01.31.2012 - Developer Diary: Managing an Online Team on a Shoestring Budget

The next entry in our on-going developer diary series, originally posted here.

Happy New Year! Mayan prophecies be damned, I think 2012 is going to be a great year. (That’s the last time I’ll mention Mayans, unless they turn out to be right and I’m still around post-apocalypse.)

With Kickstarter and the holidays behind us, Phoenix Online has been busy working away at Cognition with all due haste. Our programmers are getting familiar with the Unity Engine and creating the tools and pipeline for the game, our artists are hard at work on concept art and cutscenes, our animators are working on creating the pieces of the game itself, and myself and Cesar are furiously plotting, writing, and editing the first two episodes.

It’s an interesting and different beast than working on The Silver Lining, but the lessons learned in our nine years of development for TSL are serving us well now. We spent that time figuring out just how to make a video game, a trial-and-error of methods that didn’t work and ones that did. We learned how to organize a company that has no office, no budget, and whose members don’t all share a common timezone. Can it be done? It’s not easy, but if you’ve got good people who are dedicated, you can make it work. And while our Kickstarter funds are a huge help in making this game happen, we still need to keep a close eye on our spending. So we don’t overlook the number of programs available either for free or inexpensively that we found and used during TSL’s development.

Advances in communication technology have helped us immensely along the way. We started off on yahoogroups and MSN chat, but today we’ve got our own email system and servers, and Skype has been a great improvement over MSN. The ability to turn those typing chat sessions into free phone calls cuts down on time that was often wasted in trying to explain ourselves—an hour of typing is now a 15 minute conversation! Programs that allow you to share your screens remotely have been a great help as well—most recently we’ve been using Mikogo for this, another product that is free to use. And finally, we’ve run recent live events over Ustream, and plan to use it again when we do our backers-only stream of the demo.

On the production end, our file sharing has been greatly helped by Tortoise SVN and Dropbox. Once we were starting to put together the engine, using the shared files on yahoogroups just wasn’t an option anymore. That’s when we moved to setting an FTP and using SVN to make sure everyone had the most updated builds—it’s simple to install and easy to both update and regress to an earlier version if you need to recover lost files. Dropbox has been an excellent add-on to that as we started stretching our server space with the SVN builds. Though it’s more limited in how much space you have to work with, we could keep smaller projects there and save room on SVN, and it’s similarly easy to update so that everyone is working with the most current files. Then there’s Redmine, an online database that’s excellent for tracking assignments, bugs, and what’s been completed, what hasn’t, who it’s assigned to and so forth; and finally, Gannt, a project management tool that our coordinators swear by for tracking and scheduling.

In the end, utilizing tools and programs that are free-to-use has saved us a lot of time as well as money, by helping us organize and streamline our projects. Even now, as a fledgling commercial company, we’re working on a tight budget and every little bit counts. If you’re going to get creative and make a video game for free, be ready to get creative with how you make that feasible for your team.

01.2.2012 - TSL Ep 5 and Cognition both in PC Gamer’s Best of 2012 List!

PC Gamer has inlcuded both The Silver Lining: Episode 5 and Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller in it’s list of the best games coming in 2012!

Check it out here!

TSL Ep 5 was included in a similar list in the Swedish print version of the magazine as well (we’re checking into if it’s in the US version)–see the image below. The translation of the blurb reads:

“The fifth and last part of the episodic The Silver Lining, the adventure game based on the legendary King’s Quest adventures by Roberta Williams. The first four parts have received largely positive reviews, and now it’s time for King Graham to complete his mission, lift the curse from his family and save the world.”

12.30.2011 - Happy New Year, 2012 Is Going to Rock!

We’ve said it many times before, but it always bears saying again: thank you. Thank you for the last nine years, thank you for 2011, thank you for The Silver Lining, and now thank you for Cognition. This has truly been a banner year for Phoenix Online! Your generosity, your support, your belief, it is constantly blowing us away and making us smile. A Kickstarter total of $34,247! Hot damn!

Speaking of, sometime in January, we’ll do another mini-fundraising campaign for about a week through PayPal. We had a lot of fans saying they’d like to donate to the Kickstarter but for various reasons were unable to use Amazon Payments. Stay tuned for more information on this in the new year; and yes, the same list of rewards as we had for Kickstarter will be available for anyone donating through PayPal!

But really, the best part of all this? 2012 is going to be even better! Adventure-treff has ranked Cognition among their most-anticipated adventure titles for 2012, and Jane Jensen (I still think OMG! every time I realize we’re working with her!) has four titles on their Best 100 Adventure Games list! (#32: Gabriel Knight 3, #16: Gabriel Knight 1, #13: King’s Quest VI, and #3: Gabriel Knight 2)

We’re more excited every day as we’re working on Cognition, which is shaping up wonderfully, and even more excited about launching our company. Below you’ll see a new screenshot from the game, a truly beautiful background worked on by Romano Molenaar and Elisa Pavinato. I wonder who’s grave(s) Erica will be visiting? Or is it her own? You’ll find out eventually!

Plus, who can forget the upcoming exciting conclusion to The Silver Lining! Episode 5 will be full of some great stuff, and it’ll be a little bittersweet to say goodbye to the game we’ve spent a decade working on. But a great accomplishment for all of us here at Phoenix at the same time.

So Happy New Year to all of you, and here’s to a great 2012 to come!