Over the past few months our lead designer Mike James and art director Patrick Hore have been preparing presentations on their journeys and experiences.

In the later half of 2019 and early 2020 they will be presenting their talks at various game industry events across the UK. In the hopes that they will inspire both individuals and teams to undertake new challenges, develop better practices and look after themselves throughout.

The Talks

Level up with a Post-Mortem by Mike James

In this talk Mike will be taking you through his story of joining a new team and delivering a thorough review on their latest release, whilst hopefully teasing out some hints and tips that might be useful in your own post-mortems.

Download Slides

Discovering the 3D Artist Within by Patrick Hore

In this talk Patrick will share his journey and experiences in starting out and developing as a 3D Artist through education, personal projects and the development of War for the Overworld. Discover how he found the 3D artist within and the lessons he learned along the way.

Download Slides

Event Calendar

Mike and Pat will be attending events throughout the year. Below you can find all past and present events and confirmed future events. Further events to be confirmed.

Date	Event Name	Information
29-Aug-2019	Brighton Unity Usergroup	Website
Future Events TBC

Videos

If you can’t make it to an event there’s no reason to miss out. You can review the rehearsal videos for each of these talks below.

Inspirational Beginnings

Every tale starts with inspiration and to find ours you have to wind back to 1997, when I was just five years old. This year marked the release of a game you may have heard of: Dungeon Keeper. This unique title by Bullfrog Productions and Electronic Arts, which mixed god games with RTS, was a critical juncture in our lives.

Dungeon Keeper 2 (Bullfrog Productions, Electronic Arts)

Everyone on our team can relate their stories of how this game impacted their childhood, and you can read about those here. But suffice to say, both this game and its follow-up in 1999, were huge inspirations to us. Most crucially, there was a small trailer packaged on the CD-ROM for Dungeon Keeper 2, which promised a third game in the series.

Unfortunately that promise would never materialise, as in the year 2000 came the news that it was to be cancelled. To fans of the franchise this was a huge blow, as it seemed Bullfrog Productions, a company we all loved, was to be restructured and reorganised to work on big-budget licenced titles.

Although many titles tried to fill the gap in the genre in the intervening years, including personal favourites such as Evil Genius and Startopia, and even some crazy ones like the China-only Dungeon Keeper Online, it seemed unlikely we’d ever see the prodigal third child.

The Forum Days (2009-2012)

Over the years much of our team came together on a fan forum for Dungeon Keeper and similar management games, called Keeper Klan. Mostly this was to be an echo chamber to voice our disappointment in the lack of a true sequel. Over time this energy became focussed into a concerted effort to develop a game of our own. But there was only one problem: none of us had made a game before!

Everyone who came together in these early days was filled with optimism, and although our skills ranged from enthusiastic hobbyists to experienced modders, there was a distinct lack of experience developing a full game. To compound issues the team was also spread across the world.

Being spread across the world makes things tough, especially for members in opposing time zones

Despite all that, we managed to scramble together a few prototypes. But progress was incredibly slow due to the volunteer nature of the project – most of the contributors were in full-time education or jobs. I myself worked at a milkshake bar just a short walk from where our office now stands.

Eventually we realised that if we wanted to get things done, we had to get serious about the project. A big effort was made to get more organised, and this is where the game, as it exists today, truly began.

We called our game War for the Overworld, in tribute to the late Dungeon Keeper 3’s subtitle.

Kicking It into Overdrive (Late 2012 – January 2013)

We knew that if we wanted to make this game, we had to raise enough money so that we could pay the team to work on it full time. Fortunately, Kickstarter had just emerged for games, and was proving to be a successful place for independent developers to raise funding.

We immediately set about incorporating as a company, under the banner of Subterranean Games. (To our surprise it was relatively straightforward to do.) So then we set about the task of launching our Kickstarter.

Peter was a huge advocate and that meant a lot when it came to the press

The campaign was a huge success: we raised our goal in no small part thanks to a video by Peter Molyneux (Dungeon Keeper’s original creator), which was seen by the press as a blessing.

We raised a total of £265,000, including slacker backers, which seemed like a huge sum of money at the time – certainly more than any of us had ever seen before. We also came out of the experience with many promises, not least signed copies of the game (despite us all living in different countries), and physical statues (we had no idea how much they would cost to produce). But the biggest promise was the release date of August… that same year.

The Rise and Fall of “Steve” (January 2013 – April 2013)

It wasn’t long after the Kickstarter that the first cracks started to show. The then leader of the project – let’s call him “Steve” – was meant to be running development from the US; yet somehow he couldn’t seem to open a bank account to transfer the Kickstarter funds into, so that people could get paid (since everyone had now quit their jobs to work full time on the game). I ended up handling payroll myself from the UK.

In many ways Steve was our Joffrey

Steve was also the lead programmer, and the one who had proposed the August release date. Yet he had some strange ideas about the technical architecture for the game, which the rest of the code team disagreed with, and didn’t believe was achievable in the proposed timescale. Despite discussing their concerns with Steve, he continued along his path, and kept the rest of the company in the dark. This only came to light when one of the other programmers came to me directly.

We had a big meeting with Steve, and the team decided that his behaviour simply couldn’t continue. And basically that was the end of Steve.

Unfortunately the codebase left by Steve was largely unusable, so for all intents and purposes we had to start again.

Getting down to Business (April 2013 – Late 2014)

It was clear at this stage that we were now most definitely not going to hit the August release date, and that our funds weren’t going to carry us much further beyond that, let alone into the following year. We knew release had to be pushed, but we had no room to maneuver.

Fortunately a life raft arrived. We’d approached Valve to see if we could do a paid alpha in advance of the game’s full release. At which point they made us aware that Steam Early Access was on the way, and they’d be happy for us to be among the first on there.

Our first ever team meet was graced by the radiant Richard Ridings

We got a lot of the team to travel to the UK, so we could all meet for the first time and promote the game. It was an incredible experience, which gave us an opportunity to bond and work together, some of us professing the virtues of the game outside the booth, while the code team pushed out fixes inside the booth. Peter Molyneux even dropped by, as did our voice actor Richard Ridings. (And the Mario Brothers!)

Even the Mario Bros dropped by to give us their blessing!

We didn’t have enough money to afford a hotel, so my parents were kind enough to put up our entire team for the week. With nearly a dozen people it was a crazed experience, with my room in the attic serving as what was essentially our first office.

We celebrated this event with cakes and milkshakes, a happening that would soon become a regular ritual in our company.

As the months passed and we moved into 2014 something incredible happened. We received a huge boost in sales in the middle of February, straight after the Steam Winter Sale, but eclipsing it completely. The cause? Dungeon Keeper Mobile, a game that didn’t go down too well with the fans. In response, the press, and extremely high-profile Youtubers like TotalBiscuit, pointed to our game as the true successor to Dungeon Keeper.

The Steam Sale (left) was dwarfed by the release of Dungeon Keeper Mobile (right)

The Road to Release (Late 2014 – April 2015)

But even after all that, by the end of 2014 the money was drying up. We had to finish the game and soon, so we put together a plan of action for our road to release.

We took out loans, dropped mod support completely, had some team members reduce pay while others forewent entirely, and planned for a physical retail release with a publishing partner.

In March we realised we needed as many people in the same room as possible to finish the game. We rented a rather large house in Hove, and brought team members together from all over the world – Australia, Germany, Lancashire.

Hove HQ was truly a blessing

Working in a single space gave us the opportunity to bring the game together as much as possible in the last few months. We slept upstairs and developed the game downstairs, practically 24/7. Frequent runs to Tesco for energy drinks were made.

Release and the Months that Followed (April 2015 – October 2015)

On April 2nd, 2015, we released War for the Overworld fully from Early Access. Despite all our best efforts, the game did not release at the level of quality we would have liked.

The user reviews were particularly difficult to read

Fortunately, through a sensible approach to post-release support, we managed to survive it and eventually turn things around. You can read all that in our previous blog post, “How Good Communication Can Save a Bad Launch”.

But it wasn’t long until we were forced to change plans again. In October 2015 our landlord sold the house from under us, which meant we had to pack up both our lives and our work. For some of us like me that meant returning home temporarily – something my cat loved but my parents less so.

The company itself was homeless, and although we continued working from our various accommodations, something better was drastically needed.

The Brightrock Era (Late 2015 – Present)

We spent our homeless time wisely. While most of the team continued work on improving War for the Overworld, the rest of us set about trying to find an office. We also decided that the Subterranean Games name no longer represented who we were, nor our now wider aspirations, so we incorporated once more as Brightrock Games.

Within a few months we had located what would soon become the home of Brightrock, right in the centre of Brighton (and which turned out to be Eurogamer’s old office!). It took us a total of six months to completely sort the lease!

With investment from Coast to Capital we set to work investing in the office itself. We knew we wanted to make this place not only a workspace, but also a relaxing home from home as well. After all, many of us had been working from home this entire time, or indeed in a home that served as an office.

The office underwent some serious refurbishment, all while we were working!

We spared no expense, getting a fully-equipped kitchen, air conditioning (which as I write this in the heat of summer I’m very thankful for), and projectors for our main meeting room and gaming room.

All the while work has continued on War for the Overworld, which after two years on from release now stands as not only a dungeon management game we can be proud of, but we hope a worthy successor to Dungeon Keeper as well. Naturally we’ve celebrated many times with cakes and milkshakes.

Now as we start to wrap up on War for the Overworld, we’re looking towards the future with two different titles in the works. We hope to share details on those soon.

So What Did We Learn on This Journey?

There’s a few key lessons we took away from all this that we think are valuable to any aspiring developers:

• Be sure of your team – Take a hard look at your team, especially the people in charge. Make sure they know what they’re doing, or at least have the capacity to learn.
• Share responsibility – Ensure everyone is involved in the major decisions and planning. Don’t just assume everything is fine and dandy.
• Plan together – Make sure you’ve got the resources to make the game, and don’t leave all the planning up to one person.
• Get help – Talk to other devs. Get a lawyer and an accountant (or at the very least start talking to these people).

• Keep your end goal in mind – Know your end goal and ensure all decisions are aimed at that.

   

• Keep talking to your fans (especially when things go wrong!) – If you communicate clearly with your fans and take ownership of your failures, they will often forgive your mistakes.

And remember: your mileage may vary. There are so many different scenarios to be in that there’s no guide to doing things the right way. You may have a bigger or smaller team than us, less or more resources, or be making an entirely different kind of game. But nevertheless, I hope there are some useful takeaways here, and that it has inspired you to never give up on your goal.

In March 2017, Josh attended the EGX Rezzed convention to share our story with other indies; specifically the story of War for the Overworld’s difficult development cycle and troubled release. He talked about how we used solid communication to stabilise the ship in the face of massive community backlash, and how we went on to build WFTO into a game that is now considered one of the best in its genre.

You can view the talk below, and grab a copy of the slides here.

 

This blog post will look in more detail at these issues, which will hopefully give you a better understanding of how to communicate with your community – especially if things go wrong with your game.

When developing War for the Overworld we ran into no shortage of trials and tribulations. These were borne from a number of factors, such as our inexperience, geographical distance, and lack of resources.

This all came to a head upon WFTO’s release from Early Access in April 2015, with the game not finished to the standards we expected from ourselves.

 

Every community manager’s worst nightmare condensed into a single image!

We faced a wave of negative feedback that if left unchecked would have destroyed any chance we had to repair the game and make it into the title we always knew it could be. But two years down the line and we’re still here, still developing the game we love, and WFTO has an impressive long tail for a game that should have crashed and burned. We now hold an overall steam review score of 78%, which is increasing month on month. How did we get here? With solid, honest and transparent communication! Along with, obviously, continuing to improve the game. But before we dive into the meat of why communication is so important to developers, I’d like to take a moment and provide some more context for our story. You can feel free to skip the next section if you want to get straight to the strategy.

 

Communicate Like a Human

In the modern age with social media ever-present, the number of ways that customers can let their thoughts be known has expanded exponentially. As game developers, our customers can share their opinions anywhere from Facebook to Twitter to Steam. In all these places you should be aiming to embrace your communities to strengthen the bond between developer and customer. For us this has always been part of our core philosophy: the desire to embrace our community, listen to them and allow them to share in the development of our games. From the early days of the Kickstarter we ran a weekly update called “War for the Overworld Wednesday”, which saw great engagement. We also maintained a strong presence on our forums and social media accounts. During this time we built a number of core principles around how we communicate:

The Core Principles

When you communicate, make sure to do it as:

• Much as possible – Engage with your customers whenever and wherever possible, even if it’s outside your chosen mediums. Seek out your users!
• Often as possible – Keep the pace up with your communication and make sure that information is disseminated regularly throughout your community.
• Honestly as possible – Lies will always be uncovered, and will make you appear ten times worse. Share as much of the truth as you reasonably can.
• Sincerely as possible – Sincerity will humanise your brand and will allow you to present yourself as an organisation that truly cares.
• Nicely as possible – It’s important you always present yourself in a polite and clear manner. Always be the good guy as much as you can.

Sticking to these tenets will help to redefine your company in the eyes of your customers. By treating them with respect and humanising your organisation, you’ll enable them to share in your journey, and to invest in your company and you as individuals.

It Can Be Tough

All this is easier said than done though, when you’re faced with any scenario where you’re up against major backlash. It can feel like you’re up against a tide, especially around a major event like a product launch. Here are some of the challenges we think you might face, and our thoughts on them:

• The “Angry Mob” – When faced with hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of upset users, it can be difficult to wade into the negativity. It’s important to separate yourself from the situation and realise your customers aren’t out to get you; they’re simply after a good game and that’s something anyone can appreciate.
• No time / resources – We’re fortunate enough to be in the position to employ someone full time to manage our community (yours truly). For smaller teams it may not seem possible with the time and resources you have to hand. In this case it’s important to understand that any communication is better than nothing. Find the time to make a statement at least once a week to let your community know what’s happening.
• Bad at communicating – You may have this opinion of yourself that you’re a bad communicator. Again, this doesn’t matter as much as you might think; simply stay honest and to the facts. This isn’t a marketing exercise – you’re simply trying to keep your fans informed.
• Make things worse? – You may feel you’ll make things worse by talking, but this is almost never going to be the case. If you’re nice and honest there’s very little that can go wrong.

Although it can be challenging to face these issues you’ll find that the benefits you gain outweigh the costs in most scenarios. Let your passion drive your will to communicate, and fans will draw that in!

Why Is Frequency of Communication Important?

Let’s explore a scenario: a game breaking bug has been uncovered in your game and people are talking about it. There are hundreds of complaints on the forums and your review score is in the tank. Hopefully you’re aware of the situation and you’re working on a fix. However, your community is not aware of this simple fact, and in the absence of any communication will take it upon themselves to fill in the blanks. Knowing what we know about the industry at large, as consumers the assumption will not be a positive one. Often when a developer ceases communication it means a solution will not be delivered. Players will naturally assume the worst, so it’s in your best interests that they don’t fill in those gaps. Wait too long and the damage is done. Ideally in this scenario your first response should be: “We’re aware of the situation and working on a fix.” This will assure your customers that you’re not abandoning them, and fixes are in the works. If you can, try to give a rough timeline as well. Make sure this message will reach your customers wherever they are. Use the tools available to spread the message far and wide: social media, announcements, stickied threads, blog posts, vlogs. Whatever is necessary just share the information in the quickest manner possible.

WFTO Wednesday helped to keep our community engaged

Expanding this scenario into a much larger disaster like our launch, you need to further this by keeping your players engaged; the more you can communicate the better. As we said previously, we used our weekly War for the Overworld Wednesday blog post to disseminate information each week. We kept this running post development as a tool for us to reach our core fans with critical information, which they would then disseminate amongst our further community. This helped save us time and energy, which was vital in our chaotic post-launch period.

Honesty Is the Best Policy

One of the cornerstones of our philosophy is to be sincere and honest in all our communications, as part of humanising our brand. But what do we mean by communicating honestly?

• Own your mistakes – Take ownership of the mistakes that led you to this situation. What needs to be addressed?
• Own your problems – Recognise and acknowledge the problems that contributed, and discuss how you’ll deal with them.
• The truth will humanise you – To err is human and to truthfully communicate your failings is to become human in the eyes of others. In the eyes of your consumers you then become a recognisable being, rather than an entity that has simply stolen their money.

If you’ve released in a state like WFTO did then this factor in your communication is very important. As it stands, all your players will only be seeing the very tip of the developmental iceberg, not all the issues that lead up to it. By taking ownership of these issues and honestly communicating to your customers, you’ll be humanised, making it much harder for them to simply lay abuse on you. Customers cannot empathise with faceless organisations, so share with them the human story!

We made several big transparent posts over the years, this is the first big one

We have two big examples to share from our own development. The first was a blog post we made just a year after the Kickstarter, which we titled “A Year in Retrospect”. This shared almost exclusively bad news, such as dropping mod support, and how the game was delayed. We spoke about these issues candidly and honestly and the response was incredible:

More often than not honesty is rewarded with encouragement and praise

In the wake of the disastrous launch, we continued this policy, and through it bought a lot of time for ourselves. We put together a video (see below) where we got on camera to discuss the issues directly. This accompanied a long blog post that explored the situation in more depth. In this statement we made a clear commitment to the game and our community, which amounted to, “Sorry the game is in this state, we’re definitely committed to fixing it.” After such a disaster and a whole post detailing just exactly what went wrong, we might have seen a massive backlash, but here’s what we got:

Never underestimate the value in an honest apology.

This truly illustrates why it’s so important that we as developers should be breaking the mould when it comes to this. Customers these days feel as though every word from a company’s mouth is a lie, covered in good-looking but foul-tasting PR glitter. If you talk to your customers recognising that they’re people just like you and I, then you can bet they will be fans for life!

It Pays to Be Nice

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that being nice is the best way to get someone on your side. Yet so many developers seem to fail in this regard, taking to their forums to flame their user base. This is an approach which benefits no one.

This is literally the worst thing you could possibly do (and thankfully it never happened!)

If you really want to get people on your side, you just have to remember that no matter how harsh a player is being, they are likely only after the same thing you are: a great game. Recognise their motivations and you’ll understand why they let the frustration flow in their messages.

Always be polite in your approach and you’ll get much further!

Remember that if a person is indifferent they’ll simply refund, ignore, or pass on the game. But someone who takes the time to type a paragraph about how bad the game is and how much the developer has failed clearly has some sort of passion for the title. If you can harness this passion you can create incredible advocates of your team – provided you can convert their anger into a positive force. People will appreciate you taking the effort to respond nicely and constructively, and many will flip their opinions. This is an incredible force when dealing with Steam reviews. Flipping a few reviews can help keep your game afloat. What’s even better is that this niceness will often snowball. By being nice to one user, that user may share their experience with others and be nice to them whilst sharing your message.  

 

Reach out to Your Players

  As you’re fixing the game up it’s always worth reaching out to players wherever you can find them, especially if they have been disenfranchised by the state of the game as it was.

Seek them out on platforms that matter to them. Social media is great, but don’t forget that people may talk about your game on articles from the press as well. There are tools to help you with this – Google Alerts or Twitter searches for example. Make an effort to find your users where they are and they’ll appreciate you all the more.

If you’re a PC developer then embrace the Steam forums especially. It’s likely that this will be the path of least resistance for players to discuss your game. While many developers believe it to be a cesspit, this is usually because they don’t spend the time to manage it appropriately.

A good example of this is that after nearly four years on Steam we have only banned five people from our Steam forums. And even then it’s usually for constantly flaming other users, and never for simply voicing their discontent with us (plus that’s a sure-fire track to getting really bad press).

If you foster your forums appropriately it will become a nice place without much input required from you. Though don’t be afraid to drop in and issue a short warning to encourage constructive discussion.

 

 

Empower Your Players

  If you do everything right then you’re most likely going to see that your most dedicated players take up the mantle for you, and help do your job with regards to spreading communication. You’ll find them answering questions, advertising the game to others and generally helping others. Reward your early adopters in whatever manner is feasible, whether this be a free or discounted DLC, exclusive skins, etc. Players won’t be happy if your game has launched in a poor state – they paid £30 for it and then a few months later someone could buy a much more stable version and a DLC for the same price. For example, we gave away our first expansion to anyone who purchased the game within or before the first month of release. This went a long way towards mending relations and gave people a reason to jump back in after we’d fixed up the game a lot. You can further enhance this by embracing your players and community. Identify your super fans and bring them into your inner circle. Giving them a platform to directly reach you will make it easier for them to spread your message. For us this is in the form of a group of users we call the Foundry. They’re on our Slack channel, can access us directly, have access to internal builds, and can help provide feedback. Most importantly they act as an extension of my own duties as community manager (who was also hired from the community – originally I was a Kickstarter backer!). They provide an unprecedented scalability to our communications, always being very active and engaged.

Once you have your super advocates they’ll help you with all sorts. Be sure to value them dearly! 

Actions Speak Louder than Words

While it’s always important to ensure you’re communicating, you have to make sure you can back that up with action. People will always remember broken promises, so if you’re making promises that you intend to break you need to go back and read “Honesty Is the Best Policy”. If you can’t do something it’s okay to say so as long as you provide context. Be sure to structure your development around the feedback you receive. Although you should never design by committee, you should be willing to take on board what your players are saying. Try to identify trends and action those as you deem appropriate. As an example, we’ve released six major updates and three gameplay DLCs for WFTO so far:

• Patch 1.1 – Primarily a massive bugfix patch which followed on from 25 minor patches, and introduced a number of missing features such as 4-player multiplayer.
• Patch 1.2 – Huge balance patch which aimed to rebalance the game, which didn’t get much balance at launch.
• Patch 1.3 – Introduced a Map Editor and Steam Workshop support to aid the long-term health of the game.
• Patch 1.4 & Heart of Gold – First expansion, released for free to early adopters, including a new campaign informed heavily by community feedback. Hugely well received.
• Patch 1.5 & Crucible – Free survival game mode.
• Patch 1.6 & My Pet Dungeon – DLC developed in response to huge community demand.

Remember the Business

Even after all of this you can’t avoid the fact that you’re still an active business, and it’s important that you don’t forget what keeps your business running. Time is money and money means you can keep making great games! With regards to communication, there are some areas which are good investments to help keep the money flowing:

• Reach out – Aim to improve your review score by reaching out to negative reviews. Increase your exposure by approaching influencers as soon as you think the game is worth giving another look.
• Sell beyond Steam – Look into other online stores. These sites can offer something of a mini launch, meaning they’ll promote your game, put it on sale, etc.
  • Indiegala
  • Green Man Gaming
  • Bundle Stars
  • GOG.com
  • Humble Store
• Make good use of promotions – Use sales and promotions intelligently to get the most out of them. Try to avoid deep discounts where possible and don’t overdo the sales. Build a plan of your discount strategy for a few years. Don’t alienate your existing customers, and be wary of bundles as they may give away more units than they’re worth. They certainly have their place but only as part of a solid sales strategy.
  • Steam Daily Deals / Weekend Deals / Midweek Madness
  • Other storefronts have similar deals
  • Chrono.gg
  • Don’t overdo it!

Remember that you’re in this for the long haul and you need to ensure that your business strategy supports you appropriately. Don’t just blow all your discounts at once!

Conclusion

So to recap:

• Communicate often, honestly and realistically
• Be human, be authentic
• Don’t go silent, don’t get defensive
• Foster a good community through positive communication
• Actually work on the game
• Remember you’re a business (but not just a business)

If you’ve made it this far then hopefully you’ll be able to take some of these lessons to heart. Though we understand that every developer operates differently, and that what has worked for us might not necessarily work for you. But hopefully the spirit of our philosophy has shone through here, and it will help you towards reviews that read like this: