KING Art’s journey from a bunch of artworks they saw on the internet to Germany’s Game of the Year. Two years or so before we started to think about our next project, we stumbled upon a series of artworks by Polish artist Jakub Rózalski that combined classic 19th century European landscape paintings with dieselpunk mechs. The artworks looked cool and unusual, and we saved the link like we always do in cases like this. Fast forward two years: We were working on “The Dwarves” and were thinking about the next projects. We are usually looking for niches that enable us to make potentially the best game in this niche in the year of release. So instead of making the 10th best 1st person shooter, we want to make games fans of a genre love and “need to have”. We talked about different ideas, one of which were RTS games. In 2016 they were a more or less forgotten genre. Big publishers were focusing on MOBAs, and in general, many strategy developers seemed to have moved on. A chance? One RTS series caught our eye: Company of Heroes. Developed by Relic and published by THQ, the series was a fan favorite and very successful – but there hasn’t been a new CoH for years due to the THQ bankruptcy and the following turmoil. Could there be enough people waiting for a CoH-like RTS? But in what setting? Historical? Fantasy? Sci-Fi? Or maybe… what about the early 20th century in an alternate reality with Dieselpunk mechs! Trailer-Driven Development While this is a joke and you should definitely not only work in the realm of smoke and mirrors, being forced to present the game to an audience way before you normally would, has its merits. It helps getting everybody on the same page and early positive reactions help with team motivation. Fundamentally, it lets you think about one of the most important questions if you want to make a successful game: How do you actually sell it? What is great about your game and how can you communicate that? What grabs people’s attention, what makes them excited? You start to think about target audiences, USPs, gameplay pillars, hooks, characters and everything else that can help you sell your product. We think it is a good idea to do this early on, even if you are not doing a Kickstarter or plan to announce your game early. Game Design Meetings Having all stakeholders in the meeting (sometimes supplemented by individual developers who brought up an issue) enabled us to go through the list relatively quickly and come up with solutions that worked for all departments. We found this to be extremely efficient. Another great advantage of these regular “decision meetings” is that people don’t bring up issues all the time anymore. Instead of interrupting people multiple times a day, all these issues are getting collected and tackled in one go when everyone has time and is in the right mindset. It turns out getting solid answers once or twice a week makes more sense than getting half-backed answers right away. Community Building & Kickstarter These 16.000 RTS fans were also the core of our community building. We announced the game pretty early on via social media and build a community of >100k followers in a couple of months. The popularity of Jakub’s artworks helped with that as well as marketing targeted at RTS fans who rooted for “their” genre. We started a Kickstarter campaign and were able to collect over $1.5 Million. We had a good trailer, we had good press – but more importantly, we already had the big established community that was waiting to help us make the game they wanted. We kept community engagement high, releasing over 30 “DevBlogs” and kept the community informed over social media and Discord. We released multiple Alpha and Beta versions for backers. All that is a lot of work, but we think it pays off because you receive a lot of good feedback and insights. And it is motivating to know there are people who are excited about what you are doing. Researching Games Write notes while you are playing: How does the game make you feel? What do you like, what annoys you? What don’t you understand? You have to make notes while you are playing because your impressions of the game change all the time. Questions are being answered and you become accustomed to things you found weird or complicated before. You want these early, original impressions. Write a short “review” of the game (a couple of paragraphs) after an hour, after 50% and one at the end of the game. If you wonder why they did certain things the way they did, write it down and discuss these points with the team. Also make sure to write down all the ideas that come naturally when you play a game. It is a great way to generate ideas, features and story bits. Parts 2 and 3 of this article as well as further “Making of Iron Harvest” articles will follow soon! Jan Theysen Jan Theysen is Creative Director at KING Art and one of the two founders. He is the Iron Harvest Game Director and worked on narrative design, the campaigns and game design. He was part of the small group of people who laid the foundation for the game that would become KING Arts’ biggest project to date. The post Making of Iron Harvest: Finding the Project (Part 1/3) appeared first on Making Games. Making of Iron Harvest: Finding the Project (Part 1/3) published first on https://spymugblog.tumblr.com/ Making of Iron Harvest: Finding the Project (Part 1/3) published first on https://waltergillespie.tumblr.com/ via Tumblr Making of Iron Harvest: Finding the Project (Part 1/3)
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