The Dark Triad: Dragon's Death - How the Team is Organized

Myrthos

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Abel Bascunana Autoloot games provided us with more information on the way the development of The Dark Triad: Dragon's Death is handled.
Today is one of those days I can’t sleep. Here it’s 4am.
It’s been many weeks that I’ve been going to sleep between 4-6am. I tried to organize the work, had the KS video prepared, while at the same time wrote the game and press texts, sent them to proofread, recorded the ingame video footage, managed the press news, etc. What I do recall as the most stressful time before the KS campaign was the day before launching, when messing around with the Visual .Net code Jose Manuel did so I could change the chars speed, the particle effects and trying to position the NPCs to make them move properly without them getting stuck when they touched each other (blame the collision system!). I didn’t have the slightest idea how it all worked, even JM left some indications before leaving to BCN. Also Carlos could not connect at all times to solve things that were not working properly.
And compiling…
I must have done it three hundred times. Compile now and check if things are correct. Are not? Then apply changes, commit the files on the repo and check again if it worked properly. It was very time consuming and getting good video takes wasn’t easy. Miguel was at Seville due to personal matters for a week, so I was overwhelmed by all the work we needed to pull out for the KS campaign.
Rafater worked hard to have the video ready while I was preparing the KS layout. We finished it all at 9am, having been up all night long. The day after, KS approved our page and the backers know the rest of the story and how it ends… Anyways this time we’ll take it longer so we can push a proper KS campaign, as said on the last update.
So as you see, we rushed quite a lot, also because we are trying to meet our internal deadlines. Why such a hurry?
The reasons are as follows.
When the team was made up by Miguel (Combat and IA Design and Production), Jose Manuel (Lead Programmer), Rafa (2D Art) and me (Story, Dialogues and Quests, Production), both Miguel and me could pay the expenses for Jose Manuel’s and Rafa salaries. But as the project needs increased, we needed to hire more people. Now that David Lopez (3D GFX), David Lucena (Lightning and Shadow casting) and Carlos Mangas (Combat Programming) have joined the team, it’s very difficult to keep up and pay them all from our personal savings.
Both Miguel and me are making remarkable efforts to maintain afloat this lifetime cRPG dream of us. Miguel has had to let go some of his clients from his personal business to allocate more time to the project. This also means a reduced income and more economic constraints, besides he recently moved with his girlfriend with all the expenses and hassle this means.
In my case, I voluntarily left a Social Games company that I’ve seen ranking up from 17 to 120 employees in a year and a half. I was the QA Manager and my job was pretty stable. But dreams are dreams, and to make them come true you must risk something. I’ve been working on some freelance translation work to help pay my part of the expenses, but this doesn’t give enough money to make the cRPG we want to make.
We’ve achieved many, let me write it in capital letters, MANY good things with such adverse circumstances. Jose, David Lopez, Carlos Mangas, David Lucena, and me, are now working full time on The Dark Triad (Jose Manuel has been the only one that has been working on the project full time during the last 10 months). Miguel and Rafa are working part-time, even Miguel works almost 7-8 hours on the project. Rafa is also involved in other projects, but when he is needed he’s always there to respond with hard work.
So we can say then that our modus operandi almost resembles that of other established professional RPG game companies, with the difference that everybody works from their homes. I don’t really know if we are the first ones to attempt a cRPG at this scale doing remote work. This, rather than being an obstacle, has meant an increased productivity, as we have a schedule where we must overlap and be together during all the morning, and then everybody has some flexible hours, which allow them to work at midnight for example when they feel more proactive. The team has daily meetings by Skype, also all the activity, tickets, messaging, etc. is centralized on Assembla. Before finding out what worked best for us Project Management-wise, we tried with Trello, Google docs, Jira and other Agile Dev solutions, but Assembla is the one we all feel most comfortable with.

If you’ve read our other entries, you know we already have some major systems in place, specially our proprietary 3D tech, which consists and a fully fledged 3D game editor and a ...More information.
 
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Why isn't this game highly anticipated here? Turn based, party based isometric crpg? It looks great!
 
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Yeah, this one had slipped past me. Looks interesting. Graphics look very good given that they are only looking for about $130k.
 
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Why isn't this game highly anticipated here? Turn based, party based isometric crpg? It looks great!

I'm very interested in this game, but with the number of turn based and party based games coming on kickstarter now it's no longer enough just to have those 2 features.

A year ago I would have bought anything just because it was turn based and party based. Now there's choices, which is great btw.

I think that's one reason original sin is funding much slower than I would have thought.
 
I thought this looked as if it was likely to be a good game, possibly very good, and that the team obviously know their stuff. I just *wish* they hadn't come up with such a generic story and setting. And they need to answer the question: What does this game do that the other iso turn based games don't? Also, the combat demo part of the video was dreadful, like trying to watch a football match from a passing airliner.

And agree with Sakichop: If the funding for Original Sin is slow, which it is, I can't hold out much hope that Dark Triad does better the next time around than last time unless they vastly up their game on the marketing and presentation front.
 
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Hi guys,

First of all thanks for the comments. I just wanted to tell that we won't rush to come back to KS until we have something much better than what we showed the first time. The story is being rewritten from scratch, and I think you guys will like how it's shaping up. We'll post about it in the next 1-2 weeks so you can give us feedback and tell us what you think for if we can improve something.

We made many mistakes when it came to prepare our KS campaign and we are working hard to address all of them. We didn't convey properly what the game was about or what non-combat skills the player will have available, among many other things explained in our latest KS updates.

We also want to demonstrate to potential backers that we can improve upon what was shown with our scarce personal savings during what will be a non-stop 12 months of development. And if you like what we show next time, hopefully people will feel more confident that we can deliver a good CRPG experience.

And last, I want to thank all the RPGWatchers, as readers from this site generated the highest amount of backers until we cancelled the KS campaign, so thanks for your support so far guys! =)
 
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I must applaud Autoloot's general attitude and great effort. I will definitely back you guys on your next Kickstarter attempt :)

Looking forward to your next post!
 
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