KickStarter Kingdom Come: Deliverance Pre-Release Thread [RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[agris]

Sounds like they're over-staffed at the moment. And writing the design doc during production? Perhaps I'm just accustomed to reading about Obsidian's methodology, but that doesn't sound very efficient..

 

[agris]

Update #28

Project Update #28: Do you know this man?
Posted by Warhorse Studios ♥ Like
In this update we are going to talk about something else then development itself: the black art of selling the game, and why we need your help again.

The outcome of the Kickstarter campaign was a great vindication of our effort and it made possible an option we only dreamed about before: to go directly to market, without a publisher that funds the development. This is a very attractive proposition but there are several things we need to consider. Firstly, there is no such thing as going ‘directly to market’. At the very minimum we will have to deal with Valve, Microsoft and Sony – all of these companies are very nice to deal with, but they still are an intermediary between us and the players. Secondly, publishers do lot of useful things and could allow us to bring the game to more players, for example by providing more localizations or by increasing awareness of the game among the gamers.

Since the end of the Kickstarter campaign we have been approached by several distributors or publishers, with different offers, some seem very good. As we were pondering these, we came to realize that this may be a skill we are missing: Dan knows a lot about design and what makes games fun, I, hopefully, know something about production and about keeping the development on time, but neither of us is a real salesman.

So this is where you come in. We are looking for a person that would join our team as a Chief Commercial Officer. This is a fairly senior position and we are looking for somebody who has experience with games business. It can be somebody from a game publisher who wants to come over to the Light Side, it could be somebody from a game developer who is looking for a new challenge, it could be anybody who has skills and experience in doing business with games.

Formal description of this position can be found on our LinkedIn page.

All our backers are people interested in games, many of you work in the industry and even if you don’t, I bet you know somebody who does. If someone’s name flashed across your mind when you were reading the last paragraph, please do us a favor and point them in our direction. Or, if you are interested yourself, of course do not hesitate to get in touch. This position is a tremendous opportunity to join our team and shape our policy toward publishers and distributors from the ground up. We are still small studio, our management structure is very, very flat and you will not be burdened by cumbersome bureaucracy.

Let us know.

Martin Klíma, Executive Producer

TL;DR version
We're (tangentially) considering a publisher and are mentioning it to test the waters, and a job opening for a business position.

 

[Kem0sabe]

On one hand they badmouth publishers, now they are ready to suck any dicks that are willing to put more money into the project...

All the while running a project without anyone on board that actually knew how to put their product on the market. What kind of business are these people running?

 

[agris]

I think their heart is in it, but I really worry about their project planning and logistics.

 

[cvv]

All the while running a project without anyone on board that actually knew how to put their product on the market. What kind of business are these people running?

Completely opposite from EA, I reckon.

 

[Cadmus]

I really think it doesn't concern us how they manage to publish, promote or sell the game. What concerns us is the game itself and this sort of marketing is trying to get the players involved where they should give a shit.

 

[agris]

I really think it doesn't concern us how they manage to publish, promote or sell the game. What concerns us is the game itself and this sort of marketing is trying to get the players involved where they should give a shit.

They are correlated, if not coupled, factors.

Would you honestly not give a shit if they announced a partnership with EA for US publication, Atari S.A. for Euro distro, and that the game would simultaneously launch on PC, Xbone / PS10^4 and Facebook? Actually, they are committed to a console build, but I don't know the specifics (or if they've said anything else about it).

 

[Cadmus]

I really think it doesn't concern us how they manage to publish, promote or sell the game. What concerns us is the game itself and this sort of marketing is trying to get the players involved where they should give a shit.

They are correlated, if not coupled, factors.

Would you honestly not give a shit if they announced a partnership with EA for US publication, Atari S.A. for Euro distro, and that the game would simultaneously launch on PC, Xbone / PS10^4 and Facebook? Actually, they are committed to a console build, but I don't know the specifics (or if they've said anything else about it).

Yeah, ok you are right, there's lots of correlation between the two but there's lots of extras we don't need to care about and they are trying to get us invested in the shit that's only their own problem.

 

[DeepOcean]

All the while running a project without anyone on board that actually knew how to put their product on the market. What kind of business are these people running?

Completely opposite from EA, I reckon.

Knowing something about placing a product on the market isn't the same thing of being evil, ruthless bastards.

 

[agris]

Yeah, ok you are right, there's lots of correlation between the two but there's lots of extras we don't need to care about and they are trying to get us invested in the shit that's only their own problem.

Oh, I agree. A KS update that reads: "hey, we've got an open position" is kind of weird, but I think the real purpose of this is to 1) see how the backers react to the prospect of a publisher and to 2) get them used to the idea. Hey, if a backer happens to fit their job opening, that's just a bonus (from their PoV).

 

[Zed]

This game has the worst Kickstarter updates ever.

 

[Azazel]

Aren't they being funded by the richest man in eastern europe? Just put that shit on Steam or GoG and let it be for fucks sake.

 

[Metro]

I think their heart is in it, but I really worry about their project planning and logistics.

This x 1000. It will be their downfall.

 

[abnaxus]

In before Bethesda pity publish.

 

[Perkel]

Looks like you people forgot what kickstarter was all about in first place.

They didn't want money to create whole game. They wanted money to create a build which they could show to publisher along with userbase so publisher would give them proper money to create game.

"
o things were looking very promising according to the research. Gamers are evidently interested in the kind of game we’re making. Naturally, we immediately sent the results to all the publishers. In practice, we had saved them work and money and given them a pretty solid basis for deciding whether our game was commercially viable.
"

"
In the meantime, we had Gamescom and the negotiations with publishers happening. Most of the big ones told us it still wasn't quite what they wanted and they hadn't made up their minds yet. One of the smaller publishers showed great interest, though, and even arranged their own survey. It was really starting to look very promising, even though for us it seemed like do or die. If these guys were to reject us too, we were up the creek.
"

They got a bit more money and they decided to go indie. They probably miscalulated and now they look for publisher. Imo i think they should go to their gov and ask for funding.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Imo i think they should go to their gov and ask for funding.

Czech republic being part of degenerate EU, they (developer) have a thousand ways to get more funding from the union's financial aid lines, which any economist can make a candidate project for.

 

[Morgoth]

If something good comes out of it then degenerate EU aid lines have proved to be a good thing, notwithstanding economic theory.

 

[Azazel]

Looks like you people forgot what kickstarter was all about in first place.

They didn't want money to create whole game. They wanted money to create a build which they could show to publisher along with userbase so publisher would give them proper money to create game.

"
o things were looking very promising according to the research. Gamers are evidently interested in the kind of game we’re making. Naturally, we immediately sent the results to all the publishers. In practice, we had saved them work and money and given them a pretty solid basis for deciding whether our game was commercially viable.
"

"
In the meantime, we had Gamescom and the negotiations with publishers happening. Most of the big ones told us it still wasn't quite what they wanted and they hadn't made up their minds yet. One of the smaller publishers showed great interest, though, and even arranged their own survey. It was really starting to look very promising, even though for us it seemed like do or die. If these guys were to reject us too, we were up the creek.
"

They got a bit more money and they decided to go indie. They probably miscalulated and now they look for publisher. Imo i think they should go to their gov and ask for funding.

No, they were being funded by the richest man in the Czech republic, he required a demonstration of market viability before he would pony up however, hence kickstarter. Whether that has fallen through or what, I'm not sure.

 

[Lyric Suite]

New blog entry

Got a cloning device?

06/05/2014category: Blog,author: warhorse

Another month gone (tempus fugit – it feels more like a week) and it’s once again time for an info update. I’ll begin with practical news – new tiers have been added to our website, so if you want to support us, you can now pledge up to King level and get a beautiful handmade woodblock print, a (real) silver coin, a t-shirt, an action figure and other goodies. King is limited and there are only about 250 pieces left at KingdomComeRPG.com.

We have also launched an official Wiki page in collaboration with IGN.com and information about the game will be gradually added there.


Looking at the crowd of backers with a surprise

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.


Sustainable growth
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.


Walking around our future offices (Curtesy of Ondrej Malota)

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.

Got a cloning device?
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.


Fisherman decides to cook a fish (eventually)

So you make an agreement with the graphic artists that instead of creating assets for minigames they should first design situation plans and white boxes of the villages on the map and then start on the crafting next week after you’ve done your review. During the course of the revision, however, you discover that some of the designers haven’t quite gotten the idea of how the crafting should look, that two very similar activities from two different designers have completely different controls, and you will have to go over it with them, redo it and add some stuff that you didn’t think of when conceiving the crafting, but turn out to be quite fundamental obstacles to its functionality.

So in the end it turns out that the graphic guys have to wait a week longer and the designing of features and handling the backlog will have to wait, too. The Boulder of Sisyphus has rolled back a bit. And then when you’ve finished all the crafting and show it to the programmers, they throw their hands up and tell you it can’t be done like that and they’re not going to waste two months of work on some nonsense like cooking and we should go and simplify it. So the graphic designers…

Plan
Along comes anarchy, which in the majority of game studios is on the daily agenda and to some extent is inevitable in something as complicated as game development, but which I honestly hate. Especially when it is I who am the main cause of it, and the fact that our woes of last year had a lot to do with it and everything would be different if things had gone according to plan doesn’t change anything. What’s done is done. At our regular leader sessions the heads of the individual departments complain that I ignore them and they feel like the ship is tossing in the waves without a helmsman.


Anarchy takes over our office while compiling! (Curtesy of Jan Smejkal)

So for the last month we have been gradually establishing order and trying to get into a routine. We updated our roadmap. We started fundamentally reworking the planning system and since we use agile planning, we even had a guy here from Hansoft to help us set up the right processes. Even that did not go ahead without shouting matches, because even though agile planning is great for programmers, planning design and its implementation in it is something like writing the script of a big-budget movie while shooting. It happens sometimes, but it’s not OK. Here, too, we had to work out complicated compromises and hopefully we’ve done that. Only now we have to update our entire backlog. And my Boulder of Sisyphus rolls back another little bit…

Don’t count your chickens
There’s one more thing that is bothering me quite a bit just now – I have to constantly keep my eyes on the ball. The problem with Kickstarter projects is that you are promising something that’s not ready yet and you are making that promise at a time when even with the best planning in the world you can never be quite sure that everything you’re planning and everything you would like to have in the game will succeed in happening. When you’re planning a game of such massive dimensions, even with a crystal ball you can’t have 100% certainty.

A game on the scale of Deliverance has thousands of graphic assets and animations, hundreds of features that have to be programmed and thousands of lines of script, and all these incomplete things influence each other. To assess at the beginning of development how long some asset will take to program and how easy it will be to program some feature is simply impossible and so there’s no choice but to estimate, refine the estimates during the course of development and if they don’t add up, then make cuts or extend the development and make it more costly. Obviously, from previous experience your estimation gets more precise, but it’s still an estimate and usually at a time when the person who’s going to do the job in question isn’t even working in the firm yet and the technology you want to use for it has yet to be programmed.

While in the case of a commonplace game you go and peddle your wares a few months before publication, when all the chaos is pretty much behind you and it’s clear to you what you will succeed in implementing and what you can still get done in the six months left to publication, in the case of Kickstarter the most you can do is show a prototype and your plans. Of course it’s not written anywhere those plans will succeed and experience tells you that all too often they don’t succeed. Just look at stuff like Broken Age, Wasteland, Divinity and Star Citizen and their original estimated schedules.

Feature freak
By keeping my eyes on the ball I mean not getting dazzled by your own awesomeness and coming up with more and more new ingenious features before you realize that to implement them you would need a five times bigger team and budget and double the time. Then comes the cold shower, the crossing out and the annoyed fans who didn’t get what you promised them. The more new people joined our team, the more ingenious ideas there were about how to improve just about everything or add some awesome new thing.

At the same time, the basis and main features alone are a big enough mouthful for a team of our size. It’s up to me, then, to curb the over-optimism and ban the addition of new stuff. Sometimes it’s a real battle (with myself). When you know something would really improve the game, you can hardly try to think up a worse way of doing it to make it easier, especially when the people who would be working on the feature in question are enthusiastic about it and try to persuade you that there’s plenty of time for it. There isn’t.

Just today we were talking about how cool it would be if the player could have the job of innkeeper. He would simply take over from the NPC innkeeper, the other NPCs would give him orders and he would bring them beer. We already have it all in the game, so why not add that? Well, maybe because the NPC innkeeper has precisely defined places to stand when he puts the beers on the tables, while the player can come from anywhere and it would look ugly if we didn’t have extra animation (extra work) for it, so we’d have to deal with all sorts of new situations. Like for example if the player ignored an order, which the innkeeper never does (extra work), how the player pulls the beers at all (GUI, animation and extra work) and lots of other things, and so we immediately dropped the subject – to the great chagrin of the designers and scripters who came up with the idea.


Where Henry is heading now?

Right now we are in a situation where we have most of the stuff written, recruited the people and now we’ll see whether we can get the written stuff implemented as fast as we thought we could. And if we don’t get it done fast enough, we’d have to simplify or move to the next act, and you probably wouldn’t like it…

That’s the big drawback with presenting a project too soon.

What to do?
I wouldn’t want it to look like I’m just crying here over my own incompetence, so I better share with you what we intend to do about it. The design, which so far has been the biggest stumbling block, is finally getting to a desirable stage. The stacks of notes I’ve accumulated over the last few months are gradually getting integrated into the design. Hopefully we will finish the remaining unwritten of the design this month. It seems we may have finally sorted out our writing system. It might seem like a trivial task, but drafting an open world RPG is really a lot more complicated than writing a linear script. Multiple NPCs have the same dialogues, the quests are composed of smaller fragments and roles and all of that has somehow top be processed symmetrically so everyone is on the same page and nothing is being unnecessarily done twice over.

We also scripted dozens of events for the world and activities that the player will be able to do outside of the quests. As soon as we’re finished with all of that we will get stuck into the final versions of the quests, the scripters will start working on them and the graphic artists will compose the world according to their requirements.

So keep your fingers crossed for us and I sincerely hope that the list of things we planned that will not end up in the game will be as short as possible

Dan Vávra, creative director

Codex tells me development for this game is fucked, but realistic looking medieval settings always give me a boner.

Don't fuck this game up, please?

 

[Perkel]

So noobs in RPG genre realized it is much more harder to create complex RPG from scratch at quality they aim ?

This reeks of shutdown.

They should focus on core aspects of their game. What is the most interesting thing about it. Deliver it and then upgrade formula in sequel or patch.
Assuming they want to even finish game.

 

[set]

Exactly. I did not follow the KS, but from my limited exposure, they tried to sell Deliverance as M&B with better graphix.

M&B was an extremely successfuly indie game because it focused on a small set of core mechanics. They didn't add... fishing or crafting or whatever stupid garbage people will spend 10 minutes using then move onto something else... It makes sense to focus on what the game is about, then embellish it through expansions.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I always got the impression this game was just another LARPing simulator, like Skyshit, except not done by Bethesda, which makes it better by default, even if it turns out to be shit. But then i don't like to read up on upcoming games. I like to wait until they are out before committing myself to them.

M&B with LARPing seems like a tall order indeed.

 

[Lyric Suite]

They didn't add... fishing or crafting or whatever stupid garbage people will spend 10 minutes using then move onto something else...

By "people" you mean Codexers. That kinda of shit is precisely what Bethesdtards love more than anything. It is why crap like Oblivion sold so much despite being shit at almost every level.

 

[Whiran]

So noobs in RPG genre realized it is much more harder to create complex RPG from scratch at quality they aim ?

This reeks of shutdown.

This reeks of uncontrolled growth (hiring too many people too quickly without an actual plan on how to integrate them into the team let alone the project) and feature creep.

This is a project spiraling out of control and is missing a central managed design. They went off the deep end with "agile" development concepts and lost track of a unified vision (two designers on the same project coming up with completely different solutions - whaaat? bad project management at least have the designers cooperate and collaborate with one another to come up with a single solution - so much waste otherwise.)

At least they recognize that the project is spinning into chaos.

As for the business end of it it isn't a business guy that they want. They want a marketing guy. They are looking at trying to figure out how to position the game in the future and how to deal with distribution while, mistakenly, calling it dealing with publishers.

Valve (steam) isn't a publisher. They are the custodians of a marketplace.

Brick and Mortar chains are a channel.

These guys are lost on how to approach the whole fulfillment of their orders and how to generate more of them. They want a marketing guy who can be a single point of contact with the distribution channels and get the best possible deals that they can (we know that Steam charges 30% to a new developer but there also appears to be some wiggle room if you can convince them to take a smaller chunk for whatever reason.)

They should have not gone on a hiring binge. That can kill companies. I've seen a lot of "pre-IPO" start-ups that did this exact thing and just burned out. I was a part of one once. It was a crazy ride that ended in utter and complete burn-out. Expenses for the company ramped up so fast that the lack of sales was completely unsustainable.

The deliverance folks got a large cash injection and went to the moon with it. They either need to promote managers and create new levels of semi-autonomous decision makers or they need to step back and let some of the new folk go. Since they probably don't want to hire and then fire a bunch of people they really need to figure out how to work with a much larger team than they had.

I wish them luck. They dug themselves a hole and now they need to figure out a way out of it. Hopefully they'll get the project on track to a unified vision that results in a product that works instead of some sort of jumbled mass of neat things that just don't work together.

 

[Smejki]

They didn't want money to create whole game. They wanted money to create a build which they could show to publisher along with userbase so publisher would give them proper money to create game.

Nope.

The build for publishers is almost 1.5 years old and was made only using money from private investor (approx $1.5m)

Since publishers, for whatever reasons ("traditional gaming is dead, tablets are the future!", "we are too small to fund this" and "we already make similar game" being the most common) decided not to fund the development Kickstarter was used to show the private investor that there is audience and to convince him to finance the game development on his own.

The "bit more money" gotten is a small fraction of the overall budget so there is no miscalculation to be had in that sense.