And so it all begins, once again: we just announced our cooperation with All in! Games on Monday and, yes, it is a sort of restart for us, following a few months of events that changed the studio and the people behind it. Deeply.
This post is to give you a bit more information of what has been happening to us since March, to update you on what’s happening to Alaloth, and what to expect in the weeks following the announcement.
Making games is a hard job and 2019 has been a roller coaster for us.
The studio has been up & running for three years now, we’ve released a few games on PC and consoles, actually making numbers, and we’ve recently started a brand new publishing program named ReLaunch to help other fellow devs. All has gone according to our plans, let’s say. We are good at making plans and we had one laid out for our flagship project, Alaloth, that has since seen some big changes.
Gamera has a very publisher-friendly attitude (most of the management comes from that side of the business) and we’ve always been super clear on this while pitching the game all around the world during fairs and events. Alaloth has always been a unique project in many different ways—not so many indie studios in the world have the chance to announce their project with a worldwide exclusive unveil on IGN, or get six front covers in the printed press across Europe. A long time has passed since the very first presentation behind closed doors and we’ve always been super happy about the feedback from journos and players. We started showing the game in public at SGC 2018 in Ljubljana and one year later, at SGC 2019, we officially lined up a publisher, helping us to raise the bar, making Alaloth a bigger, better game.
But what happened on the way?
Why has Gamera been silent for a long time with so many people waiting for a release in fall of this year? Well, making games is a hard job, as we said. We were supposed to sign a publishing deal with a different partner before the summer. We had plans for Alaloth at E3 2019 with said partner that fell through, and with that, a lot of time dedicated to this milestone was lost.
The plan falling through has meant we needed to refocus our efforts after investing time, energy, and resources into a different timeline. One of the greatest errors that a small team like us can make is underestimating how much different factors can influence every plan. Our pipeline changed a bit so that we could be able to work on systems, ad hoc feature for showcases and other cool stuff while porting our other games to Switch and PS4, because we thought that everything would have been great with such support but you know what? Life happens.
We got no response. Lack of communication led to our initial marketing plans being sidelined, and with that, we needed to start considering how we were going to move forward with Alaloth knowing our initial direction was no longer possible. GamesCom was presented as an opportunity to fix all of this, but we were not planning to attend it, because something even worse happened during the summer: one of Gamera’s founding members, the most important investor of the company, passed away in a tragic mountain accident. We decided to attend GamesCom anyway, because it was the right thing to do but we thought it was the end. We were really devastated by all of this.
But it was not the end. It was a new beginning instead. We submitted for Devcom Indie Expo at the time and were selected for the show. It was our first time there, as we just attended the main event before. A last round of pitches and meetings, a good moment to see friends once again and not think about the storm upon us. We didn’t have the chance to catch up with a few companies during previous events so we did a last minute reschedule trying to reach them during this period. Fast forward: we had a bunch of phone calls, discussed our vision, found common ground and actually signed the deal we just announced. Restart.
And what now?
First of all, we are going to have access to resources we didn’t have before. We are actually working on a brand new production plan to bring a bigger and better game using these resources. The final version of Alaloth will therefore be more polished. We are even working on the marketing and PR to give you constant updates on the world we’ve kept secret for so long, going public once again at PAX East, the first stop on a world tour that will bring Alaloth to you all.
We’ve built a huge world with a rich history, amazing characters and stories to tell and we’ve just shown a few. Great news ahead: starting from January, we will be introducing the world lore created with the help of a giant like Chris Avellone and the hardcore gameplay mechanics we’ve had in mind since the very beginning.
We would like to work on the community as well and All in! Games will help us with this too, managing our social channels and Steam page as well, while you can poke us directly on our Discord server, where we are collecting feedback and chatting in real time with you all about any game-related topic and much more (RPGs are always a good topic!). Lots of people are asking about the release date, retail and if the game is coming to other platforms: we’ll be back to all these topics later next year, so be patient!
Sorry for the wall of text but it was something we’ve really wanted to do for a while to clarify almost everything.
Lots of love to you all and stay tuned!