Behind the scenes

It’s been a slow couple of weeks for us.

First of all, it’s July and usually France go in slow motion mode until the end of August.

Also, small detail, but it was also the world cup, and it turned out that we were a lot more engaged than we thought in supporting our national team.

It ended better than in 2006 so we’re kind of happy!

But let’s get serious. The real reasons we have not much to say today are a little more mundane.

As Noodle mentioned it in the last post, we’re deep in financing. Games are expensive to make, even when you’re just two people working from home, and the money we make of our two previous games is not enough to cover all of the expenses that are going to be required to finish Lethis – Path of Progress II.

Practically, it means we’re getting in touch with publishers. And by getting in touch, I mean review the publishers, checking their editorial line, contacting fellow gamedevs who worked with them before to see how everything went. Then once it’s done, we can send an email and hope for an answer. This is just the beginning of a much longer process, maybe we’ll talk about it in details someday.

Ok, but aren’t you supposed to be Indies?

Well yeah. But publishers can do things we can’t, it can be good to get partners who know what they do. And it never hurts to ask around, even if we end up not signing with anyone.

Because financing is not just about publishers, there are a lot of ways to raise funds: Banks, private investors, public investors, subsidies, etc.

It means filling application forms, put presentation files together, and explain videogames to people who don’t really understand how all of this works. I have to admit this is far from our favorite part of making games, but this is important for lack of being fun.

And what about crowdfunding?

People often underestimate the time it takes to put together and running a good campaign (it’s two month with virtually no development progress in our case) and the amount of money really required to develop a game. It might be a solution if we’re missing the last part of our budget, but we cannot go on Kickstarter right this early in development and ask strangers to fund the entire game. We also cannot ask for less than we need because we’re not 100% certain on how to fund the rest.

So, short answer: maybe later.

But don’t worry, we’re still working on it, I’m deep in the map editor but there is nothing advanced enough to be showed here. We’re also discussing shaders, and if we’re able to put together what we want, Lethis – Path of Progress II may come with a big addition that I’m sure Noodle will be more than happy to talk about.

Sinsem