Crusaders of the Lost Idols Dev Tracker

Hey Tass. You guys are way too clever for me! We definitely would like to do more. The hardest thing is actually balancing the puzzles so that everyone has a chance to engage and feel like they have a fair crack at solving them.

The amount of work I put into the last one was quite significant and it was solved within minutes!

If time and money were no object I would LOVE to do a really sophisticated campaign like the Lost (TV show) where they had online cryptic clues, or Jay Z's album launch where he hid lyrics at real locations all around NYC.

However, there's also a question of how much does the quiz/puzzle actually start to become it's own beast and distract from the game. Lots of food for thought.

Short answer would be, nothing in the hopper but would love to do a new one time permitting.

Great question. So, I've worked in both environments where last minute announces are a necessity (like CNE) and then campaigns like FIFA where there's a three to six-month pre-promotion period.

It really comes to down to the resources available to hit a communications milestone. At CNE we are 16 people but split over different projects. At EA I was part of a machine that had well over 100-200 people (in total, including all the ancillary staff) working on the game.

I would like more lead time to really blow out the marketing but by the same token the system we have here is manageable for the size of the studio.

I spend a lot of time performing marketing tasks for existing fans (my job is probably 50-50 between new and existing fans).

Things like all the social media posts, writing the weekly emails, designing the images that you see on both, etc.

Existing fans are the reason that we are able to keep Crusaders going so we make sure to look after you :)

Fixed! It's a last minute snafu because I was on the subs bench and asked to warm-up quickly as Erika has a meeting :)

So would y'all consider doing t-shirts or jackets a la on demand printing for those of us who would love to advertise y'all around the world??

The more we discuss doing more t-shirts and printing, the more I like this idea. Eric is a big fan of t-shirts here too. I think that we should do it and maybe something like BustedTees or RedBubble will give us the chance to explore the idea. I'll look into it.

Nice work!

I don't look after the sales but it's something I can raise with the team. Thanks for the feedback!

Hello everyone. Welcome to the weekly Q&A, where any and all Crusaders question may be asked, and perhaps some will be answered.

I'm Kevin, the current developer on the Flash version of Crusaders. I'm mostly responsible for new features, bug fixes, and other improvements.

I'll be best able to answer technical questions about the game. Design and community related questions aren't really my domain, but I'll prod the correct people around the office to get you those questions answered as well.

As is custom, I'll be answering questions actively for about an hour, and then I'll check in once in a while over the rest of the day.

*HOW he started. Might help if I could write grammatically correct English.

Update: Lunch Time! I'll be away for a bit

As part of the ongoing experiment with changing up the weekly community question and answer sessions, this week's host is Kevin, the Flash developer for Crusaders.

About Kevin:

Hi, I’m Kevin.

I’m in charge of maintaining the Flash version of Crusaders. This means new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. Not design! I know the Flash gets some flak, and I’ve got thick skin, so feel free to ask the hard questions. I’m also a fairly recent Computer Science graduate, so I’m happy to answer questions about that too.

Regarding performance (I suspect this might be a hot topic), it’s an ongoing endeavour on my part, which I pick away at between other duties. It’s worth noting at this point that the vast majority of CPU time per frame is spent on drawing and Flash overhead. I’m working on cutting this down, but it’s rather more finicky than just ...