Caw, flock!
As some of you might know.. not long ago we had the chance to do something pretty amazing. Truth be told, the title of this post (as far as we know) is actually not misleading.. we made small history.
So what happened? Well.. about half a year ago, Jacob Riis, head of the Nordic Game Conference (the biggest game development conference in Europe) came up with this crazy idea for our project - making a live show of our music while the game is being played live as well and.. is being synced to the live music on stage.
Davidavi "Vidi" Dolev... You'll get to know him as "Bres"!
Not only this idea sounds crazy.. quickly we found out we have a problem.. when looking for people to consult with about how to do such a thing we couldn't find any for one simple reason.. this seems to never have been done before!
And crazy (and maybe also stupid.. looking back) as this sounds - instead of saying "ok... it's probably not doable.." and giving up on this idea.. we decided to go for it. Lucky for us, both Nordic Game and All-In Games, our publisher were both crazy to actually support this crazy idea and go with it.
Now.. it's hard to explain how many technical problems this things brings with it but.. syncing interactive things to music is always hard.. truth be told, even syncing video to live shows is not the simplest thing - it's doable, but comes with many problems. A game? Being played live? Synced to live music? And also streamed live by a well known streamer? Well... that's a whole new word of pain we were facing. Where do you even begin?
Arnold (CEO/Composer) and Kobra who was performing Gitta
We begun big. Not only we decided that we are going to do it.. we also decided we are going to do it with the actual artists from the game. So.. we brought to Sweden:
- Ron 'Bumblefoot' Thal (ex-Guns N' Roses, Sons of Apollo, Asia) - Guitars
- Ruud Jolie (Within Temptation) - Guitars
- Rob van der Loo (Epica) - Bass
- Kobra Paige (Kobra and the Lotus) - Vocals as Gitta
- Davidavi 'Vidi' Dolev (Gunned Down Horses, Subterranean Masquerade)
- Yuval Tamir (Gunned Down Horses) - Drums
- Eden Rabin (ex-Orphaned Land) - Keyboards
- Arnold Nesis (Capricia Productions) - Composer
- Ben Shmuelof (Capricia Productions) - Guitars
- Sam 'Chaotic' - Playing the game
- Dor Ferdman & Octavian Cristea - On-site programmers.
Moments before the show
Now we were left just with the technical problems and the fear of doing this. Truth be told.. this really is an insane thing to do. We are not an AAA company with endless budget - we are a small indie team and we were going to perform this thing in front of over 1,000 game industry leaders... because.. you know... it's a game development conference...
Speaking even more honestly - making this thing live is suicide. Live demos is NEVER a good idea, specially in this scenario. At some point we realized we are in over our heads. We would honestly be very impressed if a big company would manage to pull something like this off. We didn't realize just how hard it's going to be going into this. Even after figuring out how to sync a game to live music (bear in mind.. it's a story driven music based game.. not "just" a rhythm game) - we kept running into one from after the other. Builds freezing, music going out of sync - click tracks problems... flight problems.. budget problems.. pretty much any problem you can (or can't) think of.. we had it!
Ben Shmuelof, our producer
To make matters even worse.. our build kept crashing. Even in Sweden, during rehearsals - it was crashing. Now.. game builds crashing is not new to anyone - it's ok. BUT... in this case it's also a live show. So... if the build crashes - show over. Music stops. Everything restarts. The sky falls down. Sauron attacks.
We were actually so sure the build is going to crash during the show that we made a bet on stage - if the build crashes, Ben (our producer) has to go on stage and drink a really disgusting shot. If it doesn't.. Arnold (the CEO/Composer) will drink 5 of them in a row at the end of the show.
So... how did it go!?
Well... a picture is worth a thousand words, right?
Yes. That's Arnold drinking 5 shots. We made it. And... it was amazing. Best bet he ever lost.
Looking back, we honestly can't believe we did this. Even now that some time has passed. Apart from the fact that this was a very special thing to do which has never been done before - an approach which is a huge part of this whole project - we proved to ourselves as a team that dreams do come true. NOTHING is impossible. It's cheesy.. but it's also true.
Over the next days/weeks we will share more and show more from this experience and it will be more game related - we'll show the actual show and the shots from the game as well as some "behind the scenes" shootings but we wanted to share this experience with you and thank you. Every game here on Steam, no matter how good or bad is at the end of the day a community of people and we couldn't have done that without the help of our community.
Thank you for being here, dear flock - you (literally) ROCK!