Long time no see! We’ve been silent for five long months, and you’re sure to wonder why. What was going on here? Why this long pause? To put it simply: we’ve been quite busy. We were finalizing the game prototype for a Publisher pitch that our future basically hinged on, so we were focusing on that and blogs unfortunately had to be sidelined. Besides, we didn’t want to publish too much information at that important moment as it’s certainly better when your potential partner learns the salient facts from you directly and doesn’t have to hunt for them on social media. Now we finally have some time so I’ll try to catch up and write an account of what was going on here.
As you may know, we are a startup financed by a private angel investor. We received funding for development of a prototype to demonstrate to Publishers. If they’re interested, (i.e. willing to finance at least some of the development and publish the game), we move from prototype development to full production and you’ll get your game. If they’re not interested, we don’t move anywhere and you’ll get nothing and we’re out of business. Of course, there are other alternatives, like Kickstarter, but this is not what we’re focusing on right now.
The last few months were the period when we were finishing the prototype and then we went on a ‘world tour’ of Publishers’ offices, so as you can imagine we were quite occupied! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, now we want to talk about the process of finishing the prototype and the report from our tour will be on the menu for next time.
OUR MASTERPLAN
Our original plan was to develop the prototype in 15 months, and given our original commencement day this was supposed to fall on September/October 2012. Unfortunately, there were some delays when starting the company, and the deadline shifted to Christmas 2012 and we didn’t realize at first that you can’t actually sell anything but trees, turkeys and trinkets at this time of the year. We shifted our deadline to February and that gave us space to improve the thing (and it also cost us some extra money).
And what are we calling a prototype? What have we been doing for the past year and a half? We managed to do quite a lot and surprisingly (this being a game project) we even surpassed our original plan in some respects.
