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[Sunburned Games]

This is just a quick one, my most pressing concern today are the studio's underwhelming Christmas decorations!

Last week one of our articles got featured on the the Made with Unity front-page. It is a chat with Kevin, our remote art director, who can describe our art style so much more eloquently than I would ever be able to.

We are also in our last week on Kickstarter, which has been a struggle from the start, and we focused on the fun aspects of it after we had the Steam Greenlight in the bag. 'Santa: Our last day is Sunday!'

The last few weeks of 2015 are spent planning and designing stuff.

Best.
Joachim @ Sunburned Games

 

[oldblood]

Sorry to see the Kickstarter didn't take off. Glad to see you're riding it to the end, I see so many projects cancel themselves when they think they may fail, just ride it out... I've seen crazy things happen in the last week of a Kickstarter. Best of luck on the final days!

[Sunburned Games]

Sorry to see the Kickstarter didn't take off. Glad to see you're riding it to the end, I see so many projects cancel themselves when they think they may fail, just ride it out... I've seen crazy things happen in the last week of a Kickstarter. Best of luck on the final days!

Thanks! I am old enough and Americanised sufficiently to be able to deal with it. You get up, dust yourself off and continue. I think in general we Europeans are petrified by the thought of something being unsuccessful. Explains the low entrepreneurship rates across the continent.

Cheers,
Joachim 

[Sunburned Games]

Is it Yuletide already?

This is our last production day at the studio before we are sending the troops to their winter quarters for the Yuletide festivities. We are all looking forward to a few days with family, friends and (video) games. No rest for the wicked boss though, I will be holding the fort on social media - and I'll remind myself not to drink and post (at least not simultaneously). My only other task is to guard our Kickstarter, which'll end Sunday night. Looks like I got promoted to night-watchman.

So what's new? We were experimenting with miniatures this week and it looks like we have found a way of evolving our character tokens and to integrate them more tightly into our isometric combat scenes. All this is still digitally hand-drawn in our comic book style of course!

First the GIF:


And here the complete environment. This is a concept for a quest combat sequence - 'Steal Bishop Aidan's Toenails'. The first fight will take place on the bridge, then in the Anglo-Saxon village, and the final one inside the church:


And all I want for Yuletide is that whoever reads this posts something about The Great Whale Road on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or maybe even Snapchat.

Happy Holidays from all the folks here at Sunburned Games!

Go easy on the eggnog,
Joachim

[Sunburned Games]

Merry Christmas from everyone here at Sunburned Games!

[Sunburned Games]

Quick & Dirty Kickstarter Post-Mortem in Bullet Points:

Our Kickstarter ended unsuccessfully on the 20th of December. A Kickstarter for a video game is quite a gamble nowadays, so the first thing to keep in mind before starting it that it is not a good idea to rely on it - and we have a plan B (C and D) ready. Onwards to Steam in May, but let's get some closure first.

What were the key positives of our Kickstarter experience?
 

• People: Every person who likes your game and is willing to crowdfund it is a major asset. Thank you!
• Visibility: An indie Kickstarter might not be newsworthy for major outlets any more, but smaller and specialist sites might still cover your game. We got covered by a few, and while none were game changing, they were the first step to build a press coverage history for The Great Whale Road and us as a studio. Plus we also got some useful feedback to incorporate into the game and our marketing efforts.
• Marketing material: The campaign forces you to create a large amount of marketing material, which is always useful.
• Greenlight Synergies: If you are doing a Kickstarter, you can reuse all the work for your Greenlight campaign as well. The Great Whale Road was Greenlit in 10 days.

And what didn't go so well?

• Communicate the scope: We are at somewhere around 20-25% done, and we had focussed on our combat design and multiplayer implementation in the months between start of the project and the Kickstarter. This meant that main aspects like exploration, trading, crew management were not available as in-game footage. Most video games which are successful on KS lately are much closer to being feature complete.
• Date: I underestimated the impact of the 'dead period' on Kickstarter, and the lack of cross-promotion.
• Advertising: We achieved excellent click-through-rates on our 'ad-block-only' banner adverts - cheaper than standard ones across IndieDB, ModDB and RPS - but conversion to actual backers was very low. I can make a few guesses and assumptions why that happened, see 'lessons learned' below.
• Timing: The first 24 hours are key. If you don't reach a certain percentage in the first days, your campaign will most likely not recover again. We had two or three hiccups as we started, all adding up. Issues hurt much more in those first hours of the campaign.
• Reddit & Neogaf: We got some amazing support in r/arctictavern and kind words on the indie games thread on Neogaf, but we failed to make a bigger impact. Partially this is due to our game being a niche title, the style not being fashionable on purpose: we didn't go with low-poly or pixel art, but I think mainly because the current combat screen is 'animation poor'.
• Demo: Having a demo was a good idea, but making it multi-player was a mistake. Not many people played it, and while we stated that it was only covering the core functionality of our combat system, it confused people who thought that this was the complete scope of the game. As every development build it had a few bugs as well, and once we had fixed the main networking one the campaign was already half way done. This didn't help with Youtubers either.

What have we learned?

• Facebook rules: Twitter isn't bad to stay in touch with other indies and the press (and you will get backers from there), but players are primarily on Facebook. For a substantially lower amount than banner adverts we got a lot more new page likes and KS backers via Facebook adds. Make sure to target them to your market, use different languages, and try to create conversations. The audience creation tool is sufficiently powerful to target the right audience for your title. We tried Twitter marketing as well, and stopped it after €10 - it's a ridiculous rip-off in my opinion.
• France, Poland, Germany, Italy, China, Russia, Netherlands, Austria and so on: While English speaking countries are naturally our main target market (think Steam), I was surprised by the positive reception in a much wider range of countries. This might not help during a crowdfunding campaign, but it will certainly help us on Steam. Localization will be very important and we have to come up with a clever way so we can afford it.
• Deal with negativity: Not everybody will like your game, art style etc. and sometimes they might not like you. Shake it off and move on.
• A better trailer: We only had a week or so to produce the trailer, and lack of overall gameplay footage led to some questionable decisions. In the end we did our best with the limited time, money and resources. Our Steam trailer will focus purely on gameplay.
• Focus: The Great Whale Road is a niche game and every generic marketing or PR activity is most likely a waste of time and money. We will focus on sites like RPG Watch and similar ones for our Steam Early Access launch. We will still do press releases etc. but keep the main effort targeted.
• Avoid crowdfunding: I don't think I will try my hands on crowdfunding again - at least not for a video game. We wanted to give it a go, and I still think it was an important step on our road to Early Access. But we could have spent this month focused on development, and some of the budget on the Steam launch.
• Video rocks: While our KS trailer didn't do so great, our combat let's play and gameplay preview videos had more than 500 views each on YouTube alone. This is certainly an area we will expand before and during early access.
• Change is necessary: We already reworked the character tokens on the combat screen, as you can see two posts above. Getting feedback from a wider audience helps to make better decisions, which are at least partially data driven.

I am really looking forward to getting The Great Whale Road on Steam.

I am signing off 2015 - Happy New Year everyone!

Joachim @ Sunburned Games

[Sunburned Games]

January Update

The whole team is back at work and we have been busy on all fronts. We have reworked our character designs, and the first culture has already been updated.



We are extending the team to make sure we can hit our milestones on the way to Early Access (May), starting with a Unity developer on a six month contract: http://sunburnedgames.com/jobs/

We are also finalizing the art schedule, and I think that we will be looking for a 2D artist cum illustrator soon. Last but not least important I am considering options on how we can add a dedicated writer to our team as well.

Joachim @ Sunburned Games

[oldblood]

Great post-mortem and glad to see you guys are back at it in 2016. Best of luck in the new year!

[Sunburned Games]

Great post-mortem and glad to see you guys are back at it in 2016. Best of luck in the new year!

Thank you, sir. Right back at you!

[Greipur]

I hope you will fare better on Early Access. I like the new miniatures by the way, good call.

[Sunburned Games]

I hope you will fare better on Early Access. I like the new miniatures by the way, good call.

I don't get the impression that a Kickstarter relates to the number of sales on Steam due to what I only can assume are sociographic and demographic differences.

We are looking at how similar studios/games deal with EA - for example Battle Brothers. We are preparing ourselves to have a transparent roadmap and a process to turn around most fixes and changes within a sprint or two - and we only want to stay in EA for around 6 months.

Kickstarter-Steam Examples:
Thea: The Awakening: Tried twice & failed both times on Kickstarter, and they are doing well on Steam with around 30,000 owners after a few months EA and fully released at the end of November.
Sunset: Had a very successful Kickstarter, but 'only' 15,000 owners on Steam and most folks bought it after the social media meltdown was published across the bigger outlets.

Which reminds me that I still have to get Crest and give it a go! It would be great to chat with you, to talk about your experience and lessons learned from Early Access. 

Cheers,
Joachim

[Greipur]

Oh, for sure. I was pleasantly surprised that both Thea and Kingdom fared well after failed Kickstarters (even though the latter published via Raw Fury and not in EA on their own). It was mostly meant as a figure of speech (that I hope you will see a brighter future).

Though, I do believe that the more money you can invest into a game before it's a proper product the more impact you will get at launch. And crowdfunding is one of those means. If you don't have a pile of gold saved up, sweet work for hire jobs, grants or generous angel investors the available ways to get that extra resources might be mighty hard to find. I think that two of the most commercially succesful indie EA strategy games in 2015 was Armello (77K copies according to Steam Spy) and Darkest Dungeon (630K), and both got a lot of funds before entering EA. I think it's safe to say that the more feature complete your game the more you can sell, and create a nice first impression, something we failed at with Crest at launch (though we're continuously trying to improve that image).

Feel free to send me a PM about Early Access, I'd be happy to help.

[Sunburned Games]

Oh, for sure. I was pleasantly surprised that both Thea and Kingdom fared well after failed Kickstarters (even though the latter published via Raw Fury and not in EA on their own). It was mostly meant as a figure of speech (that I hope you will see a brighter future).

Though, I do believe that the more money you can invest into a game before it's a proper product the more impact you will get at launch. And crowdfunding is one of those means. If you don't have a pile of gold saved up, sweet work for hire jobs, grants or generous angel investors the available ways to get that extra resources might be mighty hard to find. I think that two of the most commercially succesful indie EA strategy games in 2015 was Armello (77K copies according to Steam Spy) and Darkest Dungeon (630K), and both got a lot of funds before entering EA. I think it's safe to say that the more feature complete your game the more you can sell, and create a nice first impression, something we failed at with Crest at launch (though we're continuously trying to improve that image).

Feel free to send me a PM about Early Access, I'd be happy to help.

I will be in touch! And in the meantime - some Northumbrians and Franks:



Joachim @ Sunburned Games

[Sunburned Games]

Salty!

This is a retrospective post about the difficulties of creating (mainly salt) water in a 2D game.

As a place holder we started using a still image for the sea background, but at some point we needed something animated. The result is achieved by using particle system blending. We started inserting a big, low res image over a plain blue image to create a non-plain base.

The next step and the key one is to create and implement a texture for the “waves”. The texture is used in two different particle systems with the same parameters but different movement directions.



Then we added an additional particle system to produce highlights. They appear randomly, with a shorter lifespan and less often compared to the wave textures.

You can see the steps in the process image below:



Then we added some mist and rain particle system.



That way the sea in The Great Whale Road can be generated procedurally and we expect that we can use the same technique across all our isometric and side-scrolling scenes.



But now back to production and the different UI options!

Best.
Joachim @ Sunburned Games

[oldblood]

Just wanted to chime in and say that Scott Cawthon's $10,000 Kickstarter failed for "Five Nights At Freddys".

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/977464073/five-nights-at-freddys

It was canceled with 0 backers and went on to sell a few copies...

[Sunburned Games]

Just wanted to chime in and say that Scott Cawthon's $10,000 Kickstarter failed for "Five Nights At Freddys".

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/977464073/five-nights-at-freddys

It was canceled with 0 backers and went on to sell a few copies...

Didn't know he had tried a KS. I guess he found the money elsewhere or only ate potatoes for a while.

But we had the funding to get the The Great Whale Road into Early Access beforehand, so the team can focus on production. And I can work on my frugal management skill.

Best.
Joachim @ Sunburned Games 

[Sunburned Games]

Valentine's Day Mini-Update

If you have already seen sufficient amounts of pink chocolate hearts then you will pleased to hear that we don't have any concrete plans to include any crew romance in the game. I don't assume that heart-shaped sweets were a major priority back in 650 AD, but if you really want them I am sure we can work something out. Now that we have gotten this out off the way, let's look at our progress.

Since the last update the team has been busy working on the winter season, a redesign of the user interface, new landscapes for  the side scrolling sailing screens and we have designed the main story system. I have been mainly working on design and lore - including researching and placing historical locations on our map. For example there will be nine historical locations for the Picts, including Obaireadhain, Din Eidyn and Dùn Dèagh. In general we will be using the historical name of the period, for the Pictish locations I decided to go with Gaelic for now, as Pictish names are hard to come by. Most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms will get their fair share as well, and I have most of the Frankish and Frisian locations chosen as well.

Alex, our third developer, has joined the team at the beginning of the month. He is a fast coder (my favourite kind ), which is a godsend considering the scope planned for the initial EA release.

I am signing off with a season transition screen - we will only have two seasons: summer (the sailing season) and winter (the non-sailing season at the home settlement).

Best.
Joachim @ Sunburned Games


 

[Sunburned Games]

[Sunburned Games]

Development Update - April

We pushed the Steam Early Access date back to June, and we grew the team. We now have a third developer as well as a third artist on board, and we have noticed that production has sped up already. We have implemented all the management, sailing and event screens. You can see some examples below.

Sailing Events

Character Screen

Hunting Event

Over the last month we:

• Connected all parts of the game
• Implemented the world map
• Built the event system
• Implemented all the UI components
• Redesigned how locations will look like
• Created the first set of props for the settlements and locations

This is a Yew tree, there will be Ash, Oak and Pine trees, too.

There is also a lot of writing to be done, and while our designer/writer works on events I am busy working on the settlement and character stories. As we will start Early Access with just one playable culture we are on track. The second culture will follow a month or so afterwards, which means that the content will have to be ready by the time we start into EA as well. I have started to look for freelance writer to work with us throughout EA to ensure we keep up with providing new content at regular intervals.

The biggest outstanding part on the coding side is the next iteration of the combat system. We have completed a few small additions like destructible obstacles and traps, and the next few weeks will see part of the development team focus on the AI.

Best.
Joachim @ Sunburned Games   

[oldblood]

Nothing wrong with pushing the date back. New updates look great and it sounds like you guys are really hitting stride. Looking forward to snagging a copy in June. Will you be doing any open testing leading up to EA?