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Postmortem: Naked Sky Entertainment's RoboBlitz  Self-funding the Project
Making a game on your own dime is not for the faint of heart, especially when it’s a next-gen title using the latest work-in-progress technology, based on an original IP, and incorporating innovative ideas from a team that has never collectively shipped a commercial game. So why did we do it? The answer is simple, because we knew only we could make RoboBlitz the way we envisioned it. To have complete creative control over this project, we had to fund it ourselves. Plus, given all the risks involved, no publisher would touch us with a ten-foot pole. The great thing about funding your own game is that you can be as creative, unconventional and bold as you want. Would any publisher greenlight a game featuring an orange robot rolling around on a giant metal ball? What about replacing all hand-animation with physics-driven movements and behaviors? Now try this one: would anyone have believed us if we said a year ago that we could make a 19-level, Unreal Engine 3 game in less than 50MB?
Working with unfinished cutting-edge technologies always leads to production delays, unforeseen design/art/code changes to accommodate a new build of the tech, and more production delays. Unless we were working on an established franchise, any publisher would have aborted RoboBlitz a long time ago. But since this is our baby, she was born a healthy 49.32MB! Lastly, because we self-funded the title, we were able to negotiate a great revenue split with the publishers and distributors. Supporting the CommunitySeveral months before launch, we opened a forum on the RoboBlitz website where users could discuss and ask questions about the game. This helped generate viral interest, build up a user base with our extremely limited budget, as well as provide a way to quickly spot and address technical problems once the game was out. Since launch, we’ve been very protective of that user base, and have dedicated over a third of our tech team to technical support e-mails and forum moderation. Shipping the RoboBlitz editor and immediately setting up an editor Wiki at our site were also strong community building steps that have gone over quite well. Right now our Wiki is still the number one public source for info specific to a UE3 based editor, and that helps generate traffic and interest in RoboBlitz. We’re also actively engaging the modding community, encouraging people to push the limits of physically based game play.
Providing an online forum for the RoboBlitz community really paid off. At launch, we learned that people with certain graphics chips were having trouble getting the latest drivers required to work with our game. However, members from our growing user base quickly stepped in with hacks and tricks to solve these problems. Some of our more dedicated users even volunteered to moderate our forums. With all the users helping each other out, the RoboBlitz community is taking off. |
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