Dawn of Crafting

Factsheet

Developer:
Demi and Goku
Based in Ankara, Turkey

Release date:
Jan 09, 2016

Platforms:
App Store

Website:
dawnofcrafting.com

Regular Price:

Social:
Twitter
Facebook
Touch Arcade
Reddit

Description

TL;DR: Craft inventions and Discover recipes.

Dawn of Crafting is a unique iOS game about crafting in the Stone Age.

You are a lost young Homo Sapien whose village was destroyed by the Homo Erectus. Master Crafter Alf, one of the best crafters of the age, takes you as his apprentice and teaches you the fine techniques of crafting. You learn everything you can, increase your skills, discover new recipes and craft a lot of items. You start building a new village with Alf. Occasionally other people, like merchants, gamblers, Neanderthals, Erectus, thieves, storytellers, visit your village. Someday you will reproduce and create a new Sapien. The young crafter will start learning the fine arts of crafting and further progress humankind.

Gather food, cook it, eat it, make an axe, chop down a tree, craft tools, craft containers, try to discover another recipe, need a better tool for it, gather more wood, peel the wood, get some vine, sharpen some stones, try to craft a knife, talk to a Neanderthal, feel lost, think of what you were going to do, oh right! Discover that darn recipe!

Dawn of Crafting is inspired by the games Minecraft, Ultima Online, Civilizations, A Dark Room, Little Alchemy.

Achievements:
• Most updated iOS game of 2016, with 61 updates in 2016.
• 20% of our players spend 20+ hours, 10% spend 40+ hours playing.
• Mash of 6 genres: RPG, Puzzle, Incremental, Adventure, Unfolding, Crafting.

History

Prototype for Crafter Game started at Dec 2015. After a week of development it was submitted to the App Store and was released at Jan 09, 2016. It was also free with no Ads, no IAPs. It would take a real optimist to call it a game at this point. Even we wouldn't play this game, so why would someone else?

While working on a little more playable version, we were expecting the game to be completely ignored. No downloads, no comments, no emails. Then someone left this review:

Good start - 5 Stars
"Pretty fun actually. Eventually the game crashed and I lost my progress, but it shows potential. I had just unlocked cherries and it wasn't clear if there was much more content. You should check out /r/incremental_games on Reddit this game is kind of like what that community likes."
by Qazedsaw – Jan 12, 2016

We were surprised, someone actually cared and gave 5 stars to our little concept. We learned he wanted to see more content and we learned about a new community, /r/incremental_games. We found out that this incremental games community is full of early adopters that will try games regardless of their graphics and completeness. This community was a gold mine for us because:

1. This was our first game ever! We didn't know how to make any game, especially a fun game.
2. We lacked patience. We are not the types of people who can stick to a game in stealth mode for 2 years and release it, we needed that feedback adrenaline.

So we started to post to /r/incremental_games whenever we made an update to get new players and new feedback. No one cared, so we had to hunt every new player one by one, convince them to play the game, note their criticism and fix the stuff they told us.

A while later we got another review:

Simple yet Addictive - 4 Stars
"Normally I do not comment on any app. Yet now, with this nice idea packaged into a simple yet quickly to understand style, I am writing my first review. I can not wait until I get more quests and unlock more recipes. I feel like there is so much more I still need to discover. It would help to get a craft list as well, instead of just the recipes for the food. Since now I have no idea of how to combine my other items. So there is a little point to improve, other than that- I'm addicted as of now."
by Salaya – Jan 22, 2016

Wow, this dude who doesn't comment on any apps just left us 4 stars and said he is addicted to our black and white game? Also gave us the idea to add a Recipe Book, which is basically a built in wiki for all the crafting recipes. He wants more quests, more recipes other than food. We didn't have anything else at that point. We didn't even had food that makes sense to craft at this point, like peeling bananas.

We got into a habit of weekly updates because at the time app updates was released 1 week after submitting to the App Store. So we sent an update for version 2 and worked on making version 3. Whenever version 2 went live, we uploaded version 3 and started working on version 4. This way we improved the game really fast in small amount of time. We asked for ideas, feedbacks from our player base which was slowly growing and interacting on our reddit community. Any good idea we received that we could build, we built it. Even bad ideas were very helpful because they were the seed that sparked better ideas. At this point the content and mechanics really got deeper and we started getting more praises and good reviews. Some players said to at least charge a dollar so this gem wouldn't get lost between the crappy free games, so made it $0.99.

A lot of people didn't understand how to play. The game was text based with buttons, but players tried dragging stuff around. So we added dragging and swiping type of interactions so the game would feel more natural.

Another problem was a lot of people who would love the game didn't even give it a chance. Because the game was black and white, and the item images were randomly downloaded from Google Images. We were generating some revenue from our the game at this point, so we used that to hire freelancer artists to make the game more pretty and the items look unified.

Some players said they felt spoiled from such a good game and wanted to donate, so we added IAP donations.

March 17, 2017
We made a post a few months ago to get suggestions for a new name. We got a lot of names, then made a poll with them. The name suggested by our active player AntiLiterat was instantly liked by the community at the first post and it also won the poll. So thats where the name "Dawn of Crafting" came from.

At this point we have thousands of more ideas to add and only a smaller percentage of the players will see them all anyways. So we started polishing the game, fixing bugs, adding quality of life features that affect all the players, not just the most hardcore.

May 18, 2017
We think our game is ready for global release after a year of hard work and 63 updates. We'll keep working on the updates but our 1 week schedule might change because of App Store mechanics.

Features

• 343 Items
• 237 Recipes
• 87 Quests
• 15 Skills
• 20+ hour playtime
• Resource Management
• RPG Equipment System
• Character Progression
• Built-in Recipe Book: No more wiki-ing!
• Deep Recipes: Use crafted items as ingredients
• Unfolding new Mechanics as you progress through the ages
• Surprising Events: Prepare to deal with the dangers of stone age.
• Infinite Replayability: Even when you think it ends, there's more!
• Simple Gathering: Tap to gather, equip axe and tap to lumberjack.
• Thought Provoking: Computers crash when they’re out of RAM. We’ve seen people crash while crafting.
• 3 Save Slots
• Single Player
• iCloud Saving
• Achievements and Leaderboards
• No Ads and No IAP Required

Dawn of Crafting Credits

Demir Berkay Yilmaz
Design, Programming

Goktug Yilmaz
Design, Programming

Mango Graphic Design
Art, Freelancer

Federico Meloni
Character Art, Freelancer

Contact

Inquiries
goku@dawnofcrafting.com

Twitter
twitter.com/dawnofcrafting

Facebook
facebook.com/dawnofcrafting

Web
dawnofcrafting.com