Months after beta keys were said to be being distributed "soon" there's still no meaningful update from Atelier801. All they can show is concept art - there's no gameplay to see yet, barely any mechanics explained and no reason to choose this game over the multitude of other cookie cutter "Zombie survival" type games that devs have been riding the trend train of and trying to rush out before the trend fades for the last 2 years now!

Spoiler: the trend has faded. Atelier801 can't hope to catch it with their track record of taking forever to achieve any progress in any of their games.

The only games they've ever had any sort of success with are rehashed reskinned versions of a few old games Tigrounette once made.

I cannot see Dead Maze being a success, I'm even sceptical of it coming out any time soon to be honest - maybe even at all. (Remember Celousco was at this exact dev stage for over a year without word before it was abandoned)

So, discuss what you think will come of Dead Maze, when do you think it will be released if at all, will it simply be Celousco v2.0?

"months" make it sound like it's been more than 2. But you do have a point. I really wish they'd just update us on the game's progress. I get that informing your user base of updates beforehand can be problematic since things might change, but it's nice to know stuff is actually happening.

We dont post that much but we regularly update you guys on Trello and Facebook with new screenshots, etc. from the game.

I understand you would like the game to be super quickly released, we would like that too but unfortunately this isn't possible. We have to work hard if we want to make a nice game!

I have no problem waiting, I just hate having no progress reports on the game. Screenshots are nice, but as a game dev I'm more interested in the progress of the game as a playable entity, and what is currently being worked on.

I understand giving an ETA is bad since it forces you to release before you're ready or upset people if not done right, but it's just nice to know how the game is actually progressing as a game, not just a collection of images. Are all the major mechanics in yet? What needs to be done before the beta release? What needs to be done before the game is taken out of beta? What are you excited about adding to the game to make it fun? How will some of the base mechanics work? We know you have a camp, but how will an assault on it look like? What kinda of stuff do you build to help defend it? just walls, or turrets , traps, etc? How many people do you expect to allow in a single "instance"? etc! I admit you've already released a little bit of info about the game's mechanics, but I'd prefer as much information about mechanics as we are getting for art. (which does look beautiful obtw (: )

Last updated 1 week after Zou's reply above. Assuming that the "regular updates" are a sign of life, Dead Maze seems to be stone dead.

The time of the survival genre being popular has long since passed, Atelier probably realised this and abandoned it. We've now heard nothing because I assume they are embarrassed/don't respect us enough to communicate and instead go silent. I'm sure we'd get the "busy" "complicated" or "unforeseen circumstances" excuses if they do bother to reply, but they've been working on this for over a year now and those excuses would seem very weak tbh.

Celousco was the same, no updates after a while, silence/staff ignoring the issue then one day "it's cancelled but we learnt so much!!" Yeah right, you clearly haven't learnt how to project manage.

If atelier staff weren't so buddy buddy and were managed like a business which wanted to turn a profit they'd fire whoever is meant to be managing this fiasco and either get serious or shut it down. They're flushing money down the toilet.

Dead Maze = Dead Game.

To be fair, the last update was right around when they admitted to pulling many people off various projects to work on getting the new Transformice adventures going. So once they get enough adventures coded to feel comfortable, I imagine they'll switch back the devs working on this, and hopefully we'll get more updates the month after they return.

I won't claim to have complete faith in them, but I feel we should give them the benefit of the doubt. If we get no updates in another month or two, I'll be on your side.

I posted an update on this topic but I'll repost it here:

Zou a dit :

Hi everyone,

Lately we were a bit more focusing on the adventures but don't worry! Now that we have enough adventures created in advance we are more comfortable so our Dead Maze team is back to work! Don't forget that we are a small team, sometimes it can be a bit tricky to do everything at once.

Thanks for your patience everyone. We didn't know exactly when we could get back to work that's why we didn't really communicate any official planning.

We are trying to create a nice game that will please our players and ourselves... Hopefully you'll like how it'll turn out!

Zou a dit :

I posted an update on this topic but I'll repost it here:

Zou a dit :VoirMasquer

Hi everyone,

Lately we were a bit more focusing on the adventures but don't worry! Now that we have enough adventures created in advance we are more comfortable so our Dead Maze team is back to work! Don't forget that we are a small team, sometimes it can be a bit tricky to do everything at once.

Thanks for your patience everyone. We didn't know exactly when we could get back to work that's why we didn't really communicate any official planning.

We are trying to create a nice game that will please our players and ourselves... Hopefully you'll like how it'll turn out!

Ty Zou. Make a cool game ;)