Interview with Goktug Yilmaz about Dawn of Crafting

Who is behind this idea and how you got into game development?

Goktug (Esqarrouth) Yilmaz , Demir (Demiculus) Yilmaz. We got into game development by building a simple prototype for Dawn of Crafting, called Crafter Game. Then slowly expanded the prototype into this game as we learned more about game development.

Explain the game in one sentence.

Craft inventions & Discover recipes in an incremental style simulation RPG game.

What made you excited about this idea?

For more than 15 years, we’ve been a fan of crafting mechanics, which is combining multiple items to make new ones. But we didn’t really like the going outside and gathering supplies part. We thought crafting mechanics would be more fun without all the hard gathering. And the idea of just sitting on our asses and crafting all day sounded very appealing!

How has this game changed from the original plan/vision/design?

Well the original vision didn’t change at all. Our vision was: Easy gathering, simple & deep crafting. But we didn’t really have a plan for the rest of the stuff. We launched the game to players after a week of development, we started to get feedback from players and also had our own ideas while we were playing. So we just implemented all of the ideas, kept the fun ideas, took out the boring ideas.

What was your biggest struggle while making this game?

Early Access on iOS is a bad idea. You want to be pushing out updates fast while you develop the game, our updates were delayed significantly because of the platform. This delayed our feedback and when a new version finally reached the player’s hands, they were giving feedback on that old version while we were already working on a new version. So there was a lot of mind context switching because of this.

How long it took you to build it?

Depends on what you mean by build it. It took 6 months to be a fun game, 12 months to become decent looking, 17 months to reach 1.0 a polished version. We’re still working on improving it.

What did you hope for after you’ve released the game and what actually happened?

We hoped to get a banner feature in the App Store. A lot of people played the game, including stay at home moms, preschool kids, veterans, hardcore MMORPG players, IGN executives, people from ArenaNet, Supercell, MachineZone, Mojang, it organically reached #1 in a few countries. But no banner feature.

What lessons you’ve learned for future projects from this game?

Nothing should come between the players and developers. No platform should be holding back updates from the game.

What’s the biggest advice you have for people who want to work in game development?

Your ideas are shit. You are shit. Listen to your players to find out the less crappy ones.

Lastly, how video games influenced your life? How your life has changed with them?

I’m not sure, its like asking how sleep and food influenced my life. Probably made me smarter, improved my reflexes, made me competitive, increased micromanaging, resource management, leadership and planning skills. Also knowing how to craft everything until the Renaissance era might help out in the zombie apocalypse.

Dawn of Crafting for Appstore

Dawn of Crafting: Website, Reddit, TouchArcade

Goktug Yilmaz: Twitter

Demir Yilmaz: Twitter

Also published on Medium.