Development Update #31

Another fortnight, another blogpost! Rumor has it that Lord Manhammer had to change his name to “Lord Querkius”, and he’s knee deep in admin & branding work to make himself known throughout Barya again with his new moniker.

This means I get to hijack the development blog again and show you what we’ve been up to for the last two weeks! So let’s get right to it!

PIXEL ART GOODNESS

Team art have been working on pixel art all over the place, focusing on our campaign. Specifically our first campaign map to make it look as jaw dropping as possible. I for one, think they have done amazing progress, and if you stick around until the end of the post I’ll show you an amazing mood video that Patrik created.

AURELIAN CLERIC

Martí, one of our pixel artists, worked on finishing up our latest Loth troops from the animation sketches created by Emanu. The result is fantastic!

AI IS GETTING BETTER

This is the more scary part of the blog post. Marcus improved the architecture to have the AI make smarter decisions. I’ll never win a game again!

We are not were we want to be, but we are getting closer. The changes we make now are mainly made to prepare for the things we want to do in the future.

However, we found and fixed why our AI seemed to have a death wish and always attacked the most difficult hostile around. It also didn’t recruit troops as fast as we wanted it to. All of that should be a bit better now.

FIXING BUGS

As all game development teams, we have bugs to fix. This sprint we have squashed quite a few. Most of them are difficult to show in a visual way. So I’ll highlight this clipping issue that Patrik solved earlier this week.

One bug was that our objects would clip into the ground at certain camera angles. Since our ground is 3D and our objects are billboarded 2D sprites, this is a fairly unique problem.

Patrik fixed this by doing the following changes:

• Moved wielders slightly towards the camera

• Hard cap at 55 degrees for all billboards

• Reduced camera angle from 65 to 60

• Unified the way we lean our landscape backwards for battle and adventure, and applied it to battle

It’s one of those issues that looks easy to fix on the outside, but is actually very complicated. Above is another image of the fix from the side.

CAMPAIGN

All our teams have been working with a campaign focus lately. Carl is working in an iterative fashion to fine tune our maps for the Arleon campaign and is making sure that all the other campaigns will make sense story wise as he goes along.

Can’t show you much from this yet, but it is very exciting!

DIALOGUE SYSTEM & TRADING

A part of our campaigns need wielders to talk to each other - which is what I and Christian have worked on lately. A challenge was to make this work through our in game level editor, and we still have some work to do.

Robin is working currently on the ability to trade troops & artifacts between your wielders! It’s a feature we wanted for a long time and it will be great to be able to play with that soon.

BURNED VILLAGE

And finally, here’s the amazing video showing a bit of collected progress from the art team. I really think it looks stunning, what do you think?

Phew! That was more than I intended to share ;) Hope you’ll enjoy it! I need to get back to fixing the camera system for the dialogues now.

This is also the last blog post of the year. Take care and we’ll see each other in 2021!

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Please note that this is a dev blog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.

Building value as a game developer

You build games, right? Of course you do! So let me take you out of your comfort zone and suggest that you build games AND value. Whether you like it or not. The question is, do you nurture that value and make it grow or let it go to waste?

A story about value creation

A lot of game developers bank everything on one game release. They pour passion, time and money into a game and then hope for the best. If the game succeeds, amazing! If the game fails, well, too bad. This might force the developer to make drastic changes, or even worse, close down the business. But let me yet again challenge that perception. I built a game studio along with a few other co-founders several years ago. We released very few games that generated more revenue than the cost of development. In fact, we were more than once close to going bankrupt. Even so, in the end we managed to sell the company. All founders got a nice payback for the time, passion and money invested, even though the company never really was financially very successful! So, while we never created short term value (a hit game with great sales) we did create long term value which was realized over time.

So, my statement is this: A game developer does not have to create a hit game to create value for its founders. Sounds weird? Not really.

“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

— - Warren Buffett

How to create and grow your value

To an experienced entrepreneur the following advices might seem like no brainers, or just plain silly. But to an indie game developer with more passion for games than business development, the points below should be a guide for simple ways to build additional value besides the actual games.

Keep your contracts in place

Make sure all assets created actually belong to the business and not the individuals working on the game. Keep an NDA as a standard part of the employment or freelance contracts. Fight before you sign contracts, not after. If you get an opportunity to sell your business, merge with a larger entity or need to buy a partner out, your papers need to be in order.

Maintain ownership of your assets

This means all assets, such as code, art and IP. If you work with a publisher it is not certain you can retain all rights. But, you always need to negotiate to get your part of any deal as reasonable as possible. Perhaps retaining your code ownership is ok with a partner if you sign a perpetual license for them to use the code? Keep in mind that a publisher often ask for more than they really need, just for the sake of not missing out on any potential upside. But they can often be persuaded to step away from their standard contracts.

Say no to bad deals

This kind of relates to the point above. You'll always have to ask yourself: What is my dream of making games worth? I've turned down several high budget projects simply because I felt the other part was asking for too much. Furthermore, when potential partners start to play tricks and show poor manners already when negotiating, it is in my experience a sign of worse things to come. Getting stuck with a shitty contract is a painful experience and will keep your focus in the wrong place.

Maintain low costs, when possible

Keep an eye on all your costs and always negotiate. If you can lower costs with 10% and increase income with 10% it adds up nicely. Keeping a low cost profile is generally the way to go. However, sometimes you need to make investments in order to scale up. As an example: My old studio developed an online game that grew exponentially and caused our servers to crash three times in three weeks. Instead of putting in the cash for additional server power we opted for cheaper solutions. In hindsight it was a waste of future revenues to NOT invest in hardware at that time.

Diversify your revenue streams

Relying on only one source of revenue is risky. If you can place your eggs in several baskets instead of one, do so. This isn't always easy as you might focus on developing one game. But you should at least consider what options you have to generate revenue from several separate sources.

Take care of what you create

In my experience, developers often love to build specific solutions to all problems. It is rarely worth it from a business perspective. But lets say you do build solutions for specific problems, because you can't find an out of the box solution. Then you are building something that others potentially could be interested in. You should recognize this as a value. Perhaps you could sell or license the solution to others?

Network

Keep in mind that business deals are made between people and not the business entities themselves, regardless of what the contract says. In order to boost your value creation you'll need to get out and meet others. Building a reputation and getting to know the right people is a great way to increase your chances of growing value.

Take reasonable risks

I basically mean that you don't always have to stay on the treaded path. The road to success is rarely straight and more than often you can find value in places you'd never imagined.

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In the end, it comes down to having a mindset. Building value is not really hard, certainly not harder than making a great game. So, why not do both?

Starting over again, doing it the right way

It is a rare treat indeed to get to start on a new game. I started a game development company along with some buddies several years ago. We created advergames, facebook games and eventually mobile games. We produced over seventy games spanning various genres. Some of them did ok, a few did amazing but most of them never got much attention beyond a marketing campaign. Never really having funds to give every game the time and love it needed was frustrating. Eventually we sold the company and moved on with our lives.

And here we are again. Starting a new studio and working on something we passionately love - Strategy games! With funding from the amazing team at Coffee Stain Studios and a team of great developers. This time we are doing things the way we always wanted. Let me share some of our core beliefs.

We believe in SCRUM
It works well for us. SCRUM helps us with keeping our development in line with what our stakeholders expect and making sure that we do not loose sight of our target. It is also great to have a methodology to fall back onto when things are shaky. Being agile within constraints is a great thing.

We believe in work/life balance
This means that we do not work overtime. We take care to plan our days carefully and we make sure to allow both flexibility and structure, where needed. We work together, but we also play games together and enjoy our very Swedish fika every day. We encourage ourselves to work out, stay curious and having fun at work.

We believe in building something long term
As we are driven by passion, we want to maintain it and help it grow. We discuss very openly about personal goals as well as company goals. How can we align targets and how can we create a workplace where we enjoy our work each day? Building great games take time and if we enjoy that time, then better games we are going to create.

In the end, it all comes down to what we want to do with our lives. We choose to work with games because well, we love games. Creating games is a labour of love and for us, the process is equally as important as the result.