Make new friends, but keep the old,
One is silver and the other gold.
I really like that song they sing on New Year’s Eve because I think there is a lot of good advice to it.
Lately, we have been working on both our newest game, Forgotten Trail, and our Kickstarter campaign to support it. At the same time, we haven’t forgotten our original backers and users of our current games.
Since the latest updates, two months ago, we’ve been making changes both large and small on our existing games:
- Replaced the opening 2-D game in Spirit Lake with a 3-D deer-hunting level, this will fix the problems some people had with the 2-D level when they wandered off the screen,
- Added music to several parts of Spirit Lake where you are wandering down the path,
- Added music to the level in Fish Lake where you are searching for the lost objects in the woods,
- We are in the process of changing EVERY web page in Fish Lake to use custom fonts, wider margins – just a lot of cosmetic changes to make the pages better. (Yes, most of this is being done with a couple of CSS style sheets.)
- We are changing EVERY web page in Spirit Lake to look better, too. Again, much of this is just larger font, more spacing.
- We are adding more little touches to pages, so when you hover over an image, you see the word for it in Dakota, or when you click on it, you hear it pronounced in Dakota
- We’re adding more animations to the instructional pages. For example, when it says that 28 divided by 7 = 4, and you click the arrow to go on, you see 28 cups split themselves into 4 groups
- Improved sound quality on some of the videos
- Found and fixed a couple of broken links and errors
At this point, there are very few bugs in the games, and most of the educational content is pretty well reviewed and revised. However, there are a few rough edges here and there that can be polished. We’ve found that the more polished a game is, the more there is to discover, the more people play it and the more they learn.
Every time something annoys me, I try to take it as a learning experience what NOT to do. It bugs the hell out of me when every time I start up a piece of software it nags me about updating it. I think,
Do you really have to issue an update every three days? How much of an improvement can it be?
That’s why, trying not to be annoying, we try to issue updates only every 3-4 months or so and have each one be noticeably better than the last.
If you backed us on Kickstarter three years ago, you’re still getting free updates from us because we SO appreciate you taking a chance on us when all we had was an idea. We’ve grown as a company since then, so while part of our staff is working on developing the new games, we still have a few of us available to be adding improvements to our existing games. You guys are golden.
Want to be golden, too, eventually? Back Forgotten Trail on Kickstarter.