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

[cvv]

I am against celebrity voice acting, unless they can get them cheap.

It's always better to get things cheaper rather than not and yes, it would be more of a gimmick than anything else.

The real value would be in Bean's name raising the profile of the game, especially if the marketing shamans managed to tie KC to ASoIaF in some improbable way. Without that, the great Brian Blessed would be the clearly superior choice.

Celebrity actors charge very different rates for voice acting depending on if you use their name to promote the product or not. They're not that much more expensive than no-name professional actors if you just want the voice and just bury the name deep in the credits list.

I guess that's the reason I haven't had the foggiest idea there was Picard and Boromir in Oblivion until now.

 

[Data4]

I guess that's the reason I haven't had the foggiest idea there was Picard and Boromir in Oblivion until now.

Seriously? Patrick Stewart's name was all anyone could say about Oblivion after that first trailer where his voice was revealed. Sean Bean's voice acting was pretty meh. He was more like sean bean rather than SEAN MOTHERFUCKING BEAN. Much too subdued and sounded like he was about to cry most of the time.

Personally, if they're going to try to catch the popularity of GOT, I think the voice of the guy who played Robert Baratheon would be a be a better fit in the game world. Gruff and growly.

 

[WhiteGuts]

Personally, if they're going to try to catch the popularity of GOT, I think the voice of the guy who played Robert Baratheon would be a be a better fit in the game world. Gruff and growly.

Not a bad fucking idea this. I like it.

 

[agris]

Have they shown any more inventory shots than this? I'd like to see what the Player and Crafting tab have behind them.

Spoiler

The icon art looks pretty good for this being pre-alpha.

 

[dryan]

V's instead of U's make the game more KVLT.

 

[WhiteGuts]

That's how U was written in the midieval era.

 

[Drax]

Ah, the time of Midi, Mod and brightly sounding keygens...

 

[cvv]

That's how U was written in the midieval era.

Sure but it just looks awkward and a bit histrionic, just like the "Deliverance" subtitle.

 

[WhiteGuts]

"Kingdom Come" is even more awkward, but overall it's a title heavy with biblical meaning so I guess it's appropriate even if not very stylish.

 

[Drax]

"King does cum" was the alternative title I believe...

 

[dryan]

I was just poking fun for the sake of it, I have no problem with KVLT VOVVELS. But the "De orthographia bohemica" is from 1412 and apparently already included a "u/ú" .

 

[cvv]

"Kingdom Come" is even more awkward, but overall it's a title heavy with biblical meaning so I guess it's appropriate even if not very stylish.

Hmm.

I absolutely agree it's title heavy and quite unstylish - but that's precisely the reason why I think just "Kingdom Come" would be less title heavy and more stylish.

 

[Darkzone]

"Bohemian Rhapsody" would fit it well. But it would have been a copy/trademark rights problem, in many states.

 

[LivingOne]

http://forum.kingdomcomerpg.com/t/sex-in-the-game/14817/6

http://forum.kingdomcomerpg.com/t/ingame-nudity/5403/341

I haven't followed this much after the KS,but I somehow expected this when I suddenly had the idea to check the forums.

 

[garren]

Ugh, whatever. Same topics made by same horny pre-teenagers. I'm sure the devs know how to make their tasteful rape scenes

 

[LivingOne]

What’s next?
3 comments
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It's over a month since our campaign ended and we’ve been keeping a bit quiet. Everyone is probably curious what we’re up to now. So here I am to tell you what our plans are for the upcoming months.

Time to store all those Kickstarter money (GDC Humble Bundle Party was taking place in the San Francisco Old Mint).
I’ll start with what we did last month. Following a two-month sprint it was time to start dealing with all the stuff that got sidelined, particularly such personal issues as family and taxes. Obviously it was also necessary to reply to the tons of e-mails that had piled up in the inbox and respond to all the interviews we had no time to respond to during the campaign. Following the success of our campaign our doorbell hasn’t stopped ringing and we’ve had a whole series of visits from various newspapers and magazines (like Forbes, for example), as well as a few fellow developers.

There was quite a fundamental change in our position with regard to Microsoft and Sony. Apart from the fact that we finally have dev kits for both platforms, we also know a lot more about our options for publishing and distributing our game and how to get the console version to our backers. We even had a very pleasant and fruitful visit from Sony. Before going into more detail, it’s worth noting that the imminent future looks auspicious for indie developers, which is not something that can convincingly be said for publishers.

Our accountants and lawyers had, and still have, quite fundamental issues with finding out and dealing with how we’re supposed to pay taxes on the Kickstarter money and how much. That's the less fun and less positive side of things. Kickstarter campaign is something our Czech laws aren’t quite able to define. We managed, however, to minimize the problem thanks to the support of the great people from Kickstarter.

Web store
We have also been dealing with the launch of our new web store, where we want to continue with crowd funding and give a chance to people who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay by a credit card on Kickstarter. Unfortunately, it took a little longer than we expected. We had to change the platform the whole thing works on and sort out a whole bunch of peripheral stuff, like coming to an agreement with PayPal, for example. During preparations for launch we found out that, while everything was basically OK in terms of the holders’ platform with offering the console version on Kickstarter, there was a bit of an issue with doing the same on our own website, so until we get it sorted out, it will only be possible to order the PC/Mac/Linux versions. Why, you ask? Well, it seems that times are a-changing so quickly that the lawyers and producers can’t keep pace and get the conditions and contracts sorted out.

We’d like to get the store up and running in a matter of days, ideally int the first week of April, at first provisionally on a trial basis with limited stock and, when we see that everything is working as it should, we’ll add the rest of the rewards.

GDC
Seeing as it was just after both Kickstarter and the San Francisko GDC, the time was ripe for us to hook up with all the potential partners who had contacted us, i.e. primarily publishers, distributors and obviously agents of the various technologies we will be needing.

GDC show floor
Judging by the queries we most often get, what most people are interested in is whether the publishers have wised up and are standing in line to sign us. Not entirely. If any of you thinks that Bobby Kottick caught the first flight to Prague with a bag of cash, sorry to burst your bubble. In the first place, it’s not entirely kosher to do a Kickstarter campaign and then sell the game to a big publisher. And secondly the big publishers are pretty much aware that a thing like that could end up like Facebook and Oculus Rift.

What is worth considering, though, is a distribution deal – one fine day we will need hundreds of thousands (one hopes) of actual boxes for the stores and for that we will need someone who knows what they’re doing, because it’s certainly not our thing. So cutting a deal with someone who will put the game out in their boxes and take a cut of the profits, leaving us with creative freedom, is quite a sensible option.

We’ve already had a whole bunch of meetings with such potential partners. We’ve also heard, of course, from publishers, though mostly just the ones who showed the greatest interest even before our campaign. The offers were a mixed bag and it can be said that the smaller the publisher, the more sensible the offer. It seems the big publishers have yet to grasp the concept that unless they offer serious money and accept a significant share of the risk, nobody actually needs them for anything anymore.

A funny thing happened, where a big publisher described the massive costs they intended investing in marketing, on account of which we would have to give them half our profits. Then a big, prestigious marketing agency told us they would do exactly the same thing for half the cost if we dealt directly with them. What would you do in a situation like that? A deal like that might be OK for someone who doesn't have a dime and really needs someone to pay their marketing costs. But if you do have the cash for that...?

Hotel lobby full of game producers. This is where all the biz is done.
It seems that the smaller publishers are much more sensible. I get the feeling they have a much better idea about the way the world is moving.

I’ve been telling everyone from the very start of the company that it would probably be best for us to put the game out ourselves (if we had the cash for it, of course). Following all the meetings, the rest of our GDC delegation also came to a similar conclusion, including our investor’s representative. We can easily put out the digital version of the game for PC and console and share with smaller distributors, who have been much more forthcoming than the big guys, on the boxed game. In the past you needed a publisher as a go-between for a whole range of services that developers didn't have access to, but today the only thing they have going for them is money, and if they don't want to spread it round or you don't need it, then they're basically good for nothing.

Apart from that, we also investigated at the GDC what kind of things we were capable of doing in-house and for how much – motion capture, recording, marketing, localization and other such services. We were pleasantly surprised how all of these things are developing. Only a year ago, if you wanted to do mo-cap of a face, you had to pay a company a lot of money for every second of processed film, which in our case would have meant a five figure sum in dollars, whereas today (finally) the same company will sell you the cameras and the software for a few thousand to do it yourself. Of course, you can also buy a Kinect and software from another firm and somewhat surprisingly achieve very similar results. Anyhow, this is stuff we will not have to deal with for another few months. For now, it’s enough to get an idea of prices and what’s on offer.

Development news
So, what’s happening in the studio? How is the game progressing? Well, we have finally been able to afford to recruit some new people and our team has grown practically overnight from 30 people to 50 and next month there will be 60 of us. Truth be told, we weren’t expecting it to go so quickly, but given the delay caused by the whole “we don’t have a publisher” affair, that’s fine. We originally planned to have 50 people last summer already, so we have some catching up to do.

Who has been added to our ranks? Obviously a few experienced commandos from the now defunct 2K Czech Prague studio, whose experience makes them a valuable addition: the senior character artist and concept guy Mikuláš; Martin, who handled the car models in Mafia, and others. In addition, we have lots of new scripters, five concept artists and, most importantly, there are now eight of us designers. On the other hand, our bid for one programmer was upped by WETA in New Zealand, who are unfortunately still in a different league.

With the arrival of the new recruits, space started getting a little tight and our offices started to look like the main railway station in Paris when it snows – shoulder to shoulder. Our graphic artists, for example, are now obliged to sit in the open space editorial office of one of the biggest Czech dailies, which is based in a neighboring building, because we simply had nowhere to put them. So we are also anticipating a move to bigger premises, which is naturally very fraught too.

The new designers working directly with me have the disadvantage that I can’t yet give them my full attention until we deal with such “trivialities” as a long-term plan, offices and our web store. From our collaboration so far, though, I have to say it’s an enormous relief not having to struggle alone for days with every idea, but being able to talk it over with like-minded people and tweak it over lunch, which so far is working out pretty well. For example, the mechanisms we came up with for playing the bard are awesome. But we’ll come back to that later.

Upcoming months
Which leads me to what’s coming next and how our communication with you will progress. Obviously, blogs like this one will continue, where we will update you roughly once a month on how development is progressing, what we’re doing and what’s new.

We had a nice chat with Star Citizen guys (Dan and Jason Spangler)
We will also be communicating on the forums. I admit I was concerned how it would look with the forums and whether we might have a problem with over-anticipation and some extreme ideas and reactions, but so far I'm delighted with the forums. The debates are very cultivated and to the point and lots of good ideas are coming out of them, as well as advice from history buffs who know some things better than we do. To give just two examples out of many: who would have known that among our fans there would actually be two experts on animal husbandry to advise us on sheep AI, or that someone would know what medieval hens looked like? Naturally we will make use of the forums to get feedback from you. I hope that the creative, friendly atmosphere there continues and I’ll try to read it religiously, because up to now I really haven’t had much time for it.

From time to time we will try to shoot the odd video update, in which we will show new stuff in the game. How regularly we will be able to do that remains to be seen. All these things take quite a bit of time, after all. On the other hand, though, they help us get valuable feedback. If and when this happens, we shall post about it on our Facebook, Youtube and Twitter.

And obviously in around six months there will be the 'Alpha Access", i.e. a piece of the game that we will gradually (around once every two months) add new features to for you to try out and give feedback on so we can tweak them into an ideal state if at all possible. As soon as the Alpha is out there, we’re planning a lot of discussion with fans about what they like or don’t like, although, of course, there are things that we, as the authors, regard as sacrosanct and it could happen that we won't back down whatever the objections.

So those are our plans for the future. Stay tuned for further information and don’t forget to add us to your Facebook, Youtube and Twitter!

Dan Vávra, Creative Director

 

[JarlFrank]

I was just poking fun for the sake of it, I have no problem with KVLT VOVVELS. But the "De orthographia bohemica" is from 1412 and apparently already included a "u/ú" .

Yeah but in the middle ages and early modern age nobody really cared much about which form of u to use... u, v and w were pretty much completely interchangeable.
(so just using these three letters randomly would be the best choice)

 

[agris]

Saw this on Gamebanshee, a new interview

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Kingd...Kingdom-Come-Deliverance-Interview-1118601/2/

I don't think there's any new info in it, except perhaps some of the details regarding their deal with Robert's Space Industries. The 'tech trade' they're doing is a 'you show me yours, I'll show you mine' type deal. No financial exchange, it seems.

page 1 is in German but just summarizes known info on the game.

EDIT: Man, I haven't been following this closely but that live steamed ~60 minute video makes me sad. Looks like quest markers are on the compass, and about 11 minutes in, whats-his-name from Warhorse (the one in the upper RH corner) said that they were going to modernize the language. The more period-correct usage and accents are quite nice.. why would they change this?

 

[Metro]

I'm sure we can expect it in 2018.

 

[Santander02]

Man, I haven't been following this closely but that live steamed ~60 minute video makes me sad. Looks like quest markers are on the compass, and about 11 minutes in, whats-his-name from Warhorse (the one in the upper RH corner) said that they were going to modernize the language. The more period-correct usage and accents are quite nice.. why would they change this?

Well, how would anyone know what medieval bohemian accent are expressions sounded like? Even with english, I believe medieval people sounded nothing like the ye olde faux medieval speech used by the popular media , so I'm okay with using modern language as long as it doesn't go the "fuck, nigga, cunt" way.

 

[Cadmus]

I haven't seen this gameplay video I think..
I hope they get rid of those horrible red blood effects upon hitting the enemy and that horrible wooosh sound when slowing down the time.

Also, the interviewer is a retard for asking about clothing and suggesting that OMG EVERYONE WANTS EPIC HIGH FANTASY WHY DOES YOUR GAME SUCK SO BAD?

 

[agris]

Update #25

Project Update #25: Back to work!
Posted by Warhorse Studios ♥ Like
So another month has passed and here I am to tell you what we’ve been up to. A lot of stuff has happened: we launched our own crowdfunding platform, developed several new game features and finally started designing quests, to name just a few things.

We were inspired also by the largest medieval battle in Libušín
Crowd funding continues
The most important news for us is that we’ve finally launched our own crowdfunding platform. It really took us a long time due to the whole range of various issues that arise when you want to make a complex system that must have no glitches, in view of the fact that it’s about money.

The process involved lawyers, negotiations with PayPal and an attempt to use an existing platform, which we later rejected and created our own… Anyway, the outcome is that if you register with the same e-mail that you use on Kickstarter, you will see your existing pledge and you can also raise it. One registration will then do you for access both to the crowd funding and the forums and it should be possible at any time even for new backers to raise their current pledge.

We launched our own crowd funding platform to support us through PayPal or credit cards
At this moment not all the tiers from Kickstarter are in the store. Take it for now as a sort of dry run and if everything works as it should, most likely we will even add the majority of the pledges from Kickstarter, apart from the ones that were limited and sold out. That does not mean that we’ll never want to make new swords, for example, however when we do, we’d do it in such a way that our Kickstarter backers would still have something exclusive.

So how is the store working out? It’s not of course as massive as the Kickstarter campaign itself, but it’s not bad. Even despite the relatively quiet launch, we collected more than 17,000 dollars in the first week. If that keeps up we’ll be satisfied.

Characters and animations
I mentioned last time that new people have joined our ranks. One of them is Honza Zámečník, who knows how to do almost everything you can think of and exceptionally well too. So Honza and our main character developer Jirka have started thinking about how we will create the characters and how we will animate them.

Our 3D models made with just one camera
Literally around the corner from our studio is a company that has a top-notch 3D scanner, so our guys of course started experimenting with whether we could manage to create a 3D scanning setup cheaply ourselves, and the results of their attempts with a couple of cameras and a cell phone look really promising. Judge for yourselves:

Our 3D models made with just one camera
So far, it looks like the characters in our game will be very detailed 3D scans of real people. Apart from that, we also started dealing with how to get the figures in motion, not only their bodies, but also their faces. That can be a bit of a problem with an RPG, because it contains a huge amount of text and it is practically unthinkable (and especially unaffordable) to use the best possible method – performance capture – for all of them. So for now it looks like we will use performance capture for the cut scenes, and some other solution, that allows batch processing of large amount of data for the branched dialogues and ingame stuff.

Well, since technology is progressing in leaps and bounds, it turns out that motion capture has advanced so far and become so cheap that it might be worth our while buying our own small studio, which would be equal in quality to the existing studios, but cost a fraction of their prices, and might even be cheaper than paying for recording in a big studio abroad.

New features
Every few weeks we have a company-wide presentation of the new stuff that has been created during the previous weeks. Since, due to having to catch up on the whole backlog, I haven’t had much time for dealing with the actual development, I was quite surprised how many new things had been created.

In the first place, we have the archery practically done, including most of the RPG stats connected with it and I dare say it’s that sophisticated we could put out an archery simulator ;-) The scripters then set up shooting of forest game, so you can set out hunting hare with your new bow and I gotta say anyone who manages to hit one of those bunnies is a sharpshooter. It really is awesome.

Our AI has learned to get characters to create queues in front of a door, give right of way to each other and close doors behind them. The horse riding has improved a bit, so for example when the rider now jumps from his mount on a hill, he drops perpendicular to the ground, and on the other hand he can mount the horse even in relatively complicated conditions. The model of the horse itself is being redesigned. The former one was a little short and when galloping sometimes looked a bit funny, so the horses are getting new models and a new skeleton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsXvodDn5JM&list=UUIqUdfkbYmCGM-YRmk28zCg
Apart from the new castle they’ve been working on for some time, the graphic designers also created very realistic creeks, the programmers have added digging holes in the ground and shields are gradually working their way into the combat system.

Planning and design
As far as me and design are concerned, this month we still haven’t gotten into the working regime I’d like to see. Fortunately we’ve managed to sort out most of the backlog. We created a long-term roadmap of the tasks for the game. We’ve finally decided, hopefully, where we will be moving to next month, because we no longer fit into the existing space.

I also gave lots of interviews and we had a visit from our friends at the German magazine PC Games, which published a long, exclusive preview and video on us. Now we can finally take a break from the media for a while. I had five lectures at universities and startup clubs, which is a useful activity, because in our country there are not many options for study focused purely on game development and so it is necessary to popularize games so people will have a place to work here in the future. There are never enough good programmers and at these presentations, which were stuffed to bursting, I addressed several thousand. If you’re interested in the footage you can find it here:

• BizIT – Budoucnost herního průmyslu (complete lecture in Czech),
• Imagine Cup Developers Day (short video in Czech),
• Dan Vávra o historickém a výzkumném aspektu RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance (interview in Czech),
• Czech scene teams up for Pioneers Unplugged #4 (reportage in English).

Meanwhile, the designers have been writing diligently. We started from the simplest activities and events in the game to get in sync before getting stuck into some serious quests. The problem is, since I don’t have time, I can’t even get round to reading the things that are being done. Seven people are capable together of generating more than a hundred pages of text in a week, which I then have to read, comment and usually also target where the changes should be heading.

So we finally came round to designing one quest together so we would all be on the same page and each could apply all the necessary skills. After all, writing even a very trivial quest for an open world game is really a whole thing. You have to constantly bear in mind the player’s freedom and deal with “What happens when the player doesn’t do something he’s supposed to, does something he isn’t supposed to, doesn’t have something he should have, injures someone who he's going to need etc.” Most greenhorns therefore often slip into writing situations in the style of “The player comes to the square, where at that moment...”, or “Then the player will follow the soldiers to...” The question of what happens when he comes there at midnight or he doesn’t follow the soldiers usually takes them by surprise

Living history
Well, since the biggest living history and re-enactment event here, the Libušín Medieval Battle, has again taken place, I couldn’t miss that either. About a thousand warriors met there again and brutally hacked at each other indiscriminately while their better halves and more peace-loving friends presented life in a period camp. My photos are here.

In conclusion I’m adding links to all the various interviews and articles that have appeared about our game in recent days.

• PC Games Hardware: Kickstarter-RPG Kingdom Come: Selbst Schafherden und Objekte haben eine KI (about artificial intelligence of sheep in German),
• Digital Worlds #3: Kingdom Come: Deliverance (video preview in English),
• CzechGamer.cz: O umělé inteligenci v Kingdom Come: Deliverance (inteview in Czech),
• CDR.cz: S Danem Vávrou o Kingdom Come: Deliverance, jak vznikla idea středověku? (video interview in Czech),
• Hype Tank: 5 reasons why to give Warhorse all the money! (video preview in English).

Thanks for your support!

Dan Vávra, creative director

PS: Watch out for more news at our social channels

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google
• YouTube

Of note is the new video, which shows a chubby Peter O'Toole getting buggered

(not really)

 

[Cadmus]

Oh man that battle at Libušín looks great, I wish I had gone there!

 

[Haba]

 

[WhiteGuts]

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