The Plan™

This week I want to talk about the high-level plan for how we will realize the vision for the game, or at least get as close as we can with the support we can muster. There are basically 3 major phases that the project will go through in terms of funding, team size and the kinds of things worked on. Right now we are still in phase 1 where we are building the unique core features (dragons, battles, destruction, the things shown so far mostly) that require a lot of experimentation and free reigns, but not necessarily a lot of people - just the right people. In this phase we rely fully on Patreon, but that most likely won't be enough for the rest of the game. This brings us to phase 2, which might be in a year or so from now, maybe earlier (or later, depending on how things evolve).

When we have a good demo of these features, we'll use it to get additional funding to ramp up the effort. This will most likely be in the form of a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign, which tends to bring in a lot more funding than Patreon. This will be the first free public demo where any potential backer can test it. Provided the campaign is successful, we'll hire more people and start working on putting everything together into a real game rather than the tech and systems we're developing right now. I expect the campaign to bring in a lot of funding because of the widespread appeal of the game, but this likely still won't be enough to take it all the way. The good thing is that it doesn't have to, which brings us to phase 3.

The crowdfunding only needs to take the game far enough to where it can be launched into Early Access on Steam. After that, the EA sales should cover the rest of the development. This is a very common strategy for indies, but even some larger games have a long EA period, such as Baldur's Gate 3 being in EA for nearly 3 years before the full launch. There are no official guidelines for how far along a game needs to be before launching on Steam, but you risk permanently ruining the game's review score if it launches in a bad state. Generally players are more forgiving of lacking content than they are of lacking polish, so the most important part is that the core features are solid.

That's the plan for now at least. So the goal this year will be to get the core features into a good state so we can show them off in the public demo for phase 2!