It’s no surprise to anyone how hard it is to make a game these days.  Being an indie developer can provide plenty of time and tools at your disposal, especially with the litany of tutorials and open source engines to assist with game-making, but the third component is the biggest roadblock to successfully implementing your dreams: money.  It’s no secret the cost of game development can rear its ugly head, with even the smallest games needing voice acting and commissioned art ranging in the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars.  So many developers prepare a game plan, devise an appealing strategy, and set sights to receive crowdsourced funding on a little website called Kickstarter.

This was the case for Beawesome Games, who pitched a survival sandbox game where dragons can accomplish many feats across a large, multi-biome map. They reached out to potential investors for a minimum of $12,000 of funding in 2019 to continue development on the title that had been 100% self funded since its inception in 2017.  By the end of their campaign, Day of Dragons was funded by 12,123 people with over $534,000: nearly 44 times its funding goal.  With this, several new dragons were awarded to backers and the game was primed to reach a stage not expected but ultimately wanted by developer and backer alike.

After 7 years of development, 5 years from the Kickstarter’s end, and an engine swap from Unreal Engine 4 to UE5, Day of Dragons has reached a 1.0 launch on February 17th.  What should have been a high-fiving success for the small team with a big Kickstarted dream, not to mention over $20,000 in Patreon funding each month, has been slammed over the past week with cries of an unpolished launch filled with computer-melting graphics settings, broken promises on features, and a volatile community team playing clean-up against it all.  Over the past few days I’ve reached out to backers of the game who allowed me to see the state the game was in on its 1.0 launch.  In screenshots of the game and in my explanations, I will be omitting names and maintaining their anonymity for fear of retaliation by the developers due to their track record of doing so.

Day of Dragons provides a concoction of Rust’s and ARK’s survival PvP gameplay with the ability to grow and level up various dragons.  From the few servers available it looks like there are a total of 14 dragons to choose from, though some were either paywalled or Kickstarter Backer Only.   Day of Dragons starts with your chosen dragon in the Hatchling phase, leveling up by consuming food and completing quests, then providing you points to put into passive bonuses to help with attack, defense, or survivability.  Each dragon has a ranking system on birth, dubbed Genetics, of which stats they will excel in. Think Effort Values a la Pokemon that can be increased and tinkered with through a family tree of breeding.  This system allows you to prep and prime your dragon of choosing to help reign supreme as your preferred dragon.

Currently, most of the servers for new players unwilling to join one of the bigger, more prominent clans are forced directly into an early grave.  The official servers when joined had already been territorialized by various clans with high-level dragons that feed off the unknowing and uninitiated.  Several times I would watch backers start a new dragon and nearly immediately get picked off as food for the bigger badder dragons.  Clans would hover around the small dragon spawns like they were playing a pvp-enabled edition of Insaniquarium.  It’s enough of a point of frustration that after a few tries I asked them to see what the game was like on custom servers.

Custom servers revealed the rather barren nature of the game.  For starters, every backer I watched play the game had to have their graphics on low if not lowest settings as the game would chug under 20FPS at anything above Medium.  The computers playing the game were decently powerful, with enough power to play most recently released games on High and Ultra, but were nowhere close to completing that task here.  Once the game was on Low and therefore playable, the world was very barren of outside interaction.  While the map does provide a multi-biome setting for your dragons to navigate and interact with, Day of Dragons lacks a mini-map or world map that the backers could find.  The only means of discovering locations was the use of X,Y coordinates in the top right of the menu and “feeling” your way around the map.  You can set pinpoints, but that consists of tabbing a specific X,Y coordinate and just kind of hoping you remember what is there and why you did it.

Objectives in Day of Dragons are not very enticing or exciting.  Missions range from hunting bugs, one of the only non-player sources of food within the map, and drinking water. Eventually your dragon will reach elder status for a chance at a better breed, and then you repeat the process until you get what you’re looking for or want to try another dragon.  With such an impoverished variety of bugs to eat and water to drink, and the only other edible object we saw, the errant mushroom, killing you if you eat it, the time-to-level is excruciatingly slow.

Screenshots give you no real understanding of the game as Day of Dragons runs with a very, very minimal HUD.  So minimal that we found out what each of the three bars were by watching them confusingly decrease with no explanation.  Hitting tab provides a percentage list of multiple stats: hunger, thirst, stamina, health, uh…bile?  There’s also images presenting the current biome’s temperature, your dragon’s comfort level, the time of day, and what kind of region you are in.  What do these do to your dragon?  No idea!  But the icons all surround a mini-map that is, as seen, “unavailable,” and the percentages of your hunger and thirst move quickly.  Not getting food or water within 10 minutes sends your dragon on a death spiral where once starved and killed, you’re back to the character select screen to fumble around again.

This feeling of confusion and frustration is exacerbated by the fact that Day of Dragons launched with no tutorial.  Everything that was found out through the 1.0 release was through trial and tribulation.  Backers who have slugged through each Alpha and Beta test come with the necessary knowledge to just navigate through the game, let alone thrive in it.  It’s a sad summary of the full state that Day of Dragons is in: a barren journey of starvation and dehydration for newbies who aren’t given a tutorial and are sent to death by toxic, overpowered clans from Beta with superior knowledge of the current systems.  As an Early Access game, this could be understood as testing the waters and giving the chance to hash out problems that are clearly here. But this is the developers’ 1.0 release, a symbol of a fully realized, complete title ready for shipping with anything after being post-release content.  This game is not complete, it is not ready, backer-funded content isn’t working, and backers and newcomers alike are voicing their frustrations.

Unfortunately, where they can vent their frustrations is becoming a smaller space than what was expected.  Numerous accounts, the earliest rumblings happening nearly 5 years ago, warn and condemn a power-hungry developer who will remove accounts from the official Discord server, lock threads on Reddit and the Steam Discussion Forum, and will block accounts on Twitter/X providing criticism or “slander” of the title.  It’s these constant power struggles that have each backer I’ve conversed with refusing to go on the record because they don’t want to lose the ability to keep up with the game or be banned from the game outright.  Most want Day of Dragons to be something enjoyable and want to be able to use the dragons and skins they paid for.  Other backers have written the game off completely, wondering if the game was ever meant for greatness or just another elaborate Kickstarter plot to prey on a niche community that invests hard earned money on games that promise greatness rarely seen.

And from what I’ve seen, it’s easy to sympathise with that feeling.  Beawesome Games amassed over half a million dollars via Kickstarter, currently receives tens of thousands in Patreon backed dollars, are in the talks of creating new multimedia projects to expand the world’s lore, and stretched out a 7 year development cycle only to provide a 1.0.0 project that feels like a 0.1.0 build.  With only a fraction of the budget going to music and art, and the company’s CEO being the sole developer and coder of the project, it ultimately begs questions of credibility and resource use when millions of dollars provide a project as confusing, abysmal, and disappointing as Day of Dragons has become.

We’ve seen this scenario happen countless times within Kickstarter: a promising idea receives massive funding and either the scale of expectation or the power to just walk away and call it quits becomes too big to ignore.  But Kickstarter is an investment program and funding a project does not guarantee a fully-fleshed out project, or a even a complete one for that matter. It will always leave a bad taste in anyone’s mouth being taken for the ride that some Day of Dragons backers feel they’ve been on for several years.

Maybe that’s what that Bile meter was for in the game all along.