Greeting Dragons,
As you know, we do not have a dev blog this month as we are all hands on deck working hard on the Open Beta release coming next month in July (confirmed). With the release of the Beta, it brings with it a new era for Day of Dragons, a completely new and different game than the Alpha, built on a different version of UE4, with many new features, optimizations, and feel. That said, when the Beta releases next month, the old Alpha will be deprecated and no longer available or playable. In it's place will be the new Beta version of Day of Dragons which we have spent the past 20 months since our very successful Kickstarter campaign building from the ground up. It's the reason the Alpha has not been updated in over a year, because we deprecated it, and replaced it with the Beta. I say that because there is a lot of confusion concerning the Alpha. The Alpha was a passion project, the work of one person trying to do it all himself with absolutely no funding, then pitched his idea on Kickstarter hoping to raise $12k to hire someone to make 3 simple models with the hope that after enough time, the game would self-fund itself to where more custom content could be made and added. But Kickstarter didn't raise $12k, it raised over $500k, which enabled us to make a much higher quality and custom game from the ground up than the Alpha was ever planned to be. The funding enabled us to make Day of Dragons the way it was dreamed to be! (Thank you Kickstarters!) Being that we had the funding, there was no reason to spend any more precious time on updating the Alpha, and so we put all of our time into building the Beta, which is so much better than the Alpha in every way. Once you play the Beta, you would never want to touch the Alpha again, the difference is like night and day.
The Day of Dragons Beta is the accumulation of 20 months of hard (funded) work by our small team of developers to bring to you all the promise we made during our Kickstarter campaign, a dragon survival game like no other. We have used the funding to design and create our own models, sounds, animations, mechanics, effects, music, UI, and code - just as we said we would - and have proven the naysayers on YouTube all wrong. We didn't do what they accused us of doing, we didn't do what they said we'd do, we did exactly what we promised we'd do, we made a dragon survival game from the ground up using the funding our backers supported us with - and we're just getting started! It's only been 20 months and we have made tremendous progress! Most games take over 5 years and millions of dollars to finish. We're by no means finished yet, we have A LOT MORE planned for Day of Dragons, just look at our new Roadmap on Trello. But we have come along ways from a Kickstarter demo to a fully functioning game in just 20 months, and I want to thank our dev team for working so hard these past 20 months to get us to the Beta stage.
Day of Dragons has the goal to bring you something truly special, a game where you literally feel like you are the dragon. A game where you can roleplay, a game where you can PvE or PvP, a game with quests, AI boss fights, alpha class progression, secret unlockables, exploration, clans, and the most amazing physics-based flight system you will have ever have experienced in any survival game! The flight is beawesome! We offer server communities the tools to host their own dedicated servers, with custom configuration options to help server admins create the environment they want with the rules they want for their world - and our servers are very stable, highly optimized with very little lag able to host up to 100 players with no issues. We also provide server owners an intuitive admin panel for server admins which makes managing your server communities very easy - and all of that will be available to you next month with the release of the Open Beta as you will be able to host your own Day of Dragons Beta servers. If you want to rent a server, we highly recommend Nodecraft and have been working closely with their team to ensure Day of Dragons server hosting is fully supported.
We have so much planned for Day of Dragons, our devs love our game and we love our community. I hope you are all as excited as we are for the Day of Dragons Open Beta scheduled for release in July (Kickstarters with Beta Access perk will get it a week early). We are passionate about our game, we have goals, we have plans, and we have the vision. Day of Dragons is the Dragon survival game you have all been waiting for - and we are going to prove it to you starting with the Open Beta as we introduce to you all our first flyable dragon (and first starter dragon) the Shadow Scale available to everyone with the Open Beta release in July!
We hope to fly with you all soon!
- Jonathan Slabaugh, Lead Developer for Day of Dragons