by Simon Dean,
Project Lead
With the two year anniversary of Folk Tale development fast approaching, its an opportunity to look back at the game's humble beginnings, and examine some of the decisions that have caused delays along the way.
The first few months of the project were spent in isolation learning
the intricacies of the engine and assessing project feasibility. I
knew the project would need to raise funding to complete development
so I planned to tackle most of the technical risks up front to build credibility and demonstrate an ability to deliver. While my programming skills were decent, many of my
other skills were rusty having laid dormant since leaving the games
industry fifteen years prior. I very quickly realized I needed help,
so with a prototype held together with nails and glue I shared my
progress in the game development forums.
The Early Folk Tale Prototype
Playing the first build again - which in reality means walking around a small area watching some very basic pathfinding – I'm surprised at how much potential it showed. The prototype was good enough, and over the summer of 2011 the team grew in size with collaborators joining from the United States, UK, and Europe.
By late summer 2011 Pete had joined the team as a writer and had
become instrumental in driving the story and humor of the game
forward. As an author of zombie-themed short-stories, I had no idea
whether Pete could turn his hand to lighthearted comedy or not. Reading
his first few submissions, I admit I struggled with letting
go of the remnants of high fantasy present in the early prototype
and adopting gangster goblins, camp wizards, and a faith based on the
worship of toast. But the more drafts Pete scribed, the more I
became sold on his vision. All his great ideas however presented a dilemma. How could our small indie team with just one animator
handle the volume of animation work required to effectively tell the
story. Slashing admittedly great work to reduce the length of each
scene, I bit the bullet and committed Tom our animator to the huge burden, knowing
it to be the first decision that would significantly push back the
delivery date. With a whopping ten cut scenes in the demo, in hindsight it wasn't something we should have tried to tackle.
How did we go from a gritty looking medieval scene to the
colorful world of today? Folk Tale was going to be a humorous and entertaining game, and that didn't fit particularly well with the semi-realistic art style of the prototype; the early characters produced
by the artists had more of a WOW look than life-like; and on a
technical level we could keep shaders computationally inexpensive by
avoiding normal maps thereby helping performance. Weighing all the
factors, the decision was made that we would migrate towards a
hand-painted art style.
That process wasn't immediate, evolving over the course of the
following year through trial and error. Without a concept artist to
call on, the creative process started with me as Project Lead
creating reference models or annotated image mash-ups, before being
handed over to the artists to contribute their own ideas. Briefing
multiple artists this way was problematic. While there was a
convergence of style, there were slight inconsistencies between
assets due to each artist's skill level and interpretation that would
persist for another year.
Village Life As It Exists Today
Eighteen months in, and the team had settled into a workflow that while not
perfect, was yielding consistent results thanks to each member
focusing on tasks that played to their strengths. Project quality had
improved significantly, and the only inconsistencies that remained
were in the textures. We could have overlooked that, but knowing
we'd be asking the community to help fund the game, we felt a duty to
strive for perfection. To help address the inconsistency issue, Rich
assumed responsibility for art direction overseeing the production of
all models and textures, a timely appointment as Hayden joined the
team part-time as a 3D artist. Tom was assigned ownership of all
technical art ( skinning and rigging ) and animation. With Rich
finishing an excellent remake of the snow covered Monastery Of The
Mangy Wolf , and Ben finishing a similarly great job on the
volcanic Old Forge area, the Goblin Swamp was now
looked sparse and was showing it's age having been the first zone to be modeled many months ago. So we expanded the scope of
Rich's assignment to include not only a repaint, but the remodeling of all the
swamp assets, and that required more time.
In September 2012 Steam Greenlight launched, and propelled Folk
Tale from obscurity into the limelight. Everything snowballed
and after 104,000 visitors with 67% voting "Yes", Folk
Tale was greenlit in the second round of selections on October
15th. The comments came in thick and fast as the unique visitor
count continued to climb towards the 200,000 mark, providing us with valuable early feedback. One of the recurring observations was that our
initial plan to use just one voice actor for all the characters
wasn't going to cut it. With zero additional budget for voice
acting, I turned to the voice acting alliance forums and shared what
we hoped to achieve. The response was tremendous, and after
receiving around thirty auditions in just 24 hours, we closed the post
and selected ten talented performers to work with. As a community
request-verging-on-a-demand, it wasn't on the project schedule.
Coordinating legal contracts, recording sessions, processing, editing
and slicing hundreds of lines of dialogue over several months was
extremely time consuming and diverted many hours away from
development, further adding to slippage.
Expanding the scope of assignments did however have a positive
outcome in that I personally gained some much needed breathing space
to cope with ever-increasing demands on my time. As project
awareness increased each of my responsibilities - programming,
design, team leadership, marketing and business - all ballooned. The
success of Greenlight had unexpectedly forced us to up our game on a
number of fronts. Our marketing communications had been somewhat
limited to the standard-fare of social media, so I spent Christmas
writing our email marketing platform with the inaugural email going
out as we welcomed in January 2013. Then there was the increasing
globalization of our community requesting the game be available in
multiple languages. With the original plan only allowing for English
and lack of budget once again an issue, I turned to the community and set
about writing the Community Translation Tool. It would of
course be easy to ignore such requests, but that would spoil the best
part of what it is to be an indie; being able to interact with Gamers
on a one-to-one basis and inviting them to share in your passion. Spending the extra time means the demo will
be that little bit better appealing to a larger audience, and we need every win possible to maximize
our chances of a successful Kickstarter campaign when it starts this spring.
The reality of why the project is taking longer than expected
is a simple one: a small team with limited budget striving to deliver
something exceptional leaves only one variable: time. If we let any
aspects of game development slip, we risk not reaching our funding
goal. Taking a little longer than planned and maximizing our chances
of success is the right decision for everyone.
