- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 99,592
Tags: Bard's Tale; Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight; Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate; Bard's Tale IV; InXile Entertainment; Matt Findley
Last month, we learned that inXile Entertainment were opening a new studio in New Orleans to work on The Bard's Tale IV. In today's Kickstarter update, the first in over two months, company president Matt Findley tells us a bit more about that move, and about the game's current development status. Here's an excerpt:
Last month, we learned that inXile Entertainment were opening a new studio in New Orleans to work on The Bard's Tale IV. In today's Kickstarter update, the first in over two months, company president Matt Findley tells us a bit more about that move, and about the game's current development status. Here's an excerpt:
New Location: inXile NOLA!
First off, we are excited to announce that we have opened a new studio in the beautiful city of New Orleans!
There are several reasons why we have done this. First and foremost, we are always looking for ways we can make our game budgets go further. When we cut our costs it allows us to put more people onto the project for a longer period of time. This directly results in an improvement to the games we are making. Our creative process involves iteration. Iteration takes time. Time takes money. The lower our burn rate, the longer we get to work on the game and the more iteration all the features of the game receive. With the support of State of Louisiana and the general lower cost of doing business in New Orleans we are able to stretch our budgets and put an increase of man months into our projects.
The second reason why we are excited about the new NOLA studio is gaining access to a talent pool in the south and on the east coast that we just didn’t have access to in California. We are currently interviewing for positions in NOLA and there are a bunch of new hires that we are going to get that are people we never could have talked into moving to the west coast.
Why should you care about all this? Because the first project that we are going to be making in New Orleans is The Bard’s Tale IV! It might sound like an impossible task to setup this new studio, hire a bunch of people, and make The Bard’s Tale IV awesome. How can we do it? Easy, I am going to cheat. I am not in New Orleans all by myself - we have a core group of people who are making the move from our HQ in Newport to New Orleans with me.
This team and I just spent the last couple of years making Wasteland 2 together and we are continuing our work on The Bard’s Tale IV. The only difference is that now we are going to be doing it in New Orleans. By moving this team here we are going to be able to add to it with new hires and end up with a larger team than we ever could have had in Cali.
Pre-Production Update
The last few months have been very busy and fruitful for us. We're happy to announce that at this time, we're halfway through our pre-production phase on the game. But what does this mean, exactly?
Pre-production is the phase of development where we do our initial design and technology work on the game. This mean, through both prototyping as well as work on paper, defining the game that we intend to make in as full detail as we possibly can, so that we can get a grasp of our final project scope and feature set. All sorts of things are taking shape, from our technology, to our game mechanics, to our story.
Right now, this means that the major foundational components of the game – the story and world-building, our setting and characters, have for the most part had the groundwork laid down. You saw glimpses of these during our previous Kickstarter updates, including snippets of lore and story from Nathan Long, and design ideas from Brian and other team members, and we have continued to build on these to flesh out the world of The Bard's Tale IV.
Going forward, we are getting deeper into the nitty-gritty of the game: the play mechanics and combat system, core character classes, spells and abilities, and other higher-level elements like our quest structuring and ideas for reactivity in our game world and story. It is too soon to talk about this stuff in too much detail but in future weeks we will introduce you to more of the team and let each of them talk in more detail about the things they are working on.
See the full update for some photos of the new studio, plus an example of healthy New Orleans cuisine. Hopefully the updates will start coming faster now, and more substantial than they were during the campaign.First off, we are excited to announce that we have opened a new studio in the beautiful city of New Orleans!
There are several reasons why we have done this. First and foremost, we are always looking for ways we can make our game budgets go further. When we cut our costs it allows us to put more people onto the project for a longer period of time. This directly results in an improvement to the games we are making. Our creative process involves iteration. Iteration takes time. Time takes money. The lower our burn rate, the longer we get to work on the game and the more iteration all the features of the game receive. With the support of State of Louisiana and the general lower cost of doing business in New Orleans we are able to stretch our budgets and put an increase of man months into our projects.
The second reason why we are excited about the new NOLA studio is gaining access to a talent pool in the south and on the east coast that we just didn’t have access to in California. We are currently interviewing for positions in NOLA and there are a bunch of new hires that we are going to get that are people we never could have talked into moving to the west coast.
Why should you care about all this? Because the first project that we are going to be making in New Orleans is The Bard’s Tale IV! It might sound like an impossible task to setup this new studio, hire a bunch of people, and make The Bard’s Tale IV awesome. How can we do it? Easy, I am going to cheat. I am not in New Orleans all by myself - we have a core group of people who are making the move from our HQ in Newport to New Orleans with me.
This team and I just spent the last couple of years making Wasteland 2 together and we are continuing our work on The Bard’s Tale IV. The only difference is that now we are going to be doing it in New Orleans. By moving this team here we are going to be able to add to it with new hires and end up with a larger team than we ever could have had in Cali.
Pre-Production Update
The last few months have been very busy and fruitful for us. We're happy to announce that at this time, we're halfway through our pre-production phase on the game. But what does this mean, exactly?
Pre-production is the phase of development where we do our initial design and technology work on the game. This mean, through both prototyping as well as work on paper, defining the game that we intend to make in as full detail as we possibly can, so that we can get a grasp of our final project scope and feature set. All sorts of things are taking shape, from our technology, to our game mechanics, to our story.
Right now, this means that the major foundational components of the game – the story and world-building, our setting and characters, have for the most part had the groundwork laid down. You saw glimpses of these during our previous Kickstarter updates, including snippets of lore and story from Nathan Long, and design ideas from Brian and other team members, and we have continued to build on these to flesh out the world of The Bard's Tale IV.
Going forward, we are getting deeper into the nitty-gritty of the game: the play mechanics and combat system, core character classes, spells and abilities, and other higher-level elements like our quest structuring and ideas for reactivity in our game world and story. It is too soon to talk about this stuff in too much detail but in future weeks we will introduce you to more of the team and let each of them talk in more detail about the things they are working on.
