PROGRESS REPORTS
This document reports regulary on the status of the project.
It does so in reversed chronological order: recent reports first.
22 October 2004
Report of step 7 in the V.A.F. Mile Stone Plan is here.
1 October 2004
We have concluded an initial consultation round with
International Hobo
concerning a revision of some of the gameplay elements in "8".
We felt "8" was lacking structure and that some of the puzzles would be too hard to figure out.
International Hobo essentially redesigned the gameplay layer of "8", after a long and intense discussion via e-mail with Chris Bateman.
We're very happy with
the results and we do think that implementing their ideas would benefit the game.
But we're reluctant to make any final decision about this without consulting with the publisher whom we end up working with first.
The option to make "8" a completely freeform play-environment is still open.
Meanwhile, after having sent information to several publishers -most of whom did not get back to us-, we are waiting for decisions from Dreamcatcher and Ubisoft who are both evaluating the project.
23 September 2004
V.A.F. has accepted the changes in the Mile Stone Plan that we requested.
16 September 2004
Report of step 6 of the VAF Mile Stone Plan has been published.
It includes a request to change the content of the Mile Stone Plan but not the timing.
Basically a request to allow us to use the remaining funds for preparing actual production of the game and a promise that, if we fail to get commercial funding, we would make an alternative version of the game at our own expense.
6 September 2004
We have attended the Game Developer Conference in London once again. This year, public attendance to the conference (and to ECTS, the accompanying trade fair), suffered greatly from the aggressive competition from the European Games Network with a trade show, a public games event and a conference organized at the exact same time. As a result, we found ourselves traveling back and forth twice, only being able to attend half of the conference. We had arranged only one meeting before we left, on Friday with Dreamcatcher. The rest would have to rely on improvisiation.
31 August
On the day before the conference, we met with Dan Marchant, who will be assisting us on the business side of the project. We discussed quite a lot of issuess and got some very good tips from him concerning the pitching we were about to do.
1 September
We spent the first day at the GDCE and had a nice conversation with the people from International Hobo (Ernest Adams, Chris Bateman) with whom we would like to work for game design and scripting. They recommended us to lower our ambitions (and budget) because they thought it would not be possible to find a publisher that was both wealthy and willing to take the risk of funding an original game like "8". Mr. Bateman figured "8" could easily become a niche hit but that the chances for mass market success may be slim.
2 September
The second day, we took the 1-hour train ride to EGN. We walked around, addressed some publishers, got their business cards and were able to arrange one meeting, that afternoon, with Digital Jesters. Before that we had a disastrous impromptu warm-up session with Jiri Jakubec, head of producers at Cenega who had just gotten off the plane. We met Dan Marchant again and accepted his request to sit in on the meeting with Digital Jesters. After the meeting with Terry Malham, Dan's comments were harsh and fair. We gave a bad presentation. Not that it would have mattered in the end since our project is too large for Digital Jesters to fund. We had learned a lot and prepared our meeting with Dreamcatcher throughly that night in the hotel.
The events and conversations with other people had triggered a lot of discussions between us. Ultimately we decided that Chris Bateman was probably right. That it was probably a little too ambitious to try and execute our first game at a budget of 2.5 Million. Especially considering the amount of copies we would need to sell to make a return on investment. And the 2 years of production time seemed to also be a stumbling block. So we made the radical the decision of pitching "8" as a 1 year/800.000 Euros project (hoping that we would be able to get half of the budget from other sponsors, like V.A.F.) and to just make it work. We feel a lot more comfortable with the reduced stress of a "low" budget project.
3 September
Perhaps because of the above decision but probably more because Thomas Neveu of Dreamcatcher Europe turned out to be human (and we gave a much better presentation), our meeting the next day at EGN was a success. Mr. Neveu said he would support the project and try to push it through the acquisition process of his company. Dreamcatcher, and its "Adventure Company" brand, is certainly one of the most suitable publishers we can think of for "8". We got on quite well with Mr. Neveu and since he would be taking the role of producer on himself in the process, we hope he succeeeds. In the mean time, we are going to assume that he will, and start preparing for production.
30 August 2004
We have updated the dossier of the project with an eye on pitching "8" to several publishers. We have printed and bound several copies of this dossier. And sent these, with a CD-Rom containing the latest demo and other viewing materials accompanied by a nicely printed walkthrough with screenshots, to a few publishers
(
Got Game,
BHV,
Merscom and
Ascaron.
And we will be taking some to London (GDCE and EGN)
18 August 2004
Report of step 5 of the VAF Mile Stone Plan has been published.
1 August 2004
The website for 8 has been redesigned and updated with screenshots of the new demo and lots of information.
28 July 2004
Report of step 4 of the VAF Mile Stone Plan has been published.
2 July 2004
After a meeting with Luckas Vandertaelen at V.A.F., it became clear the the major obstacle for the V.A.F. to fund "8" from its animation budget was the lack of productional partner and/or publisher. They invited us to submit a new proposal when we have removed this obstacle (and preferably for a smaller amount than the 750.000 we requested).
16 June 2004
V.A.F. has not accepted our proposal for animation funding. The letter explaining why, was very vague and we have composed some remarks to prepare for a meeting with them.
11 May 2004
Report of step 3 of the VAF Mile Stone Plan has been published.
7 March 2004
Report of step 2 of the VAF Mile Stone Plan has been
published.
We haven't been able to finish all the assets for the trailer on time but we have made a
work-in-progress version available.
This is the version that accompanies our request to the V.A.F. for animation funding.
The mile stone plan has been re-arranged a bit. The autonomous behaviour demo has now become an integral part of the software development as a result of the programming style of Ronald Jones, who has revised the complete game engine. And all our focus is now on making a gameplay demo. Roughly, April is reserved for conceptualization, May for modelling and texturing and June for animation and interaction.
Our team is now smaller then when we were working on the trailer. This makes it a lot more managable.
We have also stopped experimenting with new team members in favour of working with reliable ones.
Ronald Jones is helping us with prgramming and Laura Smith with animation (mainly of the Little Girl).
Lina Kusaite and Martin Michl are making concept drawings, the first focussing on characters, the latter on architecture.
With Martin, we are developping style guides to make creation of assets easier in the future and to unify the look of the game.
The Estonian Meerkat Studio is our primary source for models and textures.
And the Ukrainian Dragonfly studio is making some concept art and doing some architectural modelling.
We may be working with Nathalie Routin again for some character rigging.
Alex Mouton is designing the system the will run the Wicked Branches but it is very doubtful if this will meet the demo deadline (especially because we lack the funds to pay him fully).
29 January 2004
All is going well with the production. We're a little late because talking with people takes more time than expected. It takes a while until people understand what we expect from them and for us to define what we want from them. But expecially through brainstorms with concept artists Gorik and Lina, the game is becoming better and better.
We have decided to not worry about publishers and investors too much for the time being and focus entirely on producing great demos. We will make a trailer first, then a demo of the autonomous behaviour of the Girl and the Wicked Branches and then a demo to show various gameplay elements. All of this should be ready by June 30 but we need to show some animation examples by April 2 for the VAF animation fund proposal.
12 January 2004
The report of Mile Stone 1 of the VAF stappenplan has been
published.
It contains a lot of information about the progress of the project.
9 December 2003
We have been to the notary to start our business officially as "Tale of Tales BVBA".
27 November 2003
We have updated the budget in the Phase 2 Dossier to reflect our ambitions with "8". We have decided that we will try and make a commercially succesful title of high quality out of "8". The cost of which is estimated at 2.5 Million Euros (excluding marketing and distribution).
15 November 2003
The mile stone plan required by the VAF funding has started. While research and design is still continuing (and will culminate in our Game Design Symposium in Spring 2004), this means a pre-production phase has started in which we will be able to improve the quality of our work and thus our chances of appealing to potential investors and publishers.
9 September 2003
The Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds have decided to grant us 100.000 Euros for the production of "8".
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