Hummm, but tell me? *look at his notes* it's been 6 months since we haven't seen each other?
What happened, where is the next god, where are the women editors, are the carrots cooked ?
Calm down Marty, sit comfortably in the Dolorean, everything will be fine!
Disillusionment
During the month of May we participated in the event "Add-on" (a event for the video game industry). Our goal was to meet people from the industry, to learn from the many conferences, but especially to meet publishers, to get financing.
- And then it went well?
But why, no?
Having gameplay is not enough, you also have to send a visual slap and have past experience otherwise it does not pass. Another key point is to have a sufficiently robust single player progression system, something we didn't have in this version.
And finally, multiplayer is not recommended for an indie game, because if your community is not enough your Matchmacking will take 3 hours to find a game.
So multiplayer interests very few publishers and is perceived as a risk for the others.
Following this demoralizing experience, from June to August we got in touch with Clara Dubreuil (Art Director) to help us on the visual coherence in Dice and Florian Boue (3D Modeller) in order to make a new map.
Here is the final concept-art of this collaboration :
- Cool, when is it coming out?
Well, probably never, because in parallel to that my dear Marty, there is the creation of a company, and for all that to be well done, we don't do everything ourselves, so we need some money too.
For this reason and because a big part of the architecture of the game is already coded Nicolas ("Babiole" for the intimates), found a full-time job in order to be able to pay the expenses of creation of company, those related to the graphics and to put enough in the capital of the company to obtain subsidies.
We are obviously two to participate in the expenses, but the rhythm of development is not at all the same as before.
And concretely, to get all this in the same month of September, it's a little bit difficult...
- And why not wait another month, to put more money aside?
The objective of the creation of the company was to create a pitch-deck (explanatory document of the game for the editors) and to deposit a file to the CNC in order to have subsidies of assistance to the pre-production.
We managed to finalize a pitch-deck with Clara's help, and we were able to send it to editors again. However, we realized that it was impossible to finish the CNC file in the allotted time, which postpones the request for aid by 6 months and thus the project by 6 months too.
- And why not wait 6 more months?
Because having a project on the go all the time is mentally exhausting, and the goal is not to finish on the kneecaps. And, unfortunately, this extra time, falls like a knife on our motivation and our morale
- But now, what's next? Is Dice Of Olympus over?
We have made the decision to release Dice Of Olympus as a self-publishing game in the first quarter of 2023
This obviously implies a lighter version compared to our original vision, especially in terms of single-player content and progression. The multiplayer should remain part of the game though, as this is where the Dice community was born ːsteamhappyː
We hope you enjoy it, and if success and finances allow some content updates might come out after the launch, who knows ;)
- How much will it cost?
The price of the game will of course be adjusted accordingly, we don't have a final price to tell you yet, but it should be relatively low (under 10€).
- Anything planned before the release?
We can also announce that we should participate in the next Steam Next Fest in February 2023, and that this will be the last event before the launch of the game according to our schedule.
We hope you will enjoy the content of this future demo. ːsteamthumbsupː
We are trying to identify the mistakes we made during our journey in order to make the most of them for the future, and we will probably talk about them again at the time of the release.
In spite of all these adventures we are still proud of the path we have taken, and we have learned a lot during these last two years.
We have always made sure to have a clear communication around the game, and we hope you appreciate this effort from our side, if so, please feel free to express yourself in the comments or on Twitter, as support is more than ever needed ːsteamhappyː
(Nicolas "Babiole" Constanty on the left, and Anton "Algost" Bodin Marty on the right)
Thank you for reading,
Algost and Babiole