Director’s cut or… Author’s Edition
13 08 2009Have you ever heard of director’s cut version of your favorite movie? I’m sure you did. How many developer’s cut versions of games have you heard of? Not too many? If at all.
Two days ago Darek Rusin made a comment on my blog and because I haven’t heard from him for a while I went to his website to check out what he’s up to. He started Orchid Games and released Heartwild Solitaire. So far his website is dedicated to just this one game and that made it easier for me to spot the thing that made me mention his website. Right under the title he put Author’s Edition. That made me very interested and I immediately wanted to check out what is so special about this version. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find any info about it. Too bad. It could help “steal” customers from portals.
When we worked on Runes of Avalon we had to remove very nice feature in my opinion – Amulet of Spells. We had to remove it because it didn’t work so great and we didn’t have time to find out how to fix it, but I really believed in Amulet of Spells (you don’t earn money by having great ideas, but by releasing games). This made me thinking about releasing developer’s version of Runes of Avalon. It never happened in the way we know it from movie industry. It was much better for us to release this version as Runes of Avalon 2, as we figured out that amount of changes is too big to make it “just” a special edition.
So you see, it’s worth commenting on blogs. You might get a link to your website for free ;-)
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Roman, first – thanks for the mention. Much appreciated! :)
The Author’s Edition was mainly done because our original story had some spicy elements, like a sex scene plus stronger language in few places. Portals wouldn’t agree to publish such content, so we had to make a politically correct version for them. Actually, we even had to remove some “suggestive” illustrations and… figure that: dress up naked figures in Tarot cards ;) Weird, but I guess some people can get a bit carried away.
Anyway, we kept it all for our own version. Plus we also added some extra polish in the interface and an option to send your scores online (which portals also disallow, as you probably know).
This all is in fact mentioned on our website, but you have to click “Get the game” button and get to the subpage. I know, I know, it may not be very intuitive. We’ll be reworking this in next weeks, when we update the page for a new game :)
As for the name — we thought long and hard about it. Directors Cut was one option, but it’s better suited for movies. Special Edition was almost the one to make the cut but then we came up with Author’s Edition which had a nice ring to it and was also more specific. And it stuck :)
BTW, with Orchid Games we also created several games for Sandlot Games, including Kuros, Glyph and Super Granny series. But these were contract projects. Heartwild Solitaire is the beginning of our own product line :)
Thanks and cheers!