This week in Indie-Ana Co-Op, Jesper Kristiansen, Audio Lead and Communications handler at BetaDwarf Entertainment, shares with us the lessons learned from the development of their 2013 hit, Forced. Every game's development has its share of triumphs and losses/difficulties, but the story of Forced is one that is all of its own.
Forced Post-Mortem by Jesper Kristiansen
If you had asked me when I was 10 years old, I’m pretty sure I would have outlined a situation akin to how game developer BetaDwarf has operated for the last three years as my dream scenario. Living together in a big house, working on our own game by day, and by night playing other peoples games, and then do it all over again the next day.
My adult self can now say that while it was an incredible experience to create our game, Forced, under such special circumstances. it was probably also somewhat different from what my 10 year old self would have imagined. In both good and bad ways.
BetaDwarf gets it start
Forced, and BetaDwarf, got it’s start at a university campus in the outskirts of Copenhagen in 2011. The original idea came from a group of university students, who saw an opportunity to combine learning, game development and a future job, by simply making a game and a game development company during the last part of their education.
With this mission in mind, they set about poaching the best people from the other classes. Potential candidates was invited in secrecy to a meeting, where the plans were revealed and soon, work on the project got underway.
On the university, they were lucky enough to find an unused classroom, and thus claimed it for themselves and the game, which at this point was known by the slightly more generic name Faith of the Guardians. And soon, people began to work on the game on more, much more, than full time. This meant that mattresses were brought into the room, so people could spend the night.
It was about this time, that I joined the project. They needed someone to do sound FX for the game, and acknowledging the not-so-impressive quality of the improvised office, I was recruited at a café far from the campus. And thus - the story of Forced and BetaDwarf was changed from them to we.
Slowly, the lived-in quality of our unofficial office only increased. People began to terminate their apartment leases and moved into the converted classroom for real. We actually thought we had some pretty good stuff going at that point. Looking back now, it was a horrible clumsy mess, but we were convinced that it was a unique diamond in the rough.
We were even brave enough to send in an application to the national game funding programme. The accompanying video was completed in the last minuted, and featured BetaDwarf co-founder Steffen lying through his teeth on the voiceover, brazenly explaining bizarre NPC behavior as the result of advanced AI routines.
Things begin to get difficult
We didn’t get anything from the funding programme, of course. And to make matters worse our free office lease at the university was about to end. One morning, a teacher mistakenly walked into the classroom and found a room full of computers, dirty dishes, mattresses, and a couple of surprised game developers wearing only boxers and toothbrushes. A few hours later, we were officially requested to leave the premises immediately.
We ended up googling the “Cheapest place to live in Denmark”, and result number three that came up was a place called Karlslunde - one of the outermost suburbs of Copenhagen. A quick meeting was called. Were we ready to move to Karlslunde to be able to continue with the game? Yes, we were!
But the decision to move into a suburban house also brought a new level of seriousness. People now had to pay rent, so there was no more freeloading. When we agreed to move, we had also agreed that we understood that this project would cost us something. And with this seriousness, we also took the first step towards professionalism.
Not that we had any money in the company to start with. So instead of salary, we were each promised a small cut of the potential revenue from the game, with the understanding that most of the revenue would go to the company itself to get it up and running and ready to produce the next game as a normal game studio would. The financial crisis had just hit Denmark at this point, so an actual paying job in the games industry was about as likely as a blue rabbit. So we thought about it as if we were building our own jobs, or at least making sure we were getting relevant experience until the crisis would blow over.
Long days and revolving doors
The days in Karlslunde was probably the hardest part of the development of Forced. Not only did we go through numerous iterations of the game. At one point, the whole of the combat system was dropped and had to be rebuilt from the ground up, which ended up cascading through the rest of the pipeline since this meant new skills, new graphic effects for these skills, new audio for them etc.
There is no doubt that these changes made Forced a much better game. But when you’re right in the middle of it, and you are finally beginning to see some light at the end of the tunnel, it can be incredibly hard to see that goal being moved further out into the future with no certainty that it might not be moved even further again. Another thing we learned during this period is how difficult it is to strike the balance between improving things, and leaving them as they are. Especially since we were actually getting much better at our craft in this period. This meant that we could always go back and improve what we had already done, since now we could make it even better, but moving back wasn't moving forward.
The thing is is that a game is never really finished. You just stop working on it at some point when you believe it’s reached the level where you want it to be. The lure of the perfect game is dangerous, but at the same time, you also have to make sure, that your game is good enough to stand above the competition. The balance between these is the key. Something that can be difficult to get your head around the first time - especially if you’re deep in the trenches.
It was also in many ways a maturing process - not just for the game, but also for the team. We learned that there is a big difference between working together on a project for fun, and doing it as a professional developer. The people who are your best friends might not be the ones best suited for the project, which lead to some very hard decisions regarding who should remain on the project, and who should not. On top of this, the combination of no salary, uncertain future, and working in a desolate suburb also took it’s own toll on the team. Happily, most were actually able to find paying jobs in the industry, showing us, that our idea about educating ourselves through self-employment was not completely crazy.
But there were also days of glory in Karlslunde; like the day where we actually did receive funding from the national games programme. This proved to us that we had improved immensely and that others could see the potential in Forced. It also secured basic funding for running the administrative side of things.
A kick in the balls
Despite that boost, the funds were running low during the summer of 2012 and the game was still nowhere near complete. We needed more time, and thus more money, and we decided to try and find both through Kickstarter in what more and more looked like an all-or-nothing gamble.
After a good start, the campaign slowed down considerably. Just 10 days before the end, we were only on track to hit about 60% of our target. All things were tried. One of them was an image, that told the story of BetaDwarf so far. About our ambitions, dreams, and the obstacles we were facing as unproven developers, trying to get a game on Steam. And the image hit a chord with a lot of people. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, the donations took off; we ended at 164% of our $40,000 goal. And with success came confidence. There were people who believed in us and what we were doing! We found new energy and development picked up speed again.
I guess the lesson from this is: never give up, always keep trying. Especially regarding Kickstarters. And you can never predict, what will work, so stay flexible. We spent two months preparing for it, and what saved us in the end was improvisation. So prepare, prepare some more, and then be ready to throw it all out the window if something else seems to be getting more traction than your minutely laid plans.
Sprint to the finish
In early 2013 we moved to a new office, closer to the city. Some people still lived in the new office, but some also moved out and found their own places. With the money from the Kickstarter we were also able to hold on to the same team now with small payments. After the days in Karlslunde, we had learned that there was also value in trying to keep the same team, as too many changes had been disruptive to the development effort; both in purely practical terms, but also in introducing uncertainty, social adjustments, and new group dynamics.
Work progressed at a brisk pace, but the new material that was created by this final team once again was of a quality that forced us to go over all the old assets again and bring them up to the same level. The closer we got to finishing the game, the more we became concerned about the actual launch of the game since we still had not secured a place on Steam. We were on Steam Greenlight but had a hard time getting in the top 10. Every time we climbed the list, new popular games seemed to pop up in front of us. And once again, money was running out.
Again, however, timing was perfect as we managed to win one of the categories in the Intel Level-up competition, thus securing a spot for a demo on Steam. With the demo up, it finally happened - we became Greenlit. We had a place on Steam to sell our game, but we were still not completely done. Now we also had to integrate Forced into the Steam-framework so that the game would work with friend-lists, automatic patching, Steam-overlay and the like. But we had no more Kickstarter money to use for this final push.
In what can only be described as a ballsy move, the two founders, Kenneth and Steffen, decided to simply take out a personal loan of $100,000 dollars each. Fueled by either courage or confidence (or a combination), they put their personal financial life at stake to finish Forced. And with this, we could finally begin to see the finish line.
A short Early Access period let us pick up some of the most serious bugs prior to release, and on the 24th of October it finally happened. Forced was released on Steam, and what had started out as a crazy pipe dream in a university classroom had become pure, fantastic reality. The same day, Steffen made another image that told the story of the wild ride we had been through while working on the game and distributed it on any available social network. I’m pretty sure that this was a part of the reason that we sold enough copies during that first day to pay off the personal loans that Steffen and Kenneth had taken out.
I guess the lesson from all of this is that even if you have made a great game, you need people to notice it. Our strongest message was the story about our team, so we used that to both save our Kickstarter and boost release sales. We used that - and we believe other developers should do the same. Find out what builds a connection with people and use that to get people to your game. Find out what your story is.
This was ours.
