If I told you that Frontiers Reach and Blind Alien Productions are a completely self funded venture?
Because it is.
Save for the past year, I was able to maintain a day job throughout most of the development of Frontiers Reach. Mostly remote contract work that required I keep licensing for all of the same software that I use to develop FR anyways. And while it has certainly been a struggle, it has been worth it.
Because I’m self funded, development on FR and subsequent titles is not in danger of stopping unless my heart stops beating. There are no investors to tell me that I have to close up shop because THEY didn’t make enough money off of my hard work and that of the people I work with. And because I do about 80-90% of the work myself from architecting backend systems to 3D modeling vehicles and environments and building the levels and even optimizing everything from top to bottom, there is very little need for a massive budget.
The worst case scenario is that I have to put development on hold, or just slow down, because I have to go focus on making money to keep the lights on. Even if my publisher dropped me tomorrow, which I don’t see happening at all right now, I could still continue to work on the game.
This was extremely important for me to setup operations like this because I’ve long been a story teller with a love of writing and visual arts and games are just the medium I prefer to work in. If games did not exist it would probably be animation or comic books.
Another really great advantage to this is that when you buy a Blind Alien Productions game, much of your purchase goes directly to supporting the studio. Steam of course gets their 30% cut, the publisher gets a cut smaller than what Steam takes, then of course taxes, but what ever is left goes into the studio, the studio technology, and the games BAP makes.
In the past I’ve looked at crowdfunding as a means of bringing in more revenue to fund development and even ran a Kickstarter that failed get funded and have a Ko-Fi I haven’t updated in a while, but at a certain point, the crowdfunding effort becomes a job on its own and then development slows down the same as if I was working a regular day job. And crowdfunding just means I have more investors with smaller contributions and as seen with other projects, micro-investors can get in the way of development and production progress the same as any traditional investor.
All things considered I think the best way forward is to continue working as a self-funded effort because while it can be slower, there are fewer hazards that directly affect the future and progress of the studio and the games it creates.
But most importantly of all, you get an actual product that you can play and participate in the creation of without empty promises, moving goal posts, and the constant nagging that “if you just gave more money” it could all be so much grander and more immersive than the last time you crowdfunded a game.
Besides, as a life long gamer myself, I can’t stand being nickel and dimmed every step along the way.
--------------------------------------
With that out of the way, there is a new experimental build up, available for those willing to play test or anyone who just wants to get a glimpse of what is coming on Jan 1.
The build includes numerous changes as well as tweaks to timing of missions and fixes to some particularly complex missions that were incompletable.
For Linux users I should note that there is a new performance tweak that will completely toggle off ALL clouds on maps that have them. This is a tweak I made to test whether or not clouds are the primary culprit in poor performance on some Linux distros.
Till next time pilots, happy hooning!