Recover, Cleanup, Continue
As eager as we are to get back to things, we needed to do a few things first.
Having survived the Kickstarter campaign, we have had to take care of a few things before jumping back into full production mode again.
Here is the simplified list:
- Avoiding burnout by taking a vacation (Check)
- Complete undone tasks that were pushed aside during Kickstarter (Check)
- Tax papers, accounting and reporting (Check)
- Request funds from Kickstarter and the Norwegian Film Institute (Check & 80%)
- Update production plan (50%)
- Backer survey, backer management (Waiting)
- Continue Production (Resiliently Waiting)
- Contact Creative Tier Backers and begin the creative process with the backers. (Waiting)
Post Kickstarter funding
We are going to continue the funding campaign for Earthlock on our website and reach a few more stretch goals that way. The work has begun on a new site layout and we will shortly move the 'Kickstarter' page to the archive. This means that those who did not get the add-ons they wanted or their Amazon payment failed, should hurry and get it now as not all options will be available on the new webpage.
Backer Survey / Backer Management
We have not yet sent out a survey asking you for the details of your pledge. We are sorting out the last details of how to go about this in the most sensible way. We should be ready to do so in a few weeks. This took longer than anticipated since we first intended to go with Backerkit, but were advised not to by some friends with lots of experience with KS.
Story / Lore
Something we would like to share with you all about some work getting back to production; Two weeks ago, we had our screenwriter - Magnus Aspli - in the office for a work-weekend with the team.
We sat down Friday morning and worked through the story of the whole Earthlock Trilogy - which was extremely fun, but very mentally exhausting to do in such a short time! Although we have done lots of work on this internally over the last 18 months we had not locked down all the details of the story. We had tons of ideas, concepts and story parts loosely connected in a way that we knew the outcome, but the connections were tenuous.
Well, after three long days and evenings of being locked in the office together, we managed to nail down all the details of Festival of Magic and the most important parts for the two sequels! With Magnus' experience and skills, we were super efficient getting everything in to place. We are really proud of the story now! It has everything we like in a good story and we can't wait to share tidbits of this with you in the coming months in teaser form.
Continued Produciton
We are just staring to design all the exciting places around the world of Umbra. Here is Fredrik working on an area called Ramoo Island. He is done with his cleaning up tasks and can now go back to creating cool stuff. That is it for this time! Next up is the Nordic Game Convention in Malmö, Sweeden that we will be attending next week. Hopefully we will learn a lot of useful tricks there.
