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So now back to telling you about how the development of Deliverance is progressing. Although it looks from the previous blogs that the work is going without a hitch, the time has come to cool down a little and look at all the stuff that is not going so great and that we’re seriously struggling with. Not that I want to make us look like incompetent amateurs and lead you to a state of despair, but I think you will be interested to know about all the things we come up against.

As you may have gathered from the previous posts, Warhorse has doubled in size in the last two months from less than 30 people to 60 of us. The new recruits came not only from our own little country, but also from the US (even from Bethesda), Poland and Sweden. So theoretically we can now do twice as much work. The problem, though, is that work on a game is based on the design document. Naturally, our original plan was to write the design as we went along. According to the design, the core features were supposed to be designed first and as the designs gradually expanded we would take on more people as needed.

But our situation in the last, quite dramatic year drew a stroke through our budget. Since I was looking for money and shooting the Kickstarter video instead of designing, our design document has a few, quite significant gaps and even though I am now far from alone on the job (there are eight of us now), it is only coming together as a whole very slowly. The new people have to be trained, we all have to get on the same page, write the design in the same way, set up a system of work and define patterns of how we will write so that other people apart from us will be able to find their way in it, and all of that is demanding. Especially when, like me, you have to roll in front of you a massive boulder of backlog stuff.

Don’t get me wrong. Our design runs to several hundred pages – we don’t pull the game out of thin air. Most of the features are described down to the minutest detail. Only then a situation come along where you are desperately trying to write the last few missing, but quite important features for the programmers, the designers meanwhile are working on lacking craft mechanisms and in the middle of it all ten new graphic and concept designers are asking for assignments. But to assign work to the graphic guys, you first have to read and comment the crafting design from the designers, which after two weeks of work by six people “surprisingly” runs to a hundred pages, and that you cannot read in five minutes.​