The mind is a funny thing.

As part of my preperation for yet another retail distribution presentation of our games, I was thinking this morning about how Dragon Commander and Project E came tor be, so I browsed through my notes from when both projects started.

I was quite surprised by what I found, because somehow I got it in my head that it was all about vision etc…, but the reality of it is that both games came into existence by accident.

This was in the summer of 2010, and we didn’t know yet that Dragon Knight Saga was going to be pretty succesful , so as usual, I was trying to think of how we could bring in enough money to keep the  studio going and one day manage to make that very big RPG I keep on talking about.

I had just met a couple of the larger publishers who kept on telling me that a) fantasy RPGs were never going to sell, and b) the future for me with Divinity was in making an XBLA & PSN version. Yes, I told you already that you shouldn’t always listen to them, but anyway, at that time it was a remarkably consistent message so I wouldn’t do my job if I didn’t at least think about what they were telling me.

Heading back to the office, I started scribbling down some thoughts. It was more a stream of consciousness than anything else, but I was surprised nontheless in reading them again this morning. Within those notes, lay the seeds of what by now have become two mature games, even if those random thoughts were still far away from what the games ultimately became.

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Back in 2001, Divine Divinity was in serious trouble. Several people at our publisher, CDV, wanted to kill the game because it was late, and our publisher’s producer needed help defending the game at an important internal publisher meeting. The goal of that meeting was  a re-evaluation of their entire portfolio, and I was asked to write up a list of what I considered to be the strong and weak points of the first Divinity.

Being quite the idealist in those days, I made what I thought was a fair assessment of our own game, not realizing that it’d actually be used against us afterwards.

I figured it might be interesting to share the mail I sent to the producer with you.

This game really was a lot of work - really a lot

It’s quite long, but it reflects a lot of the hopes and aspirations we had at Larian in those days. Re-reading it, I recognize the idealism that drove us, as well as the hope that the publisher was going to forgive us for being late and give us the extra fuel we needed to finish the game the way we wanted to finish it.

For the record, it didn’t work out that well – several months later, just after the release, I had to downsize my team to 3 people from the original 30, because I refused to accept that I had no budget anymore, and spent everything on trying to finish the game as good as we could . My thoughts were that if the game was good,  money would find us somehow. It didn’t of course. I caused quite some traumas with that attitude, and to this date I have regrets of how I handled the situation back then, but that’s another story.

Here’s the mail:

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I’m going to write a bit about game design and pitch the choice & consequence mechanic in Dragon Commander today. As a heads up, I’ve got another piece coming in which I interviewed a royalty auditor who did audits at all of the top publishers, but it’s going to take my some time to write up the interview. She had interesting things to say however, with some of them requiring me to correct some of my statements on this blog. But as I’m off to Hamburg to meet plenty of German distributors at the Casual Connect thing, it’ll have to wait a bit.

Look, I know you don't believe a word I'm telling you, but really, that's what I'm trying to do - lots of choice and consequence, really, lots of it !

So, today, choice & consequence.

They are two words that’ve become must-haves on the back of the box for any modern RPG that wants to matter. If you look at the advertising done for some of the biggest RPGs of the moment, you can easily be fooled into thinking that here are games  that allow you to do anything you can think of.

The reality of course is quite different. When it comes to crafting stories, branching storylines, coupled to simple systemic gameplay elements, are still the state of the art for RPG developers. Essentially we use the same mechanic the “choose your own adventure” books used, with the nuance that the turning of the page can be accomplished by different means.

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A sequence of things that happened this week made me realize that something that seems over-obvious to me, may in fact not be so obvious to others in the same position. It’s all to do with how independent developers look at retail, or rather, how they don’t look at it.

Is it really that stupid to make sure your games can be seen by anybody who enters a shop ?

Here’s what happened:

Wednesday evening I get a mail from Tom @ Evolve PR telling me

“Ehhh… this little post from RPS has a lot of comments from people going, “what the hell?” — obviously I would also agree that digital is probably the best way for indies to get big numbers these days, but yeah… might be worth hopping in and commenting a little bit?”

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Last week I did an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun. I don’t know yet what the journalist used from the interview, but I’m a little bit ill at ease, because I shouldn’t have done the interview in the condition I was in, having had a sleepless night. Anyway, they posted an excerpt to announce the interview, and that generated quite some reactions already, so I wanted to post the link here.

Update: The full interview is online now here.

The topic is digital vs retail, and my position on it is that if you’re an independent developer, and you’re doing digital only, you’re missing out on a lot of revenue. I wrote a bit in the comments section to clarify the point.

I’ve been raging a bit here about creative use of publisher costs, and somebody mentioned in the comments on “How Larian ended up self-publishing” that it’s only normal that costs associated with press events should be deducted from a developers royalties.

So I browsed through my picture library and found some pictures from PR & marketing events I participated in.

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Whenever I manage to get home before my kids go to bed, I am forced to tell them the next adventure of Little Green Dragon. Little Green Dragon you see is the sequel to Little Blue Dragon. He’s been having an epic journey through an enormous fantasy world for over two years now, fighting against the evil Nomen who just recently abducted Little Green Dragon’s mother.

I used to think the first Divinity was only going to be a 20 hour game

It’s becoming pretty hard for me to keep up with my own story, and unfortunately my kids have excellent memories, so occassionaly I need to carefully query them about some of the well-known facts of the little dragon universe. I even started taking notes.

The thing they like the most I think is that it’s a neverending story. Whenever I try to bring some closure, they want to know what happens next . Running out of inspiration and hoplessly caught in a spiderweb of plotlines, I tried finishing the story once, but a young boy crying and a wife giving me the evil eye, forced me to add yet another plot-twist, meaning that Little Green Dragon still has a very long journey ahead of him.

My personal equivalent of listening to Little Green Dragon stories is playing RPGs & reading books, so I guess the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. I too like my RPGs to be very big, and I rarely read a fantasy book if it’s not at least a trilogy. If it’s not big enough, then I don’t feel it’s worthwhile investing myself in the protagonist, because what I’m looking for are grand epic adventures, Lord of the Rings like.

So recently the discussion of size versus quality popped up again at Larian Studios,the topic being where to spend our efforts, and as typical in that conversation, I once again found myself stuck between a rock and a hard place.

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Reading this blog, you might get the impression that the only thing I deal with is the financial side of development. Yet, when you look at the credits of Larian Studios games, you’ll discover that I used to be both lead designer and programmer of games like Divine Divinity.

Me selling some of my games - every little bit helps

What happened was that in the early 2000’s, I could get away with me being in charge of most things. But as productions scaled up and teams became larger, I was forced to (very reluctantly) release several of my roles as I was doing more damage than good. My main job became that of being the one outlining the general vision, and overcoming any obstacles encountered during executing that vision.

Since it turned out that financing topped the obstacle list, I ended up focussing a lot of time on the cash aspect of the business.  But to be honest, I hate this part of the job,  it’s not the reason I founded this studio. There really are days when I say, the hell with it, I want to program again, I’m not dealing with this stuff any longer (today is one of those days )

But then I remember the ultimate goal, the making of “the very big RPG that will dwarf them all”, and I get on with it, realizing that the side-quest of finding of what Hollywood calls “Fuck-you money” is realy becoming urgent.

The problem is, every time I think we’re close to achieving that point, costs go up, and we need to find more cash, which doesn’t really help.

So, a plan was formed… Continue reading →