They may not make a ton of sense if you weren’t there, since I used the slides as visuals to highlight or counterpoint what I was saying.  I plan to do the talk again at Boston Post Mortem at some point, and when I do, I’ll either get it recorded or update my notes to high enough quality that I can post them.

Death of an Indie Studio
Wyvern Theatre
Friday, 3:00pm – 4:00pm

This year, Boston area indie studio Macguffin Games closed its doors. In three years, Scott Macmillan took the studio from a one-man shop to a 4-person startup with paid employees, launched two games (one of them for Facebook), and then finally shut the whole thing down with no regrets. At this talk, he’ll discuss the big lessons he learned, what worked and what didn’t, and take lots of questions from the audience.

Just Because You Have an Idea, You Are Not a Game Designer
Wyvern Theatre
Saturday, 10:30am – 11:30am

Many of us have worked with some amazing designers over the years, and they are much more than walking idea factories. Passion for concepts is great, but don’t confuse passion for skill. In this panel we’ll talk about the characteristics that make a good game designer, and specific skills we look for when hiring on new talent. We’ll also spend some time to point out the differences between good ideas for projects, theoretically good ideas, and bad ideas that you think are good.

Panelists include: Ichiro Lambe [President, Dejobaan Games], Chris Oltyan [Producer, Dire Wolf Digital], Eitan Glinert [President, Fire Hose Games], Scott Macmillan [President, Macguffin Games]

Start Your Own Damned Company
Cat Theatre
Sunday, 4:30pm – 5:30pm

Sometimes, people have great ideas for games. We’re happy for you, we are. But you know what? Our studio isn’t gonna help you realize your vision, and chances are no other company will. It’s shocking, but the reason we dove headfirst into the start-up ocean full of shattered dreams and razor blades was because WE ACTUALLY HAVE A GREAT IDEA FOR A GAME TOO! If you really feel passionately about your idea and want nothing more than to see it live then go make it your own damn self, we’re busy. But we’ll throw you a bone with this helpful panel full of tidbits on how to get started. Let us regale you with tales of wonder and woe, led by our fearless moderator Ichiro Lambe. Only the brave will survive, no refunds.

Panelists include: Chris Oltyan [Producer, Dire Wolf Digital], Eitan Glinert [President, Fire Hose Games], Scott Macmillan [President, Macguffin Games], Ichiro Lambe [President, Dejobaan Games], Damian Isla [Director of Technology, Moonshot Games]

In essence, Macguffin as it was previously – a four-person full time team of developers – is no more.  But after looking at ways to wind things down, and taking some time to evaluate what I want to do with my spare time once I have a job, I’ve decided to keep Macguffin around for my future gaming projects.

One of the big things I’ve learned in doing the past three or so years of game development is that I really do love creating games, doing the coding and game design.  Since shutting things down and starting to look for a job, I’ve begun coding and designing again on my own – and I’ve been having a blast.  Regardless of where I land I fully plan to keep working on games and blogging about it.  Who knows, perhaps I’ll even have something for the market someday.

Right now I do not have plans to return directly to All Heroes Die.  I say this for Therlun’s benefit (I know you’re out there!).  The two big problems with AHD are the limitations of BlitzMax, and the sheer scope of the endeavor.  Neither of those gets solved by me working on it nights.  The most likely path forward is that at some point I do a game inspired by chunks of AHD, or redo the game with a slimmed down design in another language.

In the meantime, I’ve been working in Unity using C#, and may have some upcoming posts about how that’s  been.  It’s also near time for the IGDA to begin its elections, and if I can get some help, I plan to cover the candidates again.  More on that shortly.

Although we gave it a great try with Mustache Mercenaries, we weren’t able to turn things around fast enough to keep the company going.  We knew that was a risk when we started, and I’m not unhappy at all with what we accomplished with the time we had.  I’m thinking about doing some post mortem blog posts over the next couple weeks, and if I do, I’ll delve into some of what went right and wrong.

We’ll be leaving the Mustache Mercenaries servers up for now, but they’ll most likely come down in the next week or two.  So play now!

In regards to the Kickstarter – thank you to everyone that contributed.  In the end, even if we had hit our goal, that alone would not have been enough.  In order to keep the company going, we needed a couple things to break our way on the business side.  Sadly, they did not.

I started Macguffin Games because I love game development and although this company is going away, the people that  brought it to life are not.  We’re still here and will still be making games.  On my part, I’m looking forward to having more time to devote to various game projects, as well as to the excellent Boston indie community.  The experience of starting the company and of working on All Heroes Die and Mustache Mercenaries has been an amazing one; I have learned more in three years of doing this than I would have in 10 working at my old job.  I wouldn’t trade this for anything.

So, to our friends, two things.  One – thank you.  You’ve all been fantastic, and we wouldn’t have accomplished what we did without you.  Two – don’t be sad.  There is more and better to come for all of us.

In the meantime, don’t worry about Macguffin Games.  It was, after all, only a plot device.

• Engine Charge! – Up until now, the action on your engine did not do anything – it just skipped your turn.  Now, it adds one turn worth of steam.  Be careful!  Using this can get you from near empty to almost full steam in one full round… it’s easy to overload.  Let us know if you end up with any serious steam issues, like first turn explosions.
• Invitations – The invitation button at the left on your Friends’ bar now works.  Invite your friends to play as well!
• New Weapons and Robots – We’ve put a bunch of new higher powered weapons, robots, and other parts into the store.  There are items for both Steambucks and Coal.
• Encroaching Robots bug is fixed – We finally fixed the bug where robots will slowly migrate across the battlefield.
• “Locked” in store – the Store now tells you if an item is locked because you are too low level for it.
• Art on Battle Cards – We now have art for the battle cards.  More art will be going in over time.
• Special Borders for Coal Cards – The two cards you always have in your hand,
• Animations Hooked Up – We’ve hooked up a number of weapon animations that were previously all placeholders.  Laura Ingalls Wilder’s mailbox will no longer shoot fireballs.
• Robot Workshop Share Button - The Share button in the robot workshop now works.  We’ll be working on enhancements to that in the near future.
• Streamlined Combat Log – We’ve removed some unnecessary text from the combat log to streamline it.

Thanks!  Have a great weekend everyone, and email us at mmbugs@macguffingames.com if you have any issues.

In other news, we’ve launched a Kickstarter for Mustache Mercenaries.  We’ve tried to set it up with a number of interesting prizes, such as a sew-on patch for the Research Society for Rampant Robots, authentic Mrs. Macguffin Chocolate Chip Banana Bread, Limited Edition in-game items, and even having the Macguffin team take a weekend and make you a game!  Please go check it out.

We’ve been working hard on a revamp to the in-game store for Mustache Mercenaries, as well as putting in a number of small fixes and changes.  We plan to have the build up some time on Monday, at the latest Tuesday if something huge blows up.  We’ll keep you posted.

We’ve gone live with a new build of Mustache Mercenaries on Facebook.  Here’s what we’ve got:

Friends Bar!
Now you’ll be able to see a random selection of friends that are also playing Mustache Mercenaries on Facebook.  Not incredibly exciting in and of itself, we grant you that.  But!  We’ll be enhancing this as we go, and it leads directly to…

Dueling!
You can now duel your friends.  Each duel costs you one point of Energy, and you can duel your friends once every six hours.

This is a first pass on dueling so we can get your feedback.  We are planning on a bunch of additions to it in the future, including the addition of NPC allies on one or both sides of the fight based on differences in the power level of the robots.

Lots of bug fixes and tweaks!
We’ve also done a ton of work to make tweaks and fixes.  Such as:

• Fixed a handful of bugs that blocked progression in the game.
• The Plank Shield no longer allows the player or NPC to target anyone.  Now autotargets the wielder.
• Fixed a bug where all your robot’s slots would disappear while in the Robot Workshop.  Oopsie.
• Added an Exit button to the FIGHT! screen.
• A bunch more tooltips.  Buttons that don’t do anything yet now tell you that.  Display elements often tell you more than they used to about what they’re displaying.
• Story text is now larger on the FIGHT! screen.
• Fixed a number of the fight locations on the maps – more will be forthcoming when we get more map assets in there.
• Added two more mechs to the catalog for purchase.  You may also see these fellows in as enemies in some sections.
• Engines that used to often overload on the first turn have now been tweaked to not do so.
• Fixed the “null” cost on the Moderate Steam Engine.
• Added a tooltip to the Energy bar to explain why the time goes up so far if you’ve played a lot – once you pass 50 actions taken in a day, we slow down your rate of regeneration a great deal until the next day.

As always, please let us know if you find bugs or have comments and suggestions – we’re all ears, folks.

Mustache Mercenaries is now live! Welcome to the Beta!

We’re sure there are tons of bugs – we’ll be sorting them out as fast as we can, as well as adding new features.  If you run across bugs, please feel free to put them up in our discussion forum on Facebook, or to email them directly to us at mmbugs@macguffingames.com.

First, our wonderful logo screen.  We feel this one is self-explanatory.

Then, to the lab!  The lab is your hub for all activities in Mustache Mercenaries. When the beta launches this week, the two big features that you access from here are going into fights (via the glowing yellow map screen), and reconfiguring your robot (via clicking on the glowing green door).

You’ll also notice our genteel ambassador, Mr. Brain.  He’ll be spouting advice and nonsense for your benefit whenever you’re in the lab.

Finally, a battle!  Here we have Abraham Lincoln in a borrowed mech, fighting against some of John Wilkes Booth’s henchmen.

A number of the items here are placeholders – that toolbox in the lower part is a help button (Use your imagination! Tools are helpful!), and the big black square there is our placeholder art for Battle Cards.  Both of those will be replaced by Friday.

What are Battle Cards you ask?  Find out tomorrow!

We’re extremely pleased to announce the new Macguffin Game, Mustache Mercenaries.

Mustache Mercenaries is a turn-based game of robots.  Robots powered by steam!  Robots fighting each other!  Robots with pilots!  Pilots like… Laura Ingalls Wilder?

Well, yes.  In fact, Laura has been interrupted one too many times by people that want her to keep crops from withering and to build general stores, and she’s had it up to here.  I’d stand back if I were you.

Mustache Mercenaries is what happens when you decide that what the Little House on the Prairie needed was steam-powered legs and the ability to thrash someone with a mailbox.  It’s what happens when The Emancipator doesn’t refer to Abe Lincoln, but instead to his handy axe.  Said axe happens to be inscribed with a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, but that might just be coincidence.

At launch, we’ll have the main single player component of Mustache Mercenaries live – a series of campaigns where you can play Laura Ingalls Wilder, Abraham Lincoln, J.P. Morgan, and Harriet Tubman as they pilot their giant robots through old-timey America.  John Wilkes Booth doesn’t stand a chance.

And once we get done with the initial launch, we’re going to be working full time on adding new features and new content into the game at an astounding clip.  We’ve just scratched the surface of what we want to accomplish with the game – we are planning new modes of combat, expansions to the functionality of your lab (Oh – yes, you have a lab.  It’s where Mr. Brain hangs out for the most part.), new mech parts you can purchase or find in fights, and a pile of other stuff.  We also plan to bring you folks into the loop – we want your suggestions on what pilots and features you want next, and anything else you want to tell us.

We’ll be launching the beta of Mustache Mercenaries some time in the next week.  We won’t be publicizing it at first – we want a little time to make sure everything is working right – but if you’d like to know when it goes live, please join our mailing list.  Once we’ve worked out the kinks, we’ll also be publicizing it as widely as our thin little indie pocketbooks will let us.  We’ll be counting on you folks to help us spread the word.  Please also feel free to Like the game on Facebook!

Our goal here is to make a Facebook game that doesn’t suck…  something with substance.  Silly substance, but substance none the less.   Welcome along for what we hope will be an awesome ride.

(And yes, it’s for Facebook.)

The quick summary is that AHD is a huge game, and we are nowhere near done.  With the resources and time we have, it’s also one that currently can’t support the company.  Graham and I have both been working without drawing any pay for our entire time on the project, and we’re at the point where we can’t continue doing that.

We very much want to return to it when we can, but we don’t know when that will be.  Right now, we’re just going to take things one step at a time.  We still believe in AHD, and we want the finished game to see the light of day.

This isn’t the end of the road for Macguffin Games, either.  In fact, the reason we’re halting development is so we can work on another game – this one in the Social Media space.  I’m sure some of you will be disappointed to learn that; I understand.  We think there is an opportunity to make great games there, make enough money to live, and to do it in a reasonable time frame.  Our creative goal with this new game is to make something that we can be proud of, something unlike most of the offerings out there.  We’ve begun prototyping the design and art direction, and we are all extremely excited by it.  We hope you will be, as well – more details will follow as things shape up.

Thank you so very much to everyone that has supported us for the wild ride that has been All Heroes Die.  I started development on it  just a bit over 2 years ago, teaching myself how to code, alone in our guest bedroom.  Since then, I’ve met literally hundreds of people whose support, enthusiasm, and good will made it possible to keep going.  Two people in particular must be mentioned: my wife Anya, without whose support (both emotional and financial) this never would have happened, and Graham Sternberg, the man who created most of the AHD setting, most of the art, and who talked me off the ledge on more occasions that I’d like to admit.  I’d also like to mention Heather Wilson, Mike Faulk, and Phil Krzeminski for their work on game events, game events, and art respectively; thank you folks for all your excellent work.

Finally, thank you to all of the wonderful people in the Boston Indies community; because of them, I seriously believe that Boston is the best place in the world for someone to be an indie developer.

EDIT: When I originally published this, I forgot to mention, we are planning two more builds for now – one to fix a number of bugs that came up in the last build, and another with Warfare in it.  The first will happen sometime in the short term – the next several weeks – and the Warfare one some time before or around fall.  I’d like to give a better estimate, but it all depends on how everything else is going.

EDIT EDIT: I’m an IDIOT!  I didn’t thank Whitney.  This game would not have gotten 1/4 as far as it did without her, and it sure as hell never would have launched for PAX.  Her fantastic and awesome coding skills were all that got us to that first Beta build.  Whitney, thank you so much for you amazing work.

The new plan is that we will be putting a build out next Friday, May 28th, come hell or high water.  How much of the Warfare stuff it contains is still up in the air, but it will definitely have new art, new events, and a number of improvements based on the revamped targeting system.  We also found a really nasty inefficiency in our load sequence, and have lopped off 20 seconds of load time and 3/4 of our used memory (!!).

So, what is this targeting system, you ask?  In order to explain that, I’ll give you a really brief overview of how game events work in All Heroes Die.

A game event in AHD currently targets one of the heroes (the player controlled members of their noble house), and consists of text describing the situation one of your hero faces, a piece of our event art showing the scene, and several text choices for how to resolve things.  You might think of it as a computer-enabled choice in a Choose Your Own Adventure book, where your choice is hooked up to the stats of your hero and everything else going on in the world.

Under the hood, we do a number of things in order to select what event will be run (I gave a more detailed explanation here in the forums).  One of the first ones is to make sure we have a valid target.  If an event requires that the hero we run it for has the trait, “Star-Blooded”, then we test all your heroes to see if one fits that bill.  If not, the event is discarded; if yes, we run it with that hero as the primary target.

But then, what do we do if you have more than one target in the event?  What if the game event is, say, between a parent (the hero) and their child?  Up until recently, we only did this kind of event very rarely.  It used a hacky implementation that only could deal with hard-coded targets.  This is thing we shifted Whitney over to working on – now we have a for reals system for secondary targets.

We’re really psyched about the possibilities here – this sort of further control allows targeting setups like:

• An older hero and their young spouse.
• A hero and their non-hero parent.
• Two family members, neither of which are player controlled heroes.
• A hero and their magically talented niece or nephew.  (to be more specific)
• An intolerant hero and their mentally unstable family member.   (to be very specific!)

This system will eventually be expanded to tertiary and further out targets.

One of those scenarios above – two family members, neither of which you control – really excites us.  This allows us to have events that target two people around you, giving a better sense of the world not just revolving around your main characters.

So, this is where we’re headed.  We’d love your feedback and thoughts on what’s going on, either in the comments or the forums.  Thanks!

I apologized, and then for a good chunk of yesterday I was really bummed about the fact that we’d screwed that up and gotten quiet.  I mean, I know that one of our big advantages is that we can talk directly to our players.  How had we gotten to that spot?

In part, it was because I’d been busy on non-AHD stuff – for the most part boring stuff that I didn’t want to tweet about.  But I realized that another reason is that we haven’t made communication a priority.  One thing I know is that good communication isn’t just something you can layer on top of your company or team, it’s something that you need to imbed bone-deep into your culture.  So, I decided to get cracking on that.

Today I went into the Wave where we keep our Big Picture, did a quick clean-up, and just now posted it in the forums.  This is a high-level brain dump of what we’re trying to do with the game… our roadmap to v1.0.

The list isn’t perfect – in fact, I’m sure that it is deeply flawed.  It is probably already out of date, I know it is missing important items, and most of it won’t make sense to people outside the dev team.  But that’s why it was important to get it out there.  I think a large part of why I’m not saying more about the game is that I’m waiting for things to be perfect before talking about them – and that won’t work at all if we’re doing anything near open development.  It’s going to be messy.  So, here’s our current plan, in all its glory.

Please feel free to come by our forums and tell us what you think of it – we’d love your input.  We’ll be updating it regularly.

Joe is a great friend of mine from our days at Blue Fang Games, where we worked together on many zoo-related games.  He is bar-none one of the best and brightest designers I’ve ever worked with, and digs RPGs as much as I do, if not more.  I’m incredibly psyched to be working with him again.  For a while now Joe has been excited about All Heroes Die, and has offered me advice here and there… and every time I took that advice it made the game ten times better.

Joe is coming onto the team to to help continue our push through Beta towards v1.0; the hope is that him jumping in on a lot of the design stuff will leave me more time to talk with our players, update the blog more often, and deal with the marketing and PR that will be so important to the game’s success.

Welcome, Joe!

Since PAX

Since PAX we’ve had a fantastic response to the Beta.  We got a good chunk of sales from that weekend and onwards, some great buzz, and a small legion of awesome beta testers!  These folks have been playing the game, reporting bugs, and giving us suggestions at a rate and quality level that far exceeded my expectations.  You folks are fantastic, thank you.  You can read their comments and thoughts in our forums.

Info on the Event Systems & Children

I need to do a full blog post on the All Heroes Die event system, but here’s a good chunk of information on how it works.  This system represents the core of the game – it’s how we handle storylines and plots.  We’ve designed it to be very open-ended; our goal is to allow content creators to take the game and turn the story around 180 degrees if they so choose.

I’ve also shed some light on how heroes spending time with their children works.  Essentially, the system is pretty opaque at this point – when we put it in, it was something of a “well we need SOMETHING here right now” moment.  It will be getting a heavy revision in the future, and we’d love your feedback on what that could end up looking like.

Next Build

Our next build is going to focus on the Warfare system.  Our current tentative date for that release is May 7th, but this depends heavily on some conversations Whitney and I will have this weekend about the coding tasks.  We’ve had a lot of this feature finished for a while, but we’ve never had the time to get it to a point where I was happy.

Rather than get into a long dissertation on what this will be, I’ll just describe it generally for now – we’ll follow it up with some visuals as soon as possible.

Warfare in in All Heroes Die is based in many ways off the system used in the indie cult-classic King of Dragon Pass.  Combat forces will consist of soldiers and their leader – for the player, that will be one of the heroes from their family.  The player will have knowledge of the tactical situation based on that hero’s skills – the better a hero is at certain things, the more information they can discern.  Once the player has selected tactics and a goal for the fight and hits “go”, we’ll figure out and present the results.  There are also several chances throughout the fight for game events to fire that can significantly alter the course of the battle – as well as for game events afterwards dealing with its aftermath.

We’ve intentionally kept the Warfare system a high-level affair, like many other things in All Heroes Die; it lets us tell the big story we want to tell without too much micromanagement and detail getting in the way.  The catch, of course, will be for us to keep the player’s choices interesting while doing that.  We’ll have more details as soon as we get a bit further into this build; if possible, I’m going to get a FRAPS video up or similar where we can show you what we have going on.

And finally, thanks again to everyone that has supported us by purchasing the Beta (still only $5!).

• New portrait system – A hero’s portraits will now change from young to middle aged to old over time.  This is done based on the file names of the portrait files.
• Explore revisions – We’ve made some tweaks and changes to explore.  Since we’re still nailing down how this will be for Friday, I’ll stay quiet on this one for now.  :)
• New Events – We’ve done a series of events that will fire earlier on in the game, giving a bit more flavor to the early decisions the Nef Loviisans make in this new land.
• Bug Fixes – Various.

Thanks very much for playing, folks!

In the interests of just getting this damn thing up, I’m going to just get the whole Beta and PAX story out in one post.  This might make it a bit long, we’ll see.

Given that, I’ll tell you the upshot right here:

• PAX itself was an amazing validation of the game we’re trying to create.  We were received with open arms by lots of gamers that think this is an awesome idea.  Many have since shelled out an electronic Abraham Lincoln and snagged the beta!
• The other non-game highlights of the week were that I was on NPR (around 25 minutes in) with Mike Dornbrook of Harmonix, and that I and other area devs Ichiro Lambe (Dejobaan Games), Damián Isla (Moonshot Games), and Eitan Glinert (Fire Hose Games) were on a PAX Panel called, “Indies Will Shoot You In The Knees”, which apparently went over like gangbusters at the conference.
• We intend to get our our first update this Friday, with a pile of bug fixes, at least one new piece of event art, and several new events.

Also – pics by fellow Boston Indies crony Mike Carriere.  There’s some of me later in the set.  I look like I’ve been awake for years.  Good times!

So, on with the show!

Thursday Night

Thursday night was the “Made in MA” party, held at Microsoft’s NERD (New England R&D) Center at Kendall Square.   The party was organized by the Mass. Tech. Learning Council, a non-profit that does a lot for the tech sectors here in MA.¹ For a while, MA companies have wanted to make sure people know how much there is going on here in MA in games – this party was part of that effort.  A big shout out to my buddy Darius Kazemi for heading up a lot of the effort in organizing the thing, as well.

Prior to the party Whitney, Graham, and I were all working feverishly on the game.  We wanted to hit Beta that night, and I needed a build to show at the party.  I’ll admit, by the time the party was starting, I was freaking out.  It felt to me like we were in an endless sea of bugs.  It’s always hard for me to see past all the things that are wrong, or do not yet work in the game, and that always gets worse when we’re near a big deadline.  By the time I left for the party, I was kind of a mess.

The party turned out to be the start of what ended up being a whole weekend of people seeing the best things the game promises – something that blew me away.  It’s one thing to think the game is awesome when you’re working on it – it’s another thing entirely to have complete strangers think the same thing.  Special shout-out to Naomi Hinchen, an  undergrad student at MIT’s GAMBIT lab that I had to keep kicking off the game so I could show it to people.  You rock.

The party did a lot to steady my nerves, and it helped even more to get back to the office and find that Graham and Whitney were calm, collected, and fixing bugs at an astounding rate.  Graham sat me down, pointed me to the Wave he was writing with all our bugs to fix for the night, and told me to get cracking.  I did.

At about 3am, we were done with the first build.  We still had bugs left, but we’d gotten the most egregious stuff out of the way.

Friday Morning

Friday morning consisted of me levering myself out of bed, quickly getting the build up to Plimus, our transactions provider for selling the game.  Exchanged some IMs and emails with our top notch web designer K. Adam White to get some stuff sorted out – this was the first time we were using Plimus in a serious way, and there were all sorts of little issues to work out.  Then I ran out of the house and off to Hynes Convention Center and PAX.

The first thought I had once on the Expo floor was, “Oh, it’s E3 all over again.”  It had that feel, although everything was a good bit less berserk.  The expo floor was a complete maze of boothes – very few long lines of sight.  I staggered around half-asleep until I ran into Tovah from Fire Hose, who pointed me over to the GAMBIT booth where we’d be exhibiting.

The GAMBIT booth was something else.  Half way to the hall’s ceiling, they had a huge circular GAMBIT sign, beneath which there were enough lights for a small theater.  GAMBIT folks were running around in white lab coats, and the union folks were wiring lights and running around as well.   I hooked up with Gene and Rik, the two (also fantastic) GAMBIT staffers running things, and got the build loaded onto the computer.  I realized I still hadn’t eaten breakfast, but by then Graham had shown up to spot me, and I was off to NPR.

NPR

So, due to the grace of God and a timely plug from Darius, I was going to be on Radio Boston with Mike Dornbrook, the COO of Harmonix.  We were to be interviewed by Meghna Chakrabarti on the eve of PAX about the state of the local games industry.

They asked me to get there at 1pm for a 1:35 segment.  I got there about 1:10 because I had to wait 20 minutes for a B line train to show up – typical B line shenanigans!  I ran in, completely out of breath, but was told that everything was fine.  They brought me in to the control room next to the recording booth, and I sat and chatted with Mike and Steph from the HMX Community Team.  Little known item – Mike and Steve Meretzky roomed together in college, where they both ended up working for Infocom.  I told Mike that they both actually have a lot of the same speech patterns – if I closed my eyes, it’s almost hard not to confuse them.

The show went well!  You can listen to it here if you are so inclined – Mike and I are on around 25 minutes in.  Overall, I’m really pleased that, given the lack of sleep and food, I didn’t break down into, “bluh bluh bluh” at any point.  Afterwards, Stephanie and I went to Upper Crust next door and I inhaled two huge slices of pizza.  Then we were both back off to the Hynes.

The rest of the day from there until the hall closed was somewhat a blur – it consisted mostly of me talking about the game to anyone who came near me.  As at the Made in MA party, I was incredibly psyched to see people look at the game, understand the point we are at with it, and then concentrate on the possibilities of what we are constructing.  It was amazing.

Friday Night

When the floor closed, I staggered over to Ichiro and asked if they wanted to get food – we only had an hour until we did our PAX Panel.  He bowed out, but noted to me that there was a vendor social hour now, and it had some food.  So I hopped in line, snagged two pieces of roast beef, a roll, some raw carrots to make this all sound vaguely healthy.  At that point I got a text from my friend and fellow Boston Indie Kevin to let me know the line was waaay out the door for our panel.  I had a thought similar to, “Oh crap, now we have to really not suck,” as I headed over.

I ended up plunking down at our talk table in there – the room was already packed with people sitting on the floors, and they had dispersed the rest of the line – and finally got going on my roast beef.

The talk went really well.  We had the idea to take questions from the audience, both on Twitter via a hash tag and via scribbled notes, and that worked out extremely well – like we figured, those were some of the best questions of the night.  Eitan did a great job of moderating the panel, and I think all three of Ichiro, Damián, and I did a good job of giving people our varied takes on things.  Afterwards, I got to talk with several people either contemplating going indie or who were in the middle of doing so, and it was awesome to have been able to help them in some small way.  As I’ve found out from some GDC talks, it’s often great to be confirmed that you are doing some of the right things, even if you didn’t learn anything new in the talk.

Then I went out, drank a lot, and crashed at a friend’s house for 8 hours.

Saturday and Sunday

Saturday and Sunday were a lot more of similar awesomeness.  Two big notable things…

The first is the continued interest we received from people we showed the game to.  Without going over the top any more than I already have, it was fantastic.

The second was that I got to have dinner with a bunch of fellow indies, including the great folks at Klei and Hello Games, Lively Ivy, and I was really, really pleased to finally meet Wadjet Eye Games’ Dave Gilbert.  His “you must be crazy” move into making adventure games for a living was a key event that helped give me confidence that our own craziness could work.  These folks are all amazing – all of them are taking big risks every day making games they believe in.  As Graham would say, rock on, you rockers.

Future Plans

This week, we’ve gotten right back on the job and are working like hell.  If you’re interested, you can follow our development (with a side dish of inane chatter) on the All Heroes Die Twitter account.

Our current plan is to get a build out this Friday with a bunch of bug fixes (including the infamous Frost Giant Diplomacy crash), a new piece of event art, and several new game events.  I’m also working on our longer-term plan for what features and content we’ll have and when, but I don’t think I’ll have that presentable by Friday.

Once again – thank you very much to everyone who has supported us – all of you who’ve been pulling for us for a long time, and all of you who have just joined in.  It’s an incredible relief to be at the end-of-the-beginning, and we’re all looking forward to what’s ahead.

1 – I have hope that some day I will be able to leverage MassTLC’s connections to the robotics and bio-sciences community to create some sort of awful 90 foot tall cyborg that… plays games?  I’m going to have to think on this one a bit more.

PAX has been amazing.  So far my experience with people seeing the game has been really, really positive – people seem to understand the stage we’re at in development, and a lot of people have really been excited about what we’re trying to do with the game.

Tomorrow is the final day of PAX, and I’ll be doing the booth again for the whole day.  Monday I’ll start going through all my email and chilling out a little bit from our big push – Tuesday the team will be back at work, and we’ll start getting more info out to all of you about the game, better instructions, our schedule on releasing updates, and things like that.

Thank you so much to all the people who have supported us, showed interest, and bought the game.  This weekend was an amazing validation that the concept we’ve had is something that resonates with people, and that this ridiculously ambitious pipe dream is indeed actually becoming a reality.  It means more to me personally than I can really explain.

Now we just need to continue to execute on the promise of All Heroes Die.  We have a duty to all you folks who showed us in $5 bills.  We’re going to honor it.

I feel I should put more of a marketing spin or something on this message, but that was about all I had left.  Thanks, everyone.

We’ve created the AllHeroesDie account on Twitter.  On it, Whitney (code!), Graham (art and game event writing!) and I (design, biz, etc!) are documenting our dev tasks in entertaining 140 character bursts.  Come on by and say hi.  We’re also looking for people to ask us specific questions about the game, to further spur me to get off my arse and write the belated blog posts.

So please, join the party.  Hilarity will ensue.

Right now, we’re working hard to get ready for our “$5 Beta” at PAX East.  I’ve been asked a lot about exactly what the $5 Beta is, and wanted to take a few minutes to explain it.

What I call the $5 Beta is a release strategy that has been used by a number of smaller / indie studios, as well as by many other products in other industries.  With it, you are looking to release your game in a very rough form; in some ways, the rougher the better.  It’s a very Web 2.0 philosophy: ship early and often.  Get your game into the hands of the people who will play it, and then use their feedback to develop it further.  It’s a strategy that I first saw used by TaleWorlds’ for Mount and Blade, and also is being used by the gorgeous indie MMO Love.  The indie devs Wolfire are also doing something similar with their game Overgrowth.

There are some advantages and disadvantages to this strategy…

Pros

• Start getting real feedback on your game.
• Start building your game’s community.
• Get some actual cash flow!
• Reduce the risk of continued investment in the game by gauging the market’s interest.

Cons

• It feels somewhat like that dream where you show up to school with no clothes on, and are just waiting for everyone to notice.  (You know that dream, right?  Right?)
• You risk forming poor first impressions.  These may be hard to break, especially for media folks who look at tons of games all the time.
• You are increasing your workload with an added component of community interaction and community management.
• You’re now seriously on the hook to deliver to your fans.

Overall, we feel that this strategy is a great one to take for first-time game makers like ourselves – to us, all the cons I’ve listed are overcome by the first pro point – real feedback.  The amount of time and energy you put in to a game means that you’re going to have blinders on regarding your gameplay and UI – you’re eating and breathing this thing, and you most likely long ago made your peace with dozens of issues that will completely vex your players.  Getting honest feedback on these things is paramount.

Personally, I’m quite interested to see how this strategy turns out for us, and I’ll definitely be blogging our results.  All Heroes Die is a curious mix of old-school and new-school, in terms of its technology and business model.  On the one hand, we’re using an installed .exe that people download – very close to the shareware model that was pioneered by Apogee and ID in the early 90′s.  On the other hand, we realize that our success is tied on almost every level to having a robust and engaged online community – something that brings us a lot closer to the social games of today.

A huge thank-you to Meaghan Glynn for not only doing a great logo, but doing it in a record amount of time, and with a nasty cold to boot.

In part, what was at first an instinctual thing on my part became a conscious plan – I haven’t talked too much about the game and how it is shaping up mostly because it’s been changing a lot.  The ideas we had on paper changed as they became functional features, which in turn changed as we moved towards integrating those features with each other, and then again as we are starting to create the first game content.

I promise we will be letting more information out as time goes on – we just want to time it properly and have decent odds the features won’t change in a day or two.

As far as work on the game is progressing: it’s going very well!  Graham and I have been working hard on all fronts.  We may not have something for friends-and-family to play in December, but that’s not a bad thing – we’re finding lots of obvious changes to make as we continue with what I outlined above.  I’ll avoid saying what else I expect for our schedule for now, since I tend to immediately make a liar of myself.

In other news, we will be changing the name of the game.  We have winnowed things down to a handful of favorites, but are going to sit on them and think about it for a bit.  Sadly, “Heritage” is de facto trademarked by The Settlers, or rather the rebranded “Heritage of Kings: The Settlers“.  Because of how trademark law works, they could pretty much argue that any video game title that starts with Heritage is a violation of their trademark.  Somewhat a bummer, but so it goes – since I wouldn’t be surprised that they had to change that title because of friction with Settlers of Catan, I can’t get too bent out of shape about it.

Thanks for reading!  Hit us with any quesitons you might have in the comments.

We’re going to skip entering the IGF this year.  In short, the game just isn’t ready.  Even with all the ass we’ve been busting, we’re juuuust now about at a first-playable state.  Going through our to-do items left for the 11/1 deadline, there are just about as many high-level tasks left to do as there are days left in the month.

We could submit no matter what, and then update the build over the next few weeks after that.  The downsides there are that it would be a poor initial submission that doesn’t technically meet the rules of the competition (you’re supposed to be feature-complete), and that I’d pretty much kill myself for the next 5 weeks getting a build I could live with.  After talking with Graham, we decided that the best course of action is to keep focused on bringing the game along as best we can, as fast as we can – but without crunching like crazy to come up with what we would consider a substandard entry.

I’m pretty disappointed, frankly, that we’re not going to be able to make this work… but as all good project managers know, it’s not about what you get in a perfect world – it’s about the choices in front of you.  And I still feel our longer term deadlines are realistic.

Tomorrow Graham and I sit down and do a soup-to-nuts review of the game.  Our goal is going to be to set a deadline (probably 12/1) where we can have a fully playable alpha to pass around in the Boston dev community and get some feedback.   I feel really confident that we can make that kind of schedule work – but we’re going to put in some good planning and analysis to make sure.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still incredibly psyched about everything that has been getting done on the game to date.  We’ve come a terrific distance in less than 11 months – especially considering this is Graham’s first video game project, and the first that I’ve programmed or designed.  I think our issue with the IGF deadline was in my not realizing we were biting off more than we could chew.  As my good friend Patrick said to me today, “Think of all the ways you could have f***** this up, and didn’t!”

He’s got a great point.

So, yeahhhhh.  Interesting day.  It’s weird to have the excitement I’m feeling with how fast the game is coming along but head-to-head with the frustration of missing a deadline.  I mentioned to Graham as I was dwelling on the whole thing today – I realized I had never missed a deadline in 8 years of making games.  Every milestone I ever was associated with, every game, shipped on time.  I’m not sure I was prepared to actually fail at getting the game into the IGF – I don’t think I’d ever really considered the possibility.

But, that’s fine.  A good bit of the reason I wanted to go indie and start my own company was to learn about doing this all from top to bottom.  And you can’t learn very well without failing a couple times here and there.  So, learn we will.

And this game is still going to be pretty spectacular.

I’m asking Graham to append the link and a copyright note to them, then we’ll post here on the site.

This is pretty exciting stuff.  Woo!

In Heritage you control the last surviving noble house of a sea-faring people. Forced by need and honor, you have led them half-way around the world chasing their ancestral foe. Upon landfall you all made a solemn vow – you and your people would turn their backs on the sea until this quest was complete. The spirits of your ancestors were listening… and have heard you.

Heritage is a hybrid RPG / strategy game that jettisons inventory management and meaningless busy-work in order to focus on epic scale storytelling. In Heritage, you will be responsible for guiding the heroes of this noble house through several generations in their quest to finally bring an end to their foe and allow their return to the sea.

Heritage will be coming out for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems and available digitally.

Starting next week, Graham Sternberg (who will be introducing himself in a post sometime in the next couple days) and I will begin blogging the development of the game.  We’ll be focusing on the nuts-and-bolts decisions we face in making what we think is a pretty ambitious game on a short timeline.

Speaking of timelines – our goal for Heritage in 2009 is to enter a strong beta into the Independent Games Festival in November.  Before that, though, we’ll be showing off a prototype demo of the game at the first Independent Game Conference East on May 7th, here in Boston.  By “prototype demo”, I mean “it will hold together and look decent and play, but don’t ask to see my code.”  Our goal is to take the player through the introduction, character creation, and the first several turns of the game.

We’ll be putting more info into the blog about the gameplay, design philosophy, art, and everything else about Heritage – so stay tuned! Please let us know what you’re interested in discussing.  You can contact us via the blog comments, our forums, or over email.

As you might guess, this is a really exciting day for me.  This announcement is the public start of a dream I’ve been chasing for about ten years: starting my own game company and making games people enjoy.  So far it has been a crazy ride worth of learning, hard work, and the support of fantastic people.  I’m hanging on tight.

Welcome along for what I hope will be a very interesting ride.

Please bear with us if anything (the forums in particular) aren’t quite working right – and let us know!