Hey gang. A little birdie told me about this thread, and suggested I should drop in and say hello. So...HI! :D
First off, thanks for being fans of BAK, and still caring enough about it that you're still chatting about it twenty three years after the fact. It's astonishing, honestly. I know that all of our team feel very fortunate to have had that two and a half years together, and we wouldn't trade that time for anything in the world. And it's not just because BAK ended up being so popular. When a small team like that spends that long working that closely together, you turn into a family, and fortunately for us, it was the kind of family you
want to have. I miss working with those guys nearly every day. I was on teams before and after, but my Dynamix days are some of the happiest of my life.
SO...it's evident a little housekeeping is needed in regards to questions, comments, speculations about the blog, potential games, kickstarters, and the question of what the hell I'm doing with my life in general.
1) OH MY GOD NEAL IS MAKING A GAME! - Given where we are, I'm guessing that's probably the issue that's uppermost in everyone's minds. Am I or am I not building a new game? Or am I rebuilding an old one? Or am I doing something else? What the [EXPLETIVE DELETED] am I up to?!?!?
The simple answer is this. I'm screwing around with a new toy to see what it can do. This time around, it just
happens to be a game engine. Rather than slamming on the brakes for a few months to come up with a new design, the easiest thing to do is to take something I already have a design for, and try to implement it using the tools in Lumberyard (aka a black box version of the Crytek engine with a new paint job and spinning rims). Even more importantly, I needed something that I could reasonably create myself without needing to enslave an army of artists and programmers to implement. BAK fit that requirement beautifully. As it stands, I should be able to recreate about 70% of BAK's original functionality without having to get anyone else involved. The morass of the combat engine still lies ahead, but for now I'm focused on building up from the simplest system to the most complex, starting with the dialogue / keyword system (which of this writing is about a week away from being a fully-functional replica of the original). I'm also re-skinning the U.I. to be more in line with what a mid-1990s evolution of the interface might look like (largely for the sheer hell of it).
The larger question I know some of you will be asking is, "is this the beginning of a full scale Krondor reboot / remake"?!?! No. Just to be explicitly clear, No. Nein. Non. Nie. Hakuna. Hindi. нет. いいえ. नहीं. خیر. Ú-thand. Ghobe'. I could throw some more in there, but I'm pretty sure you get the point. There are any number of reasons that won't happen, starting capitally with the fact that the license to Ray's universe is tied up. The last time I bumped into Ray at ComicCon two years ago, some folks there brought the issue up, and Ray made it clear that right now Midkemia -- and everything in it -- is tied to a license that's going to be around for a while, and a BAK remake is nowhere on the licensee's radar. The door to an officially sanctioned title is locked and bolted. And while I
could try to create the entire game on my own...I don't like being sued. Really. I'm not the least bit fond of it. I can guarantee that the millisecond I put BAK Remastered up on Steam, I'd have a team of lawyers at my front door with a chainsaw endoscope ready to educate me on the fine points of copyright law (google "Star Trek Axanar"). Even if a lawsuit wasn't an issue, I wouldn't want to do that to Ray. If you read my blog about all the effort I put into trying to respect his universe, understand that I also respect his rights as a fellow writer. This is his sandbox. He let me play in it a while for which I will be eternally grateful. We never became close buddies, but I learned a lot from him, and I'd like to stay on good terms. As it is, with my limiting this project to the first chapter and the first zone of the game, we're already treading a bit on his territory, but at best it will serve as a technical experiment rather than a re-release of
Betrayal at Krondor.
Why do all of this? Because this is how I learn things. If you hand me a tool, I almost never follow the tutorials. Whether it's Maya, or After Effects, or Corona, or the program dejour, I always learn things best when I come up with something I want to build, and then I just
do it. Things stick much better with me that way. I've always been a tad ADD to begin with, so by learning what I need to know when I need to know it helps me keep information anchored where it needs to be.
Of course if all goes well, at the end of this litlte project of mine, I'll have more than just a tutorial exercise. I'll have the guts of BAK's core systems yoked to a completely modern game engine, which is turn is connected to the largest distributor of content on the planet (i.e. Amazon) with all the advertising reach that a major distributor can provide. From there it will only be a matter of swapping out some data to create another game altogether, essentially a 100% mod project. But that's a loooooong way down the road, and I have a lot of other issues to tackle before before we get
there. For now now, this is a test, and only a test. But certainly there are some exciting possibilities.
2) THORVALLA AND KICKSTARTERS - Someone above mentioned my connection to Guido Henkel's failed
Thorvalla Kickstarter campaign and was asking questions about what the heck happened there. I just want to clarify this a bit so people understand not only what my role was, but also to give my own take on what went wrong there, and why I hate Kickstarter and crowdfunding in general.
To give a little perspective, I want to flash back a bit. In the late 1990s, I was on the hunt for a new gig when I found an ad for a new company slated to develop a super hero MMO funded by Squaresoft. The company was looking for someone with a rep as a strong narrative designer to help create the world, but also someone who understood game mechanics. Dropping in for an interview, I found myself in the office of Guido Henkel, best known as the producer of
Planescape: Torment and creator of the
Realms of Arkania. Guido and I hit things off, and were admirers of each other's work, and it was pretty clear that I was the lead candidate for the job they wanted to fill. They told me it would be a few weeks before they'd be making any hiring decisions, but they'd call me as soon as they were ready to make a move. A few weeks went by. I dropped Guido a line and was told that there was a temporary hiring freeze because of a political situation within the larger Square corporation, but they'd be contacting me soon. A few more weeks went by. I made another call, and this time Guido had news, but it wasn't good. Squaresoft's much-vaunted first movie
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within had tanked at the box office and the result was catastrophic for the company as a whole. They were planning to close the San Diego office as part of a large company layoff, and that would be the end of that particular job opportunity for me, but the experience had at lesast introduced me to Guido (as well as programmer Daniele Gaetano with whom I'd later work at Rapid Eye Entertainment on
Lords of Everquest).
Following the collapse of the Squaresoft subsidiary (whose name I'm currently blanking on...eMusement I think?), Guido and I remained intermittently in touch, largely only bumping into each other at professional conferences. With the advent of Facebook, however, Guido and I re-established contact around the time he'd begun work on his
Jason Dark novels, and I monitored his success with them with interrest as I was curious about the possibilities of publishing short stories under my own indie label. Because we were both writer / game designer hybrids, we remained interested in somehow working with each other on a project, but we'd have to wait again until the Kickstarter revolution before we got the chance.
Fast forward to 2013 and the Year of the Kickstarter blockbuster. Double Fine shook the gaming community with the announcement of a record $3 million dollar success story, and every game developer on the planet sat up and took notice. Clearly there was a new funding paradigm in development, and like so many others, Guido saw it as an opportunity to make an indie game without the frustrations of dealing with the large game corporations who no longer had the time, or patience, for non Triple AAA titles. It was a position that many "old school" developers found themselves in. When most of us entered the industry, we made the games we wanted to make, and then we found the audiences who wanted to buy them. But with the advent of MMOs and Free to play, the industry reversed in such a way that put the gamers in the driving seat. New or unique ideas were thrown out, supplanted by polls and metrics-driven design that only supported the implementation of projects that would appeal to a generic audience. Guido, like so many others, was looking for an opportunity to make a game that he loved again, but sadly he came face to face with the soul-sucking chainsaw that is public crowdfunding.
I couldn't tell you when he got started on the actual development of the concept for
Thorvalla. I also couldn't tell you who did the concept art, nor who built the Unity prototype that was showing before the end of the campaign. I wasn't there. The first I knew about it was through a Facebook posting two weeks prior to the launch of the campaign. Privately I'd dropped him a note, saying that if he needed a writer for the project once it was funded, I'd be glad to help out. I was intrigued by the possibility of what this new platform could do. A day or two later he pinged me back, asking if I might be willing to bash out a mythos backstory to use in the campaign, so I cranked out something based on the general notes he'd sent to me. In keeping with
Thorvalla's nordic setting, I approached it like an operatic, over-the-top summary. It had some fun hooks, and would have been a cool setting in which to play.
I'll be honest when I say I had been concerned about the success of the project even before the
Thorvalla campaign launched. Not because I didn't think the game concept was viable -- it was -- but purely from the standpoint that I didn't think we had the pre-publicity that I felt would be required for us to get any traction. Going back to traditional marketing, I knew that game companies had to have game magzine covers and articles at least six months in advance of the actual release. It took that long for word and excitement to build for a project. Even in the ultra accelerated world of the Internet, it can still take weeks or months for new projects to get enough heat to attract sufficient attention. You need blog posts, and game reports, and podcasts, and tweets, and they all need to be pointing to your launch day as THE THING THAT CANNOT BE MISSED. But those things weren't in place. The launch was a whisper in a sealed vault in a subterranean cave shielded by the cone of silence. Even if we'd had a machine that turned donuts into gold bricks, we'd never have funded because nobody knew we were there. By the end of the third day, I felt the writing was on the wall.
There is an unrealistic, idiotic self-fulfilling prophesy that happens on most all gaming Kickstarter campaigns, not just
Thorvalla, and it goes something like this. If on your first day of your campaign you don't raise at least 25% of your goal, you're dead in the water. You're done. Just give up, pick up your toys, and go home. Nobody loves you.
This makes absolutely zero sense. What's the point of a 30-day campaign if the first day is the only one that matters? But time and time again, if the game doesn't fully fund on the first day, or if it doesn't at least reach that 25% mark, everyone that's paying any attention to the project declares it dead. And guess what? If the first thing that you hear about a project is a prophesy from the game journalism gods that the game won't fund, then nobody is going to bother to go an visit the site. Even people who like the idea won't pledge because they don't want to back a project which won't fund (which makes no sense because you aren't out any money if the project fails to fund). And it becomes an unstoppable feedback loop. It's all or nothing in the first day, or a steady 30-day cruise to an already won goal with ridiculous stretch goals. Granted, there are numerous exceptions to this rule, but this is how it plays out more often than not. Without question, this played a part in the failure of that campaign as it has done with so many others.
As to the statement about my failing to get my industry friends to back it, honestly, I'm small potatoes. I've never made any claim to be a rockstar in my industry. But that said, bigger names than mine -- with way the hell more connections than mine -- have tried and failed on Kickstarter. Brenda Braithwaite, who is a regularly featured speaker at GDC, failed her Kickstarter. Her co-creator, and now hubby, John Romero was part of the same Kickstarter. To draw a circle around it, let's be clear that
the co-creator of DOOM failed at a kickstarter. In twenty years John's name will be on gaming's Mt. Rushmore somewhere, and all that will be left of me are a lot of really long Internet posts.
Another example was Chris Taylor and Wildman who had Gas Powered Games. I could parade out a long list of much more famous developers, and you'd see that they exploded on the launch pad much in the same way that Thorvalla did. The lesson was, and still is, in the world of crowdfunding, no one gives a rat's ass about what you've done before. It might initially draw attention to your campaign, but once you get people there, the idea in front of them
right now has to be what you get them excited with.
In addition to the problem of the first day prophesy, another thing that I know came up with both Guido's
Thorvalla project, and then later during the
Wildman project, is the public's expectation that you already have an arsenal of levels and art and videos and a ton of crap to show on day one, as if the Kickstarter weren't there to raise funds to get it built, but instead was some form of pre-sales platform. But this is a
Catch 22 situation for developers. Pledgers want to see everyrhing immediately. They'll fill your campaign forums with complaints if everything isn't on the table on day one. I don't blame them, because you want to know what the heck you're paying for. But at the same time, the stuff you're expected to show is the game....i.e. the thing you're raising the funds for so you can afford to have it built so you can show it to them.
Nobody is coming to Kickstarter unless they're there to raise funds to hire a creative team. And as much as gamers will tell you it's all about the gameplay, if you're showing prototypes and stand-in art -- if you aren't showing final game art -- they'll say the game is an obvious P.O.S., and they won't pledge. This is Kobyashi Maru on steroids. And it you do it for 24 hours a day, 7 days a weeks, for a month. Sixty days if you're suicidal. You're lucky if you haven't had an aneurysm by the end of it, and you'll come out of it absolutely hating the people for whom you're trying to make something cool.
I'm not saying that the above reasons are the sole reasons for why the
Thorvalla campaign failed. I know that lots of people had very different reasons, but I will say that those were chief contributing factors. As far as my ability to have saved it goes, it wasn't
my project to save. That was all Guido. I pitched in, did what I could, but sadly that wasn't enough. I hope that at one point that the world of crowdfunding will mature enough that there's a more reasonable enviornment in which creators can bring their projects forward and not feel as though they've signed up for a public stoning.
3) NEAL IS "TRYING" TO BE A FILMMAKER - To quote Yoda on this count, "there is no try, only do." I am not
trying to be a filmmaker, I am one. I know that it's very tempting to button hole people into one category, but I do a lot of creative stuff that has
nothing to do with computer gaming. I'm not unique in this. Swing a dead cat in a room full of game developers, and you'll hit peole who are actors, who are musicians, who are active in politics, who are race car drivers, who do a whole plethora of other things either for fun or for profit.
You guys know me here because of the games I've made, but years before I ever touched my first computer game console, I was making super 8 monster movies in my back yard. They were TERRIBLE, but I made them. I had a subscription to CINEMAGIC magazine which was the thing you read if you wanted to make your own science fiction, fantasy, and horror movies (and consequently I'm currently shooting a documentary about the people who founded that magazine and the careers it launched -- i.e. Guillermo Del Toro, J.J. Abrams, Robert Rodriguez, and many others). My college degree was not in computer science, but in radio / television / film production. I got my first job at New World Computing because of a series of radio dramas I'd produced. I was also an electronic musician and brought with me a lot of knowledge of MIDI which came in handy when were first starting to develop music for the MT32 sound module ---
And I could go on. But you don't need me to. You get the point. Just because I like to do other things doesn't mean I'm any less interested in making games. And the previous poster is correct in pointing out that I ran a Kickstarter for a film that so far still hasn't been made. Absolutely and unequivocally true. I still hope to get that project made, but at the time I was planning it, I had a host of resources readily available to me for free, but between the launch of our campaign and when we could have realistically started shooting, that situation radically changed, and has only become more complicated over time. Three of our actors moved out of town, two because SAG members (meaning we'd have to pay them Union wages that weren't even remotely in our budged), and one has since grown up and become a series regular on "The Last Ship". At some point it will get made, but it will take a radically different form than what we'd originally planned. No one has been more disappointed than I am in this situaton, but it's not something I've given up on.
Although the film we'd started off to film exploded on the launch pad, it started a lot of great stuff for us. We were able to equip ourselves with the film gear we needed to become an indie cinematography unit in San Diego. For the past four years we've been shooting a Star Trek related documentary featuring George Takei, Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, Harve Bennett and many others. We've filmed promotional spots for the American Cancer Society, and miscellaneous other charity events. We shot material for a steampunk web series called
The Crypto-Historians from Star Trek writer Jimmy Diggs, and last year a short that I wrote, directed and produced called
The Case of Evil toured 38 film festivals in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. (including screenings at DragonCon and GenCon), and picked up 6 awards including best horror film, and best screenplay. There's even more stuff on the horizon that we're looking to do, and regardless of whether or not more game work comes my way, I'll always be making films. I am first, last, and always a storyteller, and I'll always try to find new ways on new platforms in which I can share them.
Okay, so that was probably WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more than any of you were looking for. But what did you expect from the guy who wrote a game that had more text in it than any of the novels in Feist's universe.
Peace out.
