time. First, the development focus will be on simple and obvious improvements to the game as well as adding all of René’s Assets that are not yet unlockable in Alpha 9, so it’s ok to continue a few months without a dedicated artist. Nevertheless, you’ll have to be a bit more patient than usual with big content updates as we will need some time to get back up to speed.
Conclusion
We want to thank everybody who’s been along with us on this ride thus far. Founders’ Fortune has grown bigger than we expected and part of that is thanks to all of your feedback. Some people may worry about future development, but you don’t need to.
From the beginning, on every store Founders’ Fortune sold, we’ve been saying “development is going to continue until sometime between September 2019 and September 2020”. We are glad to announce that with this plan, development can continue well beyond September 2019, in fact it looks like we will be able to reach Summer 2020. We’re looking forward to releasing the next updates for you 🙂
