Unity Price for Freedom: Avarice [Build 36 Beta 1] [Team Dead Deer]

[Pararela]

We will[ be hitting 6 year but yeah it is a long time... only when you don't factor our team size into it and how much content is already in it. We might shoulda prolly should have put something smaller out, but I honestly can't say we could have gotten it out any faster than we did without twice the team and the factoring etc size.

It took a lot of work to develop the architecture changes for the game itself, and we are still developing some brand new featuresets and modules that just... do not exist. We are one of the first devs to put out some of the modules we have for unity. After we worked out a lot of our core tech things really sped up a lot. But yeah I can pretty confidently say we develop pretty fast all things in consideration because... hrmm, let me think on if I can say this publicly.



Well yeah I can, so basically we wanted to hire contractors to do a smaller game set briefly before Redic got into the city starring Aya, you've met her if you have played, she's the horned lizard girl hunting blackfurs. We hired four different contract based writers to do it, and we base most all of it off already existing locations and art to speed up the development speed, it was contracted for two years before I personally stepped in and for the past 2 years I put most my personal efforts towards taking the disparate documents and writing and fixing/unifying/updating them all to be more cohesive and completed a lot of the incomplete work.

In two years... GnS' full core story is written. It could ship in a couple weeks, even, in this state... it only took us two years to pullt his entire side-game together and finish it and some of it was slowed by a personal injury that slowed me down for a few months. Right now we are just polishing it and adding more to the experience based on input from Critical Bliss, who will be publsihing it.

Even if we weren't adding more to it, it was a FULL game, I would guess 10 hours, and now with all this side content? I think GnS could easily be a 15 hour game or longer if you just enjoy some of the side content we have for it. When I step back and I look at a lot of other projects, friends of mine even, I am pretty shocked how much we pushed.

GnS is valuable, too... its being used as a testbed for features, content delivery, what people enjoy and we need more of vs less, SEO building, and a host of stuff that GnS' existence lets us radically experiment without risking Avarice. The way our art pipeline, programming, and writing pipelines were vs how we have them now has improved a lot and yeah, super proud of what the entire team has accomplished. We haven't skipped a beat on releasing Avarice content, it's been super regular compared to the past when we had some pretty bad drought periods, and despite that we have essentially completed an entire test bed/game for it that will be out Soon.TM.

I am excited for GnS and it's good that you can use it as a testbed, but I can't help but wonder.
Instead of hiring contractors to make a whole side game, why didn't you expand the team of the main game?

 

[Valaska]

I am excited for GnS and it's good that you can use it as a testbed, but I can't help but wonder.
Instead of hiring contractors to make a whole side game, why didn't you expand the team of the main game?

Well, that was more or less our actual objective to test new writers and programmers to see if someone would have the time or the consistency to joint he team on a more permanent basis. The reason we as a small team can't just expand the team to do this and need to test it out, is that we don't have the resources to risk on someone that just may not pan out.

It is more important to focus on getting the whole team to a point where they are financially secure. So contractors were in our eyes the safest and most hassle-free route.

But, it was a tall order on our contractors and our organisational skills lacked a bit, too. It ended up with multiple contractors which came and then had to leave due to other obligations or not realising how MUCH work there is in making something like GnS. We tried the safe bet and had two writing contractors, an integrator, and a pretty clear plan. Art would mostly be re-used assets or assets that can be used in Avarice that we would need anyway so our main production line could handle that.

Not keeping up on it properly and observing it closely enough led to... a lot of issues and "neglect debt" adding up. Most all the work was good on a writing standpoint, but there were large formatting issues and characterisation and voicing that differed from one contractor to the next and Aya was radically different than in Avarice!

So when I took charge of GnS it was a lot of work taking a despotic handful of documents that Deck did his best to order and organise, but even then some did not play properly in the numbering order and some had portions that over-wrote the others. Funnily enough, this is an issue some BIG teams have where overwriting can happen and you need to decide which version is better or even if the two can flow, it's why having a single writer with a principal manager/editor can save you time instead of just adding more people at a task.


TLDR;

Full time persons would be much more expensive and they don't always work out. Writing is a VERY hard thing to judge when a writer is GOOD, but might not have the time management/motivation to stick to a long-term collaborative process. Contractors were a way for us to feel that out but... did not pan out in this situation.