Solasta - Director's Log #3

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The Director's Log #3 for Solasta: Crown of the Magister:

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Director's Log #3 : On Kickstarter and moving forward

Article by Mathieu Girard (CEO of Tactical Adventures)

Hi everyone,
Over the past few months, we have given you regular production updates on what we have been working on. I thought that now would be interesting to share the bigger picture with you.

And it is thanks to you!

The Kickstarter Campaign has been a great experience for us - be it on the production, community or financing side. As we hoped for, the additional funds will allow us to add more content. You have joined us as a community, providing feedback, suggestions... and also reassuring us on the interest for Solasta, for it is always a leap of faith to start working on a new game! Don't worry, we also know we have to improve the camera system and we are working on it.

Something that's probably less obvious is that the production of the Kickstarter demo has been an amazing learning experience as well. It required us to set up a production pipeline very early in the development cycle, and forced us to confront challenges that usually only appear later when working on a video game. The Ruins of Telema were a boon because it was a "stand-alone" dungeon: we had to face not only the complexity behind designing a level with verticality in mind, but also keep an eye on balancing encounters and cutscenes to avoid slowing down the pace too much.

I think one of the biggest findings is that it's really, really cool to have a demo showing off the quality level we'd like to achieve . Some Kickstarter projects only have a trailer, others a very early demo without sound or full of placeholders... We wanted to give a slice of what could be the final game (within reason of course), which is why we did some voice recording, had some music tracks produced and even added some last-minute tool-tips and tutorial elements. Obviously, we were trying to convince you that the game will be good, but it was also very useful for us - we get to tackle questions and clear some of the unknown before entering full Production. The state that we reached was critical to me, because it resonated with my passion for the MVP principle. But what is exactly MVP?

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