Frozenbyte

I know that this sounds like a weird post but; Yep just like the title say, i realieve believe people should be more happy with this type of developers that make good games, with good music, good mechanics and dont aim to being the next great big thing.
There is a dignity in being modest and knowing your potential and also your limit,.

I believe i will continuisly buying Trine franchise as long as they keep puting out a dscent game without microtransactions with only 1 DLC max per game even if the gameplay does not evolve a lot, i did respect them.

With all the situation in most of the gaming enviroment, full of microtransanctions, full of "we are the next big thing" (starfield, no man sky etc etc,) or false advertising, full of paid cosmetics or stupid ideas like linking account to PSN like with helldivers. i will say:

There is beauty in simplicity sometimes.

Hi everyone!

This is Frozenbyte, creators of Trine, Has-Been Heroes and most recently, Nine Parchments. We are an independent game developer from Helsinki, Finland. Nine Parchments is (by coincidence!) our 9th title, and with it we return to the Trine world.

Game is set to release tomorrow, 5th Dec on Nintendo Switch US/EU and Steam Worldwide, and Switch Japan on 7th. PS4/Xbox One will follow at a later announced date.

Check out for Nine Parchments, and Frozenbyte , and . We have also compiled photos/videos from our development journey with the game .

Participating today are following Frozenbyteans:

• - Charlotta, Art Director of Nine Parchments

• - Lead Writer of Nine Parchments

• - Tia, Console Programmer in Nine Parchments

• - Ella, Community Manager

• - Kai, Marketing Manager

• - Joel, Vice President of Frozenbyte

• - and me, Lauri, designer of Nine Parchments and CEO of Frozenbyte

We are here to answer any questions related to Nine Parchments or our other games, or game development in general!

Edit: It's time for us to call it nights! We will however return in (our) morning to answer any unanswered questions, so when this post is around 16 hours old we should be back to answer anything we missed. Thank you everyone, it's been an amazing evening, and your questions and feedback have really made the day and the launch wait easier for us too, we're super excited to launch Nine Parchments tomorrow! :)

Hello,

We are a few members of the company called Frozenbyte, currently running the party central.

Basically we are just trine 2 make it and mostly everything else awesome and would be cool to get some feedback or random questions.

mbace = Marketing Dude, laurifb = CEO with soul,
JoelFB = VP of excellence, niinafb = Director of the moneys

Hello,

I made a post awhile back asking for updates and also stating there are many of us holding on for dear life. I may be in the minority, but I don't want to see this game fall off the map any further.

Is there any planned dates, milestones or information being prepared to share with the public?

Thank you in advance!

Hello and good afternoon,

This post is directed towards Frozenbyte in hopes that we can get an update on the game. Its obvious there has been a decline in the active number of players over the months. However there are still many of us clinging to this game in hopes that Frozenbyte is able to pull it out of the hole its in.

The silence on the direction of the game has been a frequent question amongst the community for months now. We have yet to have an official address from Frozenbyte communicating to its player base the direction for the game.

There was a recent post stating that development will slowly resume "paraphrasing here", but nothing from Frozenbyte if an official capacity.

My hope is that someone from Frozenbyte will see this, and give something back to its players that are clinging to this game. There aren't many of us left, and those of us that are still here would love to hear from ya'll.

Communication of any kind will be much better than the perpetual silence we have seen to this point.

I want to start off by saying I am very excited to play Starbase and regardless if my ideas are heeded or not, I will still play it.

I know its a wall of text. TL;DR at the bottom.

I have a vast amount of experience with many MMOs and survival "MMOs", such as Space Engineers, EVE, Star Citizen, and Atlas (if you want to count that), among some others.

This post is to point out some of the shortcomings of other games that I hope Starbase does not fall into, as it is not even in EA yet, it still has a chance to avoid some of the big issues that plagued other similar games.

Space Engineers

1. Unable to play with more than 4 or 5 people effectively. The game essentially becomes unplayable for many multiplayer servers once you start getting more and more objects into the world. Even if they are not fighting it gets pretty bad. This is probably my biggest concern by far as it will severely hinder this game straight out of the gate on launch day onto EA.

2. Extremely long time in EA, although they are good about communication about updates and such Keen has had SE in EA for so long at this point, many players joke it may never actually come out of it.

3. Buggy mess, even after so long in EA it is still saddled by some of the same issues it has had for years. I know players that have quit because of small bugs that have never been fixed that hindered their fun.

EVE

1. Poor new player experience. EVE has an extremely high learning curve starting out. New players have to learn quite a bit in a short period or the harsh reality of EVEs first rule will come bearing down on them. Yes they have improved it quite a bit over the years, but I still feel it could give players a much better NPE.

2. Slow combat. Yes EVE is from an entirely different era of gaming, but todays combat is expected to be fluid and fast paced. Even without TiDi it is still pretty slow compared to more modern space games. This will scare off new players that are seeking that rush of excitement in quick bursts, rather than a marathon they may not have time for.

Atlas (admittedly not a space game, but it has many of the same features and it released into EA recently)

1. Terrible Launch day performance. I have been through at least a dozen launch days for various MMOs and honestly most of them are not great, but some are worse than others. Atlas has had one of the worst I have seen in a long long time.

   1. They crammed 15,000 players into about 25 zones that even today have issues when more than 20 people are in the same zone. This lead to them opening up other spawn areas so players could spawn there instead until things settled down. It was too late, the damage to the games reputation was done. It has yet to recover.

   2. Many players couldn't even get into the game to play, so a good number just refunded the game and never gave it a second look.

2. The Devs do not listen to player feedback about important issues. Sometimes they do, but in terms of the big picture of what players want, they are going completely against the players and are losing people quickly. They continue development on new things when there are existing game play mechanics that need fixing or are not fun.

Please Frozenbyte, do not fall into the same traps that so many before you have. I want this game to succeed where so many others have failed.

TL;DR: Launch day onto EA is an extremely important day and will set the tone for the entire lifetime of this game. Do not take it lightly and make sure your players can actually play on that day. This game will have far more refugees people from other games on that first day than you guys think. I know you are basing a lot on wishlist metrics but you cannot solely go off that, this game has the potential to be BIG.

Lastly, look at the other similar games that came before you and note their flaws so you don't make the same mistakes.

JLarja from Frozenbyte writes in Nine Parchments Steam discussion:

"For us, it doesn't matter how much people complain about Windows, as long as they keep using it. If you check the Steam Hardware and Software Survey, you can see that about 46 % of participants are on Windows 10 and almost as many on Windows 7. Various versions of OS X are less than 3 % of users while even more fragmented Linux distros take 0.6 %.

I don't know how accurate the numbers really are (for example, survey currently shows +6 percentage point change for Windows 7 and almost -5 percentage point change for Windows 10), but there's certainly no hurry from market share point of view. I have to say, though that previous Linux ports have generated disproportionate amount of positive buzz (even though they tend to have lot of problems running on various distros). However, I have no way of knowing whether that buzz has generated much sales or not.

Technically speaking, as long as we keep making console ports, adding another platform, whether a new console or PC one, is relatively straight forward. So I'm not sure how much more aiming toward other PC platforms we can do, short of actually making a working port.

And if you happen to know an experienced and 1337 programmer interested in porting our future games to OS X or Linux, feel free to steer her/him to our web site (there's a section about jobs there) :) .

-JLarja "

The website is of course

Anyone you know that might be interested / up for this task? The more quality games ported on Linux the better.

Games developed by Frozenbyte:

Shadowgrounds — (2005)
Shadowgrounds: Survivor — (2007)
Trine — (2009)
Trine 2 — (2011)
Splot — (2014)
Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power — (2015)
Shadwen — (2016)
Has-Been Heroes — (2017)
Nine Parchments — (2017)

Kaikki tiedot pelistä on englanniksi. Early access -pelaamisen olisi tarkoitus alkaa jo tänä vuonna.