In the production pipeline, you need to know where you’ll be in a couple of months, because other people will be depending on it. But what about when you have to do it without knowing that your game will be done on time? Goes back to the estimation thing… had we known, we wouldn’t have chased after content creators and press as quickly and as aggressively. Well lining up streamers and YouTubers is important. Lining up streamers and YouTubers without having a finished game: I don't think people will get too pissed about bugs in the beta because they're expecting them. We also believe that we can establish a relationship with our players while we add new content to the game and build a community around it.
#Ultimate chicken horse game full
Do we delay launch with content creators lined up to push their content on “launch day”, and risk damaging those relationships? Do we launch in early access and confuse the people who were waiting for a full release, and potentially lose out on the real launch because Steam’s algorithm doesn’t like early access games? Or do we launch with a fully functional and stable local game but a buggy online game that players know will absolutely be fixed as soon as possible, and likely within a couple of weeks? We went for the last of those options, and we think that players won’t be too pissed off because they know the online is in the works and is coming soon, and they know that the main game is stable. Given that that wasn’t the case, we had a decision to make. We worked our arses off last minute to get it to the point where it was functional, albeit buggy, and in hindsight we should have had it done at least a month before launch. Unfortunately, we couldn’t launch with a fully tested and fleshed out online mode. What this caused was the following flaws: As a team becomes more experienced, each of its members are better able to estimate, and together the team can know if they need more time, more resources, or more focus in certain areas. We gave ourselves what seemed like waaaaay more than enough time to do certain tasks, and we were simply wrong. We didn’t do a good enough job estimating how long tasks would take throughout development. Consistent? Yes! We’ve tried not to promise too much for specific dates or times and we’ve done pretty well at that. When people asked about console, we have always said (and still say) “we plan to come to console, but we’re not sure of the order or the timing of them”. If we don’t know when something is going to be done, we say “we hope to have it done by _, but we’re really not sure”. We haven’t always succeeded, but we’ve tried and we can tell that people have been responding well to it. We’ve always tried our best to respond to the community (via Kickstarter, Steam, Twitter, etc.) in a consistent way. Responding with a clear, concise and consistent message: We’re hoping now that people have continued to listen until launch and are going to produce content revolving around the game once it launches. I may write an article about "the art of hustle" somday. We also bugged press, YouTubers and streamers and people started to listen to us once they had seen us a lot. If we have success, the shows will have been a huge part of it.Īt GDC in 2015, we managed to get meetings with Sony and Microsoft, and meet a bunch of contacts who would help us establish ourselves in the indie gaming world.
Everywhere we went, press and influencers seemed more and more interested. We went to PAX South in San Antonio (in January 2016), and that helped a ton as well. We did some smaller shows here and there (Montreal ComicCon, Montreal Indie Game Fest, Boston Fig) but PAX was by far the most important in terms of hype. The exposure we got from that, the press coverage, the YouTubers and streamers who got interested in the game… it really put us on the map. It went great and everything was cool.Īfter that, we applied for the Indie MEGABOOTH at PAX Prime in August 2015, and we got in. Next, we decided to see if a larger audience was interested and we ran a Kickstarter. In January 2015, we cleaned it up a bit and showed it at a bigger event (IGDA Demo night, 400 people) and got even better feedback. We showed it off the following month at a local meet-up and got great feedback. The game started off as a game jam game in September 2014, which was done totally for fun without any goal of even winning a jam competition. We’ve pulled through despite some issues and oversight (that I’ll talk about in a moment), and we’ve managed to make the game we envisioned when we started on this path over a year ago. First, I should mention that I’m really proud of my team.
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