So here I am again – it’s my birthday & I’m the middle of releasing a game. It’s not the first time, and I guess it won’t be the last time either.(*)

Somewhere on our servers there is C++ code of the previous Divinities in which I reflect on the practice of being in the office in the middle of the night when it’s your birthday and whether or not that is a good thing.

It makes for good stories, but I distinctly remember not being happy about it all back then. Luckily, this time there’s a difference.

I’m going home tonight, and it’s going to be at a decent hour.

And that is as it should be.

We made a movie today in which I did the tour of the office, asking developers of the Dragon Commander team about their progress.

While watching it, notice that nobody looks über-tired or stressed out, and that most in the team are actually quite positive about making their deadlines. They’re not acting, because it’s how it is.  In fact, most of the team are in their last weeks of working on Dragon Commander and are then done with their work.

Quite a contrast with the release of our previous games.

There producers were doing everything they could to find extra time, including squeezing the team to work harder and the publisher to move its deadlines. There, emergency plan followed emergency plan, with total chaos as a result. There, our creative ambitions were completely out of synch with the expectations of the  publishers, and conflict became a rule rather than an execption.

Not so this time.

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Yes, I know. I am long overdue with this entry. But as it turns out, I too seem to be made  of flesh and bones, and I really needed to slow down a bit. You can only manage that long on adrenaline alone and throughout the last months I’ve been living on awake-time that wasn’t supposed to be awake-time. So now, sadly, my body decided to reclaim some sleep-time and grounded me by giving me the mother of all colds! <coughs> Which in a way is good,because it gives me the time to pen down a new blog entry

For those who don’t know the context of that last paragraph:  We did a Kickstarter campaign, for Divinity:Original Sin. The goal was to collect 400KUS$. We walked away with over 1MUS$ pledged,  a lot of public pressure, and tons of new ideas. It was a lot of work, with little sleep for those running the campaign, but it definitely was worth it and I’d do it again, without any hesitation.

I already wrote a bit about lessons learnt from Kickstarter here, so consider this entry the continuation of that piece, even though it’ more of an open question.

One of the things I started wondering about throughout the campaign was who we should show our games to. You see, I used to think that you should strive for maximum exposure, and try to show your game to anybody who can hold a pen or camera. But after having talked to I guess over 200 media over the last couple of months and seeing their output, I’ve actually come to reconsider that statement.

Engagor was gifted to us by a backer. It’s a social media tool that allowed us to track how well our campaign was doing, and it also gave me insights into what media had an impact and which media didn’t. Very cool stuff.

It may sound straightforward, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it makes no sense demonstrating your game to somebody who has no interest in your type of game. At best he’ll get the facts straight, but more than often his writing will be detrimental to your cause. And so the question comes to mind – why do something that won’t do you any good?

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Man, time goes fast! It seems like yesterday that I packed my suitcase to go on a press-tour to prep our Divinity: Original Sin Kickstarter campaign. I can’t believe it’s almost over.

This morning David, Divinity: Original Sin’s most excellent producer, told me that the first thing he did when waking up was checking the Kickstarter counter. He followed up with an “of course, that’s not really the first thing…”,  but then saw that I didn’t buy it and sheepishly admitted, “yeah, ok, it’s the first thing I did.”

I frowned at him, giving him my “what kind of life do you have”-look, but then grinned, in an equally sheepish manner and admitted ”yeah, me too…”

For the last three weeks, life has been – “what are they writing, what update is needed, how can we be covered there, can we get this translated, somebody call that guy, how can we get the counter up, can we do this, are we really sure we can do this, ok, let’s do it, what is the Engagor thing telling us, what does the Codex think, what does the Watch think…” and so forth.

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Yesterday was a good day. Our Kickstarter campaign went through the roof and as I write this, we’re at 441K whereas our goal was 400K. With 15 days left to go, the future looks bright for Divinity:Original Sin! I have so much to say but so little time that this will probably be my smallest post ever, but I for sure gathered enough material to fill quite a lot of blogposts in the future. So much stuff learnt.

This image is now part of Larian's history. There was much rejoicing in the office and too much champagne!

Our main problem now – time.

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Update – stats from when we reached 2/3rds of our funding goal( 266K):

I took this after being on IGN for 9 hours - doesn't look like it was worth the effort for our campaign

Original post

This going to be a very short post because I need some sleep, but I just wanted to mention how motivating it is to see all these shows of support and how helpful all our fans and backers have been. I’m exhausted but reaching 63% of our funding goal (252K at present) in 5 days is just amazing and it’s very easy to find energy amidst so much support.  And the feedback we’ve received is worth gold – that alone is a reason to do a campaign like this – now I understand what Brian Fargo & the guys at Obsidian were shouting about all the time. It’s one thing to be reading about it, it’s a completely different thing to be in the middle of it. Anyway, that’s it – I actually just wanted to share a few stats from our campaign:

The average pledge amount so far is $44.23 (really high imho so we have generous backers). We’ve had 30118 video views and of those 17,78% finished the video, both numbers low imho so we need to do something there. We are now at a conversion rate of 18,9% so that’s dropped but it’s still pretty high.

Kickstarter itself turns out to be pretty important as well as RPS, the Watch & the Codex.

Tomorrow we’re going to launch an update that is going to change our approach a little bit, focussing less on the features of what we’re doing and telling more of the story & world that we’ve been creating. We’ll also modify our rewards as much as we can & introduce a few new things. And, we’ll emphasise single player a bit more – it’s true that we didn’t do that enough whereas it’s actually the most important bit.

And with a bit of luck, there’s also be Dragon Commander news, because obviously, that team hasn’t been sitting idle!

Almost 3 days into our Kickstarter and we’re at 48% of our goal. For a funding round, that’s pretty good. If we’d make 60K/day every day our studio would be making the most fantastic RPGs you can imagine

But to be fair, everybody, myself included, had hoped that it would’ve gone faster and I’m getting some flak for the timing of the campaign, and how with better messaging/positioning/timing this thing could’ve been flying through the roof. I don’t know, I guess it’s always easier to sail the boat when you’re actually on land (or whatever the saying is), but it’s still early days and I’m a born optimist.

Personally, I think we can still have a campaign that can go way beyond our funding goal, though admittedly, we will need to fix a few obvious things (well, they’re obvious now ) like the rewards, part of the story we tell (less features, more who and why), and what happens if we fail in this Kickstarter.  Thank you to DarkUnderlord,Robcat and the rest of the gang for helping us get these insights btw.

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I’m writing this on day 15 of our mad PR tour. Flying back from Los Angeles to Brussels to spend the weekend with my family. Then, on monday we’re off to Paris where  27 journalists await us at a press event organized by Focus, our local partner. In the end, we’re aiming to show Divinity: Dragon Commander and Divinity: Original Sin to almost 100 media spread over Europe and the US, and by the time we’ll finish this tour, we’ll have been presenting for over 5 weeks.

That’s quite long and by now I’m sick of seeing hotel rooms, unpacking and repacking PC’s at airport security checks and trying to organize TV screens that do the games justice. I’ll be quit happy when it’s over. My personal highlight on this tour was snatching one hour of free time in Santa Monica so I could go for a run on the beach. Other than that, it’s been one big rush and I’m starting to collect quite a lot of bad karma in the email department because I simply gave up answering. I have some vague hope that I’ll drink a special potion over the weekend and manage to answer all those urgent requests, but past experience tells me that’s not going to happen so I’ll need to figure out something different.

Dragon Commander presentation in San Francisco - there's quite a lot of stuff that needs to be organised for doing these types of things, like getting a place to show the games in the first place

What complicated this tour more than others was that we wanted to show the games in multiplayer, with the journalists joining in. This meant that wherever we went, we needed to ensure there were sufficient screens in place, that we could set up a network, that we had sufficient room and that we had sufficient people to explain the game in addition to the usual stuff. It’s a small miracle that that all worked out, but it did which does say something about the people involved in organising this i.e. they’re good at what they do

Obviously we’ve constantly been googling for our stuff and as articles started trickling through (Rpgwatch,onrpg, co-optimius, gamesradar, rock paper shotgun or strategy informer), there were these moments of elation when we saw something positive being said about our creations and likewise, there were moments of frustration when criticism surfaced. Even after all these years, I still haven’t managed to reach the state where I can say that I’m indifferent to what’s written about my games and seeing the reactions of my co-demo-tour participants, they clearly care too. That’s a good thing btw in my book..

I’m told by our PR agency that the coverage we’re managing to put together is impressive for an independent studio, and come to think of it, I don’t think any of the previous Divinities actually ever had so many previews in the works, despite the publisher backing. At least on that front our little self-publishing outfit is scoring well, even if we have had our problems.

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Day 9 of press tour for Dragon Commander. Typing this up from a small hotel room somewhere in Hamburg. Getting increasingly tired but not managing to sleep as there is too much noise from the cars driving by.

We released the trailer yesterday as well as the revamped website. The reactions so far seem to be positive though it’s clear that a lot of people need to try to the game before they’ll fully understand exactly what it is that we’v made.  Hope the output of the tour is going to help with that.

Didn’t see any articles pop up yet, but I guess they’ll appear shortly. Nervous about those, as they are all based on hand-on play. It looks like most people playing it are having a blast and we even had several guys actually rearranging their schedule to be able to play the game more. Never had that happen to one of our games before.

Still, it wouldn’t be the first time that an apparently good reception at a press event somehow transforms itself in a smiting once you see the article. There’s still a bucketload of bugs and missing UI elements and missing effects and missing etceteras, and I’m not sure if they can all see past that. We’ll see.

One thing that worries me a bit in particular is the discussion I’ve had with several journalists about the the political and satirical topics in the game. They were all pretty interested in that part of the game and since they are journalists after all, I can see how that’s going to be something we’ll have to deal with.

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