A tale of indie RPG development

http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,6621.0.html

by danso • 11 years ago

108 32 11 years ago

irontowerstudio.com

dameyawn2• 11 years ago

What game is it?!

birdsbolt• 11 years ago

The Age of Decadence.

dameyawn2• 11 years ago

Here you go, found it for you: http://store.steampowered.com/app/230070/

mattmanser• 11 years ago

It's interesting to read the negative reviews, most of them are so incredibly ridiculous.

Several people complain there's not enough content, but each one of them had put 30 odd hours into the game. Almost everyone else is complaining about the difficulty, which the steam page makes clear is a selling point of the game.

Bizarre.

erikb5• 11 years ago

It looks actually really good, much better than expected from an indie title! Kudos!

nallerooth• 11 years ago

Thanks for an interesting post. I'm impressed by the fact that the developers kept going for ten years, when their first estimate was a lot shorter.

ido3• 11 years ago

I remember the guy already being a running joke on RPG Codex in 2008-2009. Glad to see they managed to eventually release the game!

louhike3• 11 years ago

Yes, people tend to underestimate how long it is to do a RPG. I'm currently composing music for a RPG two of my friends are doing in their sparetime. It is in development since 9 years. It is really hard to make it interesting and fun to play. We hope to release a demo this year.

ido3• 11 years ago

Not just an RPG :)

thenomad2• 11 years ago

One of the big things they clearly did right, which when I was in the middle of a half-decade project I did very wrong: they kept communicating.

I went dark - stopped blogging, stopped Tweeting - because I figured it was better to spend time on making my thing (the film Death Knight Love Story) than communicating with no deadline in sight. That was a major mistake - "out of sight, out of mind". I'm digging myself out of that hole now, and it's tough.

If your project's ETA starts running faster than you can catch it, DO NOT make my mistake :)

Udo2• 11 years ago

That's an important point. I was immediately reminded of Limit Theory ( http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/04/08/mia-limit-theorys... ), where the creator went dark suddenly early this year.

I think this might be a psychological hole creators can fall into. Maybe it starts out with them not wanting to communicate, one more time, that the project will take a while. Meanwhile ongoing development has hit rock bottom in term of perceived (or actual) speed. Then former fans start getting anxious, or upset, or leave - and this actually raises the bar you need to pull yourself over in order to start communicating again.

thenomad2• 11 years ago

It's not just about communicating with your crew, but also your public.

If you don't have a fanbase waiting for your work to come out, it'll be much, much, MUCH harder to achieve a successful launch. I'm very good at launches, and even so, I found that the years of silence really eroded the splash I was able to make with my project when I launched it.

That's why these days I'm making a point to keep on Twittering, blogging, HNing, and so on, even when stuff is months away from release.

TeMPOraL• 11 years ago

It might be. I know I fall into it all too often. When the only thing you can write is "I missed the deadline. Again.", writing a report suddenly becomes a big psychological pain. But of course if you don't communicate, you're digging a deeper hole for yourself, with every missed status e-mail it becomes harder to write the next one (unless you suddenly succeded with everything, that is, but in my experience, when you end up not writing those reports then the problem is usually deeper than missing a date by a day or two).

Since then I learned to force myself to write something, anything, just to keep people in the loop; it makes things easier for everyone, even if it hurts your self-esteem.

DanBC• 11 years ago

Would it have been easier to include modding tools and then releasing earlier?

erikb5• 11 years ago

If you don't have anything to catch people's interest for some time there's not much reason to add modding support. Modding support is another area of X things you need to add, change, debug, test, adapt to feedback. And without a game in the first place nobody will even look at your modding tools.

erikb5• 11 years ago

I'm not so sure. I think it should be possible to get something done with 2-3 people in 3 years, not 10. But before I start a serious attempt I'd certainly want to learn basic things first, like how to make a fighting system. These things are only hard and time consuming when you figure them out the first time. The second or third time you are much faster.

One example I have from own experience is that one topic like that for the program I wrote in my thesis: Took me 3-6 months depending on how you count start and end date. But last week I had to do the same thing for another project and it only took me half a day. I didn't need to google anything, I didn't need to compare different variations. I knew what worked, what were the disadvantages of the most common options, choose one in 5 seconds and got it implemented. I didn't run into any of the things that took days to debug in the first attempt, because I knew where the problem areas were.

Therefore I would assume that while the first attempt of an RPG for a group of noobs might take a year or three for a prototype, a small team of experienced developers can put together a basic prototype in a few weeks.

louhike3• 11 years ago

The problem is that a prototype is not equivalent to a real fighting system you will put in a game. You will need a lot of testing so the game is challenging is fun. And it must be challenging and fun during all the game (30+ hours).

EDIT: To give an example, see a website. A small website to show some prototype will be quite quick to do. But when you need to do a website used by hundreds to thousands persons with a lot of use case, it gets far more complex.

erikb5• 11 years ago

I'd still disagree but I can see your point. It's not just the basics. A real system needs some things you can't learn from a book.

gjig• 11 years ago

I agree with your general assessment re: experience, but I wish people would stop talking about these sorts of things in years and months. I understand why it's difficult to express it in hours, but even a very rough estimate of total hours spent is a far, far more useful metric than "years".

My personal experience with studying Japanese has been that there's roughly two camps of people: those who become fluent-ish in 1-2 years, and those who know ~100 kanji after 3 years (1-2k for fluency). The primary difference between these two camps is that the former studies 6-8 hours a day, and the latter has Japanese classes thrice a week, that's it.

Speaking in hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of hours gives you a much better idea of what's actually necessary to make the magic happen, and makes it easier to judge how well you're doing: is making barely any progress in 1 week a bad thing, or a really bad thing? That depends on whether a week translates to 3 hours or 50 hours.

erikb5• 11 years ago

I agree! I'd also wonder why so little information is given in hours. We have that likely horizon of mastery at 10k hours and we have a soft limit of "usability" at about 3k hours. But maybe the thing is, nobody really counts. Like, I can tell you when I started to study my major, which led me to spend a lot of time on programming, taking it serious for the first time. Now I work full time as a software developer but do I spend 30 hours, or 10 hours, or 50 hours programming a week? Can't tell. There are lot of things involved, no matter if you're a student or a full time worker. Not all of them count. And going back to your Japanese example. Sometimes the drunken two hours you've spent in a Karaoke bar trying to impress local girls was worth much more than the previous 10 hours study session because these two hours were marked as important memories by your brain and the previous ten hours were boring. It's really hard to calculate, right? Also that study which came up with that 10k hours for mastery stated that many people very much overestimate hours spent, which from feeling I would agree. Like, since I work full time I don't believe any more that people really spend 40+ hours working. It's closer to 20 or 30 hours depending on the person. The rest is spent smoking, chatting, fighting via email, reading HN. And from own experience I also know that 12 hours of doing nothing can be just as tiring as working hard. ;)

torgoguys• 11 years ago

Great read.

Awesome to read about a decade long resolve to see it through. Instead of Iron Tower Studio, they should have named their company Iron Will Studio.

georgeecollins• 11 years ago

As a professional game developer I have so much respect for people who do things like this out of passion and achieve the miracle of actually shipping. Finishing any game under these circumstances is an accomplishment. This is a huge accomplishment and I hope they are very proud.

A tale of indie RPG development

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