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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pistolshrimp/free-stars-children-of-infinity/posts/4175633
2024 Summer Update
We don’t really have seasons here in California—just “dry” and “wet”—but I’ve been told there are apparently four canonical seasons. If there were more, we’d write more blog posts. Where should the new one go? My vote is between winter and spring, just to throw off Groundhog Day and finally sow ultimate disarray among rodents. A dream shared by all humankind.
With the Kickstarter behind us, it is time to resume our more moderately-paced seasonal updates. What have we been doing in the past few months? In short: making a plan, growing our team to fit the plan, and then executing. (The plan, not the team.) In this update you can learn a bit about our post-Kickstarter process, hear what we’ve been working on in Children of Infinity since the Kickstarter ended, gain some insights into what’s next, and get to know some of our new teammates.
BackerKit to BackerQuiet
Our Kickstarter campaign was ridiculous. In every sense of the word! The amount of success, the amount of work, and the pace of everything was beyond what we could have anticipated. While it seems like our flurry of communication ended at the closing bell for the Kickstarter, things really weren’t quiet until after we had gotten our surveys out and seen the issues that cropped up with that. Just getting to the point where we could send the surveys required a lot of auditing, problem solving, and setup in BackerKit. We also had to address some of our bespoke needs, like including our Patreon supporters.
With over 7,000 backers being managed through BackerKit, we wanted to do as much as we could to help both our supporters and ourselves prepare for any questions or confusion. At the time of this post, 86% of our backers have completed their surveys, which we consider a success! Those people were able to complete the survey, and we’ll be able to deliver rewards! Once the surveys went into the wild, I (Dan) was the help desk, and stayed busy not just with my usual work but also fielding as many as a dozen emails a day—along with questions on Discord. We don’t have a dedicated support team; it’s just me, and your support requests just wind up in my inbox! In addition to adding a cozy vibe to our operation, I actually really enjoyed helping backers out, though I’m grateful it tapered off. As someone who dreads any phone call to any service where I’ll be dealing with support teams, escalations, bureaucracy, or robots I have to dial and talk my way past, it’s fun to provide a different experience.
Pin popularity breakdown. Fwiffo triumphs again.
BackerKit Learnings
I learned a lot from our Kickstarter and BackerKit experience, and I’d love to do a full retrospective when things are quieter. The biggest takeaway I’d want to share for now with other developers learning along the way is to actually add more questions to the survey for information gathering! Just by doing a survey with our limited information, we were able to learn so much. We had educated guesses on some things, but nothing beats some real, human-reported data backed by people actually committing funds. For example, we assumed the majority of backers would be interested in a PC version (Steam/GOG), but we now know just how much of a majority they comprise. We can also see there’s a relatively large interest in a GOG release for the game, with about one in seven players interested in playing there. What we don’t know, though, is how many players are planning to play on Windows, Linux, or Mac. We should have added a question!
As a comparison, we know just how desired our different console versions will be compared to the PC. About 85% of backers are exclusively interested in playing on PC. For consoles, the Switch ranks in the front by a large margin, with a bit of a gap to the PS5, and with only a small number of our backers interested in an Xbox version.
There are more questions we could have asked but didn’t. How did backers even find our Kickstarter? How many players were planning on playing couch co-op together? Keyboards or controllers? TVs or monitors? Obviously, we could have tired people out with too many questions, but some would have had more sway on our development. Seeing just how much of a PC-player majority we have does tell us we’re focusing on the right things (PC first), but it would have been great to know just how many people want to play on Linux, for example. As we start looking to do things like broader playtesting with players, knowing just who has access to a Linux gaming setup would have been useful information.
Top 5 activities for the Lost Crew Log. Stop petting the wildlife on alien planets!
All that said, especially after the insane pace of running our Kickstarter, I’m grateful to be receiving far fewer help requests and to be able to focus largely on the work for the game, even if it’s at the expense of some of our getting-the-word-out efforts. Keep in mind that our Kickstarter was also not just busy during the Kickstarter, but also for many months leading up to do a Kickstarter! If things have seemed a little quiet lately, it’s because there were many months of work happening non-stop. I needed a break! I had a regular, five-day workweek for the first time in months and finally took a week off in July as my last deep breath before aiming to finish our work.
It took us about a month before we were back to firing on all cylinders for development, and we needed to start by assembling the rest of our crew.
Space for New Space Friends
With funding, we can afford more fun! This is the first and last time I will make that joke.
As we discussed on our Kickstarter, our additional funds were chiefly for acquiring additional full-time help. They’re the most critical aspect of what we knew we would need to complete our game and help us deliver on our vision.
Early character concept by Mandy Draeger.
First off is Mandy Draeger, officially joining the development team as an artist and animator. Did you like how our Kickstarter page looked? How about them pins? She was responsible for the art assets for the Kickstarter itself, as well as for designing the physical goods—both for mock-up and eventual manufacturing—which backers will be receiving. Going forward, beyond helping us manufacture our rewards, she’ll be contributing other art and animation and is currently working on alien comms paintings. She comes to us with a wealth of industry expertise in art, animation, design, and even QA. We even worked together at Toys for Bob on several Skylanders titles.
Next is Mallory Littleton, who is joining as our narrative lead. While we have an amazing story written, there’s a lot more work to do to actually implement it in-game! She’ll be developing how the player is going to experience the story, working with our various writers to get our rogue’s gallery of characters all playing their parts, contributing writing/design, and helping lead VO and localization efforts. She has shipped multiple Life is Strange games and is overflowing with experience and enthusiasm in both interactive fiction and leading writing teams.
Last is Andie Nare, who is joining as a programmer. She’ll be developing many of our Godot-driven, user-facing features into shippable form and supporting our bevy of design and art needs. She’s shipped products for PC, Switch, web, mobile, and even for Playdate (UQM2 port when???), and is experienced in building technical solutions and tools for designers and artists.
We are so excited to have these three joining us and reach our desired team size for what’s needed to finish our game.
What’s Been Cooking?
It took us a month after finishing the Kickstarter to actually finalize our plan, imagine the people we would need to execute it, and then turn those imagined helpers into real people who are working with us. Actual software development didn’t halt during this initial month, but we had plenty on our plate beyond just the game.
Of course everyone wants to know “What’s the release date?” Before we even attempted an answer, we needed to know what we were going to release. And what we were going to release was changing based on our Kickstarter! As our Kickstarter added scope and audience information, we were trying to plan the rest of the project based on a moving target. Once it settled, we started the process of scoping and budgeting. Then we got to making some decisions around what we wanted to do and in what order.
Children of Infinity running on the Steam Deck.
There are two non-mutually-exclusive approaches we use to help plan and prioritize our work when there is much to do. One route is going for the lowest hanging fruit possible first. We’ve proven out our entire workflow for adding new ships, for example, so it makes lots of sense to just make lots of ships. There are no unknowns, we’re sure the work is necessary, and we can easily calculate how much time we need to do them. The second strategy involves going for the most unknown things first. We had been thoughtful about being able to support multiple platforms but had done very little work toward actually proving what’s involved for Mac, Linux, and consoles, for example. We know we can do it, but we don’t know what we don’t know. Because the work has many unknowns, it’s much harder to hone in on even estimating how much effort it will even take or make decisions about what is or isn’t strictly needed.
When building a long roadmap for our project, we try to mix and match these procedures as needed so different teams can keep moving on work that is necessary. In general, we want engineering to be many steps ahead of content (design, art, writing) and understanding any limitations that content creation should be mindful of. Speaking broadly, we focused our narrative, design, art, and engineering teams on their own separate tasks to maximize valuable output for the others and get ahead of our new technical requirements. Here was the broad description of what we wanted to achieve during our first milestone of about two months:
So, how did we do with those two months? We were largely successful! We can play, create, and distribute a build of the game via Steam. In that build, you can play an experience representative of "just after the start of the game,” where the player has limited resources and will find the universe pretty threatening, with regions they probably don’t want to explore. We didn’t get to prove much of how the player grows stronger yet. The build represents how we want a few of our gameplay twists on UQM to play, like our more interactive hyperspace, different motivations for the player to explore or return home, and even letting the player be defeated without a game over screen.
- Create a gameplay experience proving the ‘core loop’ (i.e. the player’s experience flying through space, visiting planets, etc.) and demonstrating what pieces were fun and what needed work.
- Demonstrate a playable version of our vision for hyperspace and raise all the technical and art requirements.
- Start to break down the entire game’s story and characters into a complete plot map with steps we can take to scope and implement it.
- Prove a playable story experience where the player interacts with two different aliens to progress the story with shippable writing we can evaluate.
- Demonstrate the steps needed for art direction and asset pipelines on planetside, our most sophisticated art environment which mixes procedural generation with handmade assets.
- Create 10 fun planetside creatures with complete art and gameplay.
- Onboard an additional comms screen artist to start working on conversation portraits and create a couple of them.
- Finalizing a music scope and schedule plan, and actually create some pieces targeted at a few specific areas.
- Develop a process for creating and distributing builds.
- Create Linux and Mac proof-of-concept ports of the game.
- Scope the technical and business work involved in porting and distributing beyond Steam to GOG and consoles and ensure we have access to development materials.
Feeling chipper! Alien "lifeform" by Tim Sjastad.
We can play through a sequence (no spoilers!) where the player can either enlist the help of an alien, threaten them, or ignore them to get something needed to help solve another alien’s problem, which includes multiple possible outcomes which are all represented in both gameplay and conversation. In true UQM tradition, we’ve even added options we don’t even think most players will pick, but we can’t wait to see what people do.
Work in progress comms screen by Robert Mauritson.
On our art side, we created about a dozen new planetside creatures and have a solid workflow for designing, arting, and animating them. Our planetside procedural generation is behind where we’d like it to be, as proving a workflow which demonstrated the more fantastical art style we wanted forced us to go backwards several steps. We are able to procedurally generate unique space scenes like nebulae and starfields. We painted, animated, and implemented three new alien comms screens, with two more almost complete. We’ve developed new tech to streamline our animation implementation process. We were mostly done with our UQM1 ships, but we finished making their additional “accessories” (Orz space marines, VUX limpets, etc.), so we can sign off on the original roster. The Slylandro Probe is still M.I.A. as intended. Sorry. Or you’re welcome.
From scribble (Dan Gerstein) to creature (Tim Sjastad and Zach Sundberg). It seemed so much cuter in the doodle.
We adapted our technology—Simple and its Godot connections—to support all our PC (Windows/Linux/Mac) platforms and even got further than expected. We have playable builds on all of these platforms now! The additional effort put into porting for Apple silicon will also help us get a head start on Switch, which also uses ARM architecture.
We have also satisfied our business requirements (i.e., a lot of contracts) and obtained development materials necessary for porting and releasing on GOG, Nintendo Switch, Sony Playstation 5, and Microsoft Xbox Series X|S, which will allow us to not just release the game on those platforms but also to satisfy digital key delivery for our Kickstarter backers.
What’s Next?
Early alien comms screen concept by Mandy Draeger.
For Development
We have a laundry list of work to do, but our next milestone is broadly focused on a few areas: bringing other areas of gameplay (e.g. gas giant exploration, the Mark II, Floyd) up to speed with what we did this milestone along with any art spec we need for them, adding even more of our story sequences and aliens into the game, finalizing the full spec for all of the alien interactions, nailing down our planetside art needs, and starting on Switch development.
All in two months!
If it sounds too good to be true, it’s because in some ways it is. Game development is very cyclical, and especially in a game like ours with many, diverse experiences, not all aspects are going to play as nicely as others. Just because certain things are functioning and satisfying to us does not mean we expect them to be satisfying to players yet. We have oodles of polish to do! “Functional” is often a useful goal just when we’re proving out how we’re going to do a big pile of work, since much of game development includes doing things not just once, but at scale.
We hope to share our progress along the way, even if it’s not in these lengthy blog posts. We do have a lot of work to do, and prioritizing these forms of sharing can be tricky when it becomes a lot of work (i.e. attempting to write thoughtful words). Following us on Twitter and joining our Discord are the best ways to get micro-dosed updates, along with our development streams (which will be returning!).
For Streams
I (Dan) have been considering how best to handle my favorite form of communication—streaming—going forward. Streams won’t be on a regular schedule but will instead be a mix of ad-hoc ones when I’m doing low-key work, and announced-in-advance when there’s some focused/specific work to show.
It’s important for me to be able to mix the “quiet” ones in because, hey, a lot of my work is quite dull, but the point is to let everyone be a part of our development and for us to enjoy sharing our work with you.
Streams can’t be guaranteed to be completely spoiler-free for certain aspects of the game at this point. You’ll catch flashes of things like the starmap, allusions to some names of things, and so on; but any time I am working on story elements involving a character’s plotline for whatever reason, I’ll try to title the stream with a warning.
For Backers
We haven’t set a hard date on when we are closing our surveys or starting to work with our backers who are contributing their designs, participating in playtests, and learning to make their own ships. For those backers, the plan is to survey everyone’s time availability for their different contributions or activities and then start assigning slots to people. The soonest any of this would happen will likely be November/December, but we’d expect to be handling this more in 2025 since the end of the year is often a scheduling challenge for many people.
The End for Now
As Children of Infinity continues to take shape, we look forward to showing you more and more of what we’ve been making. There will be lulls here and there because we’re working in a slightly different environment than before the Kickstarter, where our priority is making and releasing a great game. By having funding and the scope we’ve set, we have several new responsibilities:
We take our responsibilities very seriously. We always did, but when we were self-funding with a very small team, the risks were far fewer and stakes much lower. Now that we’ve staffed up and have made our commitments to our supporters and our teammates, we are working against a very real budget of time and funds.
- We are responsible to our 7,000 supporters. They have committed their support to us for a game and physical goodies they want, and we owe it to everyone to deliver.
- We are responsible for paying our new teammates for the work they’re doing.
- We are responsible to first-party (Nintendo, Sony, etc.) contracts which allow us to use their development software/hardware and platforms in exchange for our respecting their non-disclosure agreements.
Thank you for waiting a long while for this giant update. We’re still so happy to have all of you along for the journey and invite you to join us on Discord, Twitter, and Reddit to keep following along.
