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Tale of Tales “8” VAF Mile Stone Plan |
REPORT
Step 6: "Finalization" (Aug 15-Sep 15)
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Introduction
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This mile stone has centered around our trip to London on 1, 2 and 3 September. Before the trip we were busy preparing materials to take with us and making contacts. After the trip we needed to evaluate what had happened and make decisions concerning the future of the project.
After we had registered for the
Game Developers Conference
in London, we found out that there was another competing event going on in London at the exact same time.
The
European Games Network was a trade fair for developers, publishers and retailers which coincided with a trade show for the public (Game Stars Live) and another conference for developers (European Developers Forum). These events were aggressively scheduled at the exact same dates as GDCE and ECTS, and at the other side of the city. This was a mostly British politico-industrial issue that was of not much concern to us. But the problem for us was that, despite of the fact that the GDCE had a much more interesting programme of lectures and presentations, all the game publishers would be attending the EGN and not the ECTS (the trade show that takes place in the same venue as the GDCE where we met with Atari last year). The main reason of our visit was meeting with publishers. Since we had realized this problem so late, we were only able to arrange for one meeting with a publisher at EGN before we left.
Anyway, we ended up spending the first day at GDCE, the second at EGN, and the third in the morning at GDCE and in the afternoon at EGN. It was a mess with the underground train trip taking one hour from one place to the other. But as you will read below, it was worth it.
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London
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The first person we met with in London, the day before the conference, was
Dan Marchant.
He is a freelance game design and development consultant we had emailed with before.
It was a very pleasant meeting and he gave us many tips on how to present our project.
We have signed contracts about working with him on business, management and scheduling issues.
The first day of the conference, after their presentation, we talked to again to
Ernest Adams and to his colleague at
International Hobo,
Chris Bateman.
International Hobo is an independent game design and scripting company from Manchester.
They were very interested in our project. But Mr. Bateman said that in his opinion, "8" is a niche market title for which it would be hard to find the 2.5 Million Euros we had estimated production would cost. This started a thinking process in us that would continue to develop over the next few days.
On 2 September we headed for the EGN trade fair, armed with booklets, demo CDs and business cards.
We succeeded in meeting with two publishers
(Cenega (CZ) and
Digital Jesters (UK)) but neither seemed very interested in our project. And Terry Malham of Digital Jesters plainly said that our 2 year/2.5 Million production was far beyond their means.
It can't be said that we gave very good presentations either. Dan Marchant had sat in on the second one with Digital Jesters and he had a debriefing with us afterwards and told us where we went wrong and how we could do better.
From many other publishers we got contact details which we were going to use to send things to when we got home.
That evening in the hotel, we prepared our only planned meeting thoroughly. We decided to stop trying to go for the big budget and long time production in favour of presenting the production of "8" as a 1 year project that would cost 800.000 Euros (of which part may be financed by other parties than the publisher). We were just going to have to scale down the project to make it fit. It's better than not to make anything at all.
On the third of September our morale had sunk an all time low. We were desperate that we were not going to find a publisher for our project and started making all sorts of unattractive plans on what to do if everything fails. We had learned a lot about publishers and their motivations and we couldn't imagine a bright future for "8" in that industry.
Thomas Neveu of
Dreamcatcher Europe
turned out to be human. Over some coffees in paper cups at a lonely little table at "The TIGA International Content Market" at EGN, we presented our game and the demo fluently. He made notes and asked questions and then he said "Well, ok, I like this project. I'm going to do my very best to get my company to publish it." We couldn't believe our ears. We could almost cry (and kiss him with our wet faces). But we restrained ourselves. He couldn't promise anything. The project needed to go through a complicated acquistion process. We told him about the negative response that his colleage at Dreamcatcher Canada had given us last year and via emails. But he said that he would try to persuade her, or try and go around if need be. We had found our Champion!
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Other publishers
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In the mean time, we have been in touch with a few other publishers and we have realized that, as long as we limit production time and budget, it wouldn't be so impossible to find a publisher. Several smaller publishers have said that they would love to publish "8" but that they can't afford to. We feel confident that, if the deal with Dreamcatcher falls through, we can make alternative arrangements by having several small publishers work together to co-publish the game, if need be. Organizing this will, of course, take time.
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Rescheduling?
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We don't think rescheduling will be necessary. On the one hand because we are optimistic about having found a publisher for "8". On the other because we have come to the conclusion that an alternative production, if it is to be anything more than documentation of the project, is going to take a lot more time than one month. If the V.A.F. accepts that we make this alternative production on our own time and that we fund it ourselves over the course of next year, then there is no need to change the schedule with respect to time. That being said, no matter what happens, we will give you a lot of documentation material at the end of the plan.
The content of the remaining two steps of the mile stone plan, however, would change. If V.A.F. agrees, we would use the remaing budget to prepare (low budget) production of the game. This includes
- Hiring International Hobo for evaluation and (re)design of the game.
- Hiring Dan Marchant for organizing the production management and schedule.
- Finding people to supplement our production team (including management staff).
- Perhaps hiring a concept artist.
- Cleaning up the game design document and fixing logical errors.
- Organizing and adding detail the concepts for architecture, objects and characters.
- Tightening the game design in order to downscale the project.
- Collecting documentation to prepare for the concept art of all assets.
- Starting the creation of a blocked out version of the entire game world.
The deal with Dreamcatcher, if any, will take some time to solidify. It may in fact take until the end of the Mile Stone Plan period to get a signed agreement. And if it doesn't work out, making alternative arrangements will take even longer, during which time we will need to find other funding for the project.
The reason why we can't sit still and wait -and possibly put the Mile Stone Plan on hold- is that downscaling the project from a production time of 2 years to 1 year means that a lot of work that would otherwise have been done during the production, now needs to be done before the production starts.
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Conclusion
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Pertaining to our three goals, progress has been made on all fronts.
We have finished and wrapped up our second gameplay demo. This is always an important step in learning just how much time it takes to actually finish something. Which is often difficult to estimate. And of course, the demo is a good tool for testing players' responses.
We have found a publisher! The deal is far from done, but we have at least two producers at
Dreamcatcher pushing for our project. Dreamcatcher is a remarkably suitable publisher for "8" because it has a brand that focusses on adventure games -called
The Adventure Company- where a lot of our target audience will come from. And because they recently started a branch in Europe.
We have also made several valuable contacts with other game publishers. And we have sent out information to several more publishers and are still waiting for answers.
And we have added three valuable team members!
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