The Game’s New Name: All Heroes Die
January 28th, 2010 by MacguffinSo yeah, that’s coming along.
A huge thank-you to Meaghan Glynn for not only doing a great logo, but doing it in a record amount of time, and with a nasty cold to boot.
Updates!
December 9th, 2009 by MacguffinI realized the other day that we’ve pretty much been radio-silent since the lack-of-IGF announcement. Apologies on that! We’ve pretty much been busting our butts working on the game – so, yes, we’re still very much alive and kicking.
In part, what was at first an instinctual thing on my part became a conscious plan – I haven’t talked too much about the game and how it is shaping up mostly because it’s been changing a lot. The ideas we had on paper changed as they became functional features, which in turn changed as we moved towards integrating those features with each other, and then again as we are starting to create the first game content.
I promise we will be letting more information out as time goes on – we just want to time it properly and have decent odds the features won’t change in a day or two.
As far as work on the game is progressing: it’s going very well! Graham and I have been working hard on all fronts. We may not have something for friends-and-family to play in December, but that’s not a bad thing – we’re finding lots of obvious changes to make as we continue with what I outlined above. I’ll avoid saying what else I expect for our schedule for now, since I tend to immediately make a liar of myself.
In other news, we will be changing the name of the game. We have winnowed things down to a handful of favorites, but are going to sit on them and think about it for a bit. Sadly, “Heritage” is de facto trademarked by The Settlers, or rather the rebranded “Heritage of Kings: The Settlers“. Because of how trademark law works, they could pretty much argue that any video game title that starts with Heritage is a violation of their trademark. Somewhat a bummer, but so it goes – since I wouldn’t be surprised that they had to change that title because of friction with Settlers of Catan, I can’t get too bent out of shape about it.
Thanks for reading! Hit us with any quesitons you might have in the comments.
Skipping the IGF
October 14th, 2009 by MacguffinIt’s been an interesting day.
We’re going to skip entering the IGF this year. In short, the game just isn’t ready. Even with all the ass we’ve been busting, we’re juuuust now about at a first-playable state. Going through our to-do items left for the 11/1 deadline, there are just about as many high-level tasks left to do as there are days left in the month.
We could submit no matter what, and then update the build over the next few weeks after that. The downsides there are that it would be a poor initial submission that doesn’t technically meet the rules of the competition (you’re supposed to be feature-complete), and that I’d pretty much kill myself for the next 5 weeks getting a build I could live with. After talking with Graham, we decided that the best course of action is to keep focused on bringing the game along as best we can, as fast as we can – but without crunching like crazy to come up with what we would consider a substandard entry.
I’m pretty disappointed, frankly, that we’re not going to be able to make this work… but as all good project managers know, it’s not about what you get in a perfect world – it’s about the choices in front of you. And I still feel our longer term deadlines are realistic.
Tomorrow Graham and I sit down and do a soup-to-nuts review of the game. Our goal is going to be to set a deadline (probably 12/1) where we can have a fully playable alpha to pass around in the Boston dev community and get some feedback. I feel really confident that we can make that kind of schedule work – but we’re going to put in some good planning and analysis to make sure.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still incredibly psyched about everything that has been getting done on the game to date. We’ve come a terrific distance in less than 11 months – especially considering this is Graham’s first video game project, and the first that I’ve programmed or designed. I think our issue with the IGF deadline was in my not realizing we were biting off more than we could chew. As my good friend Patrick said to me today, “Think of all the ways you could have f***** this up, and didn’t!”
He’s got a great point.
So, yeahhhhh. Interesting day. It’s weird to have the excitement I’m feeling with how fast the game is coming along but head-to-head with the frustration of missing a deadline. I mentioned to Graham as I was dwelling on the whole thing today – I realized I had never missed a deadline in 8 years of making games. Every milestone I ever was associated with, every game, shipped on time. I’m not sure I was prepared to actually fail at getting the game into the IGF – I don’t think I’d ever really considered the possibility.
But, that’s fine. A good bit of the reason I wanted to go indie and start my own company was to learn about doing this all from top to bottom. And you can’t learn very well without failing a couple times here and there. So, learn we will.
And this game is still going to be pretty spectacular.