How many developers behind GD? [Archive]

medierra

01-21-2010, 02:03 AM

We're pretty fucking indie, but we're not quite that small. :p

We've got 6 core team-members and will be working with a few more people in the coming months. Some of the other team-members actually just joined up on the forum today. Soundz is handling all of the audio work and we do have a budget for V/O. I tend to blab the most because I am heading up the design and most of the questions are design or business related. Rhis is in charge of the engineering effort and is active on the forums to help answer any technical questions that may arise which I cannot answer. Beyond our core team we've also gotten a little volunteer time from other professional developers and we are contracting out much of the smaller art assets.

So yeah, the game will be smaller in scope, but it won't be a text-based adventure. ;)

heron

01-21-2010, 02:10 AM

Not doubting the new company, just something I couldn't find from browsing the net.
I'm glad you guys have this all figured out and as the days goes by the appeal of the game has grown on me.

yerkyerk

01-21-2010, 06:44 AM

I also wonder; are you the only one who's left from Iron Lore, medierra?

medierra

01-21-2010, 06:50 AM

I also wonder; are you the only one who's left from Iron Lore, medierra?

No, actually most of the people working on Grim Dawn are colleagues from Iron Lore.

AXidenT

01-21-2010, 08:12 AM

Where are you guys based at the moment? :confused:

yerkyerk

01-21-2010, 08:41 AM

No, actually most of the people working on Grim Dawn are colleagues from Iron Lore.

Ah, interesting, good to know that.

zyklop

01-21-2010, 08:58 AM

So yeah, the game will be smaller in scope, but it won't be a text-based adventure. ;)

Hey - no bad words against text-based adventures, please. I played "Fish" or the "Zork series" for a long time and it was entertainment at it´s best... ;)

Alek

01-21-2010, 12:07 PM

Soundz

01-21-2010, 01:19 PM

Whoosh! Bang! RAR! <-- I am the sound guy. :D

Alek

01-21-2010, 01:22 PM

I see that GD will be comical... or at least it sounds so...

:)

Chameleon

01-21-2010, 01:25 PM

Wow only 6 people?! I thought a lot more were working on GD.

Malpheas

01-21-2010, 02:14 PM

Brohemoth is the best name ever. LOL

....aaand apparently he's not a "crate employee"; just an "Administrator".

medierra

01-21-2010, 02:22 PM

Hmm... So you need like less than 100k copies at ~10$ to have around 10k$ per developer (and those assisting). Thats ridiculous. 10$ is nothing for a game, and you will probably sell for more.

1question, how long are you working on this game (this game only) in total? How long do you plan to work before you publish it?

$10? $10k per developer? Well, we're selling the first release for $20 and at 100,000 copies that's $2,000,000. That sounds like a lot of money probably but, unfortunately it isn't all the much when start to look at the costs of game development. However, it is just enough that we could recoup our development investment, pay ourselves salary just above the poverty line, and start cranking on the next installment. We're really hoping for more like 200,000 copies sold though, which would allow us to pay ourselves more reasonable wages, expand our operations, and hire on a few more people to help make the next installment even better / release a little sooner.

We think there is the potential to do a lot better than this but we try to keep our dreams small so that anything greater is pleasant surprise. In business you can't really bank on success and have to operate on conservative projections. That is a lesson I've learned all too well.

Alek

01-21-2010, 02:34 PM

I suck at math (

AAAAAAAAAAAND economy (

heron

01-22-2010, 10:04 PM

Whoosh! Bang! RAR! <-- I am the sound guy. :D

Hey! No beatboxing! :p

Poet of the Fall

01-22-2010, 10:29 PM

Whoosh! Bang! RAR! <-- I am the sound guy. :D

Clearly needs more cowbell.

Forrest Gimp

01-23-2010, 05:24 AM

Does anyone have any idea how many copies Torchlight sold? That seems to be a success. I would be interested to see if it was close to the 200,000 copy mark that you're aiming for, especially as it's also by a small indie team with a $20 price tag.

yerkyerk

01-23-2010, 05:45 AM

No idea, I'm quite interested in that actually. Seeing that it stood on #1 on Steam for quite some time and in the top 10 for very long despite some very big titles, I think it did quite well. Don't know how to find out the salesnumber though...

It was even featured on Zero Punctuation :)

Iceciro

01-23-2010, 06:21 AM

Torchlight is pretty good for the five bucks I paid for it. There's a lot to be said for a Steam-Deep-Discount sale making games worth more to me, though. Most of my games on Steam get bought that way.

andreyy

01-23-2010, 06:57 AM

Is there anyone responsible for the landscaping work in TQ among this 6? The terrain, landscapes were the thing I loved the most in Titan Quest.

GermanZombie

01-25-2010, 12:41 AM

I like smaller teams, something about some of the older games built with smaller teams felt more unified. That is one problem I have as newer games get bigger teams, sometimes they come out feeling like not everyone was on the same wavelength in the game.

medierra

01-25-2010, 01:10 AM

Is there anyone responsible for the landscaping work in TQ among this 6? The terrain, landscapes were the thing I loved the most in Titan Quest.

Yes, two of the people who did level design in TQ are working on GD.

heron

01-25-2010, 01:51 AM

Yes, two of the people who did level design in TQ are working on GD.

So- it seems the core of the TQ team is creating the world of GM.
Cannot wait to see some concept art! The concept artist for TQ was really outstanding, any chance that person is on board?

radio_babylon

01-25-2010, 08:32 PM

Skew is handling all of the audio work and we do have a budget for V/O.)

fwiw, i couldnt care less about V/O... i know its a big deal to a lot of people, that as much as possible be voice-acted but, personally, id rather see more content at the expense of V/O than vice versa...

but then, i still play angband regularly, so you can imagine my expectations might be a little different than most...

heron

01-25-2010, 08:41 PM

I think V/o is pretty important to get the audience into the immersion of the gaming world.
Without V/O it's like watching a silent film, lol.

I'm not talking Dragon Age V/O but at least something on par with TQ standards.

GermanZombie

01-25-2010, 09:29 PM

I think V/o is pretty important to get the audience into the immersion of the gaming world.
Without V/O it's like watching a silent film, lol.
standards.

I don't agree with that, I really don't like alot of voice overs, It may be that I enjoy reading, so not listening to people talk never really bothered me. But in normally when series goes from silent to voice over I don't like it. My biggest example of that is Morrowind to Oblivion. I really thought the wall of text I had thrown at me in Morrowind was more enthralling because they didn't need to limit what they had to say due to voice over constraints.

I would like only the Important Characters voice acted if they have to do voice acting at all.

yerkyerk

01-25-2010, 09:39 PM

I think what the team's planning to do with voice acting works great; iirc, the NPC's will have standard introductory lines, but won't blabber the entire story.

Panthro

01-25-2010, 10:31 PM

I think what the team's planning to do with voice acting works great; iirc, the NPC's will have standard introductory lines, but won't blabber the entire story.

This is definitely my favourite way of doing things, important stuff and a few other bits get voiced, but the majority is text.

Baldur's Gate was like this, often peoples first couple of sentences were voiced, the rest was text (some main characters had more voice acting though).

I think it worked well to give you an impression of someones character, whilst also allowing for detailed conversations.

medierra

02-02-2010, 05:45 PM

So- it seems the core of the TQ team is creating the world of GM.
Cannot wait to see some concept art! The concept artist for TQ was really outstanding, any chance that person is on board?

Alas, the concept artist from ILE is not among us. Not really sure what he's up to these days.

Jophilli

02-03-2010, 05:58 AM

That is indeed unfortunate. That guy was pretty swell. How about the amazing modeller/skinner?

medierra

02-03-2010, 07:46 AM

That is indeed unfortunate. That guy was pretty swell. How about the amazing modeller/skinner?

There were several modelers on TQ but we do have the lead character artist working with us. Funny coincidence, one of the artists we hired late in the project during TQ was doing contract work for us on GD until he was recently hired by blizzard. Damn you Blizzard! why? WHY?! :cry:

MadWasp

02-03-2010, 07:55 AM

There were several modelers on TQ but we do have the lead character artist working with us. Funny coincidence, one of the artists we hired late in the project during TQ was doing contract work for us on GD until he was recently hired by blizzard. Damn you Blizzard! why? WHY?! :cry:

'cose of money.:eek:

yerkyerk

02-03-2010, 08:16 AM

Money? Might be prestige..
Working at Blizzard must be a dream come true for many game devs.

happylizard

02-04-2010, 01:16 AM

i hope this game will as successful as TQ, but sells a way better than TQ. i hope u will be as successful as the TL team and continue ur hard and release the game as early as u can. i hope u can beat Blizzard and let them know that not only billizard can make good arpg game, but also u....

i like TQ very much and i bought the game also.

one more thing: please make the feeling when u hit the enemy more real... TL team made it perfect, so u can also do it...yes u can...i trust u...that feeling of TQ is not very good. when i play TQ i feel like i am harvesting the crops, but not hitting the Enemy....it makes people feel boring after a long play...so please improve that feeling.

happylizard

02-04-2010, 01:30 AM

one more thing:
can we have more choices in the character selection, in TQ we have only 2 character to select and that is it. we can not even customize them....
this time can we have more choice, such as skin color, more faces, or even different races? like elf, human, so and so...bla bla bla.........

AXidenT

02-04-2010, 06:33 AM

Money? Might be prestige..
Working at Blizzard must be a dream come true for many game devs.

...a world where the offices are lined with gold. :p

MadWasp

02-04-2010, 07:35 AM

Money? Might be prestige..
Working at Blizzard must be a dream come true for many game devs.

Prestige is work here at Crate.They work because they love arpg and have talent and idea to do it. These excellent 7 workers have prestige.TQ:IT is the best H&S nowadays. I think this GD team one day beats blizzes...:) IT will be a hard match thou....but nothin' is impossible...

Blizz gives also more money...a lot of money...

but after a while Crate gets stronger...and then....:p

medierra

02-04-2010, 07:36 AM

one more thing: please make the feeling when u hit the enemy more real... TL team made it perfect, so u can also do it...yes u can...i trust u...that feeling of TQ is not very good. when i play TQ i feel like i am harvesting the crops, but not hitting the Enemy....it makes people feel boring after a long play...so please improve that feeling.

Totally agreed. This is something we're putting a lot more effort into for GD. I think a big limitation of TQ was that we weren't allowed to put blood in the game and as a result we ended up not really having much in the way of hit-effects.

medierra

02-04-2010, 07:41 AM

Money? Might be prestige..
Working at Blizzard must be a dream come true for many game devs.

Blizzard actually tends to pay on the low-end for less seasoned developers. They can do this because so many people want to work at Blizzard. To some extent it is about the prestige or at least, the resume building.

In the case of the artist that went to Blizzard, we were only contracting with him and couldn't pay him a full-time salary, so it made sense. He was also a massive Diablo fan, so it was a dream come true as well. He really deserved it as he'd been through some really rough times since the closing of ILE. :)

alexei

02-04-2010, 07:46 AM

Even without blood I think hitting sensation still could be achieve using shake effect or thunderous sound effect. I really like how smashing skill in dungeon siege 2 (although they do have blood).

happylizard

02-04-2010, 02:41 PM

Even without blood I think hitting sensation still could be achieve using shake effect or thunderous sound effect. I really like how smashing skill in dungeon siege 2 (although they do have blood).

agreed, it looks like (in diablo2) whenever we hit the enemy, the hitting action of our character is not a constant speed, there is an acceleration in that hitting procession....than is the way they make "hitting sensation" so the same to D3 and TL. Sacred2 has a lot of blood while fighting, but still crop harvsting. why, because the hitting action is constant speed....the original reason for crop harcesting hitting sensation is that-hitting action in a constant speed.

medierra

02-05-2010, 08:28 AM

I agree, there is a lot of nuance to achieving the perfect hit feeling. Just hitting an enemy and having blood splat out is not enough. It is an improvement, but there is definitely more involved. On top of that we're adding a split-second flash to give even more powerful and obvious feedback.

The animations need to wind up, have a split second of dramatic pause, and then accelerate to finish. Of course, sound is also important and we're beefing those up as well.

I think the combat is definitely feeling better than TQ but it isn't quite perfect yet and we're still working on some of the above mentioned things to improve it further.

alexei

02-05-2010, 09:27 AM

The animations need to wind up, have a split second of dramatic pause, and then accelerate to finish.

Wow that's almost like really interesting battle animation mechanism! If the result is the same as like my imagination, then I can't wait to see combat video footage!

When you finally able to produce combat hitting sensation, such combat that when people see will making them couldn't help it but feel awesome, please release it so that we can all see it and spread it around for more critical reception ;p

Jophilli

02-05-2010, 10:53 AM

Dramatic pausing followed with lightning-fast bone-crushing and flesh-rending moves?

300, anybody? Perfect. That's visceral, good bloody fun.

Betrayer

02-05-2010, 12:05 PM

Gotta have that wet thunk, like taking a hatchet to a watermelon. :D

happylizard

02-05-2010, 03:58 PM

Wow that's almost like really interesting battle animation mechanism! If the result is the same as like my imagination, then I can't wait to see combat video footage!

When you finally able to produce combat hitting sensation, such combat that when people see will making them couldn't help it but feel awesome, please release it so that we can all see it and spread it around for more critical reception ;p

flash~~~~~~~~~i cannot wait to see how the flash works, sounds very good to me......cannot wait already......

Chameleon

02-05-2010, 04:34 PM

The animations need to wind up, have a split second of dramatic pause, and then accelerate to finish.

Sounds exactly like the rubber banding in TQ. ;)

Jophilli

02-07-2010, 11:13 AM

Sounds exactly like the rubber banding in TQ. ;)

Low blow... low blow.

heron

02-07-2010, 03:25 PM

Sounds exactly like the rubber banding in TQ. ;)

good one, ha.

Iconik

02-08-2010, 04:33 AM

Sounds exactly like the rubber banding in TQ. ;)

Bwaha. Brutal.

medierra

02-08-2010, 04:47 AM

Sounds exactly like the rubber banding in TQ. ;)

Guess we don't have to worry about implementing it then. :o

Really though, I'm probably more pissed off about rubber-banding than anyone who bought the game. I put in 100+ hour weeks on TQ and it is pretty damn frustrating to see that effort diminished by a lame bug like rubber-banding.

alexei

02-08-2010, 09:00 AM

medierra

02-08-2010, 09:25 AM

Oh don't be so down..It's not like rubber-banding is so bad. At least it become a memories for everyone who ever played TQ:IT ;) It's a joke that only known to TQ player :D

And we all here are relieved that you put extra effort about the bug for GD. We not gonna have any rubber band anymore right? :)

Hopefully not - if we do have anything like that, we'll be working around the clock to fix it. As you can see - I never sleep. ;)

alexei

02-08-2010, 10:30 AM

Hopefully not - if we do have anything like that, we'll be working around the clock to fix it. As you can see - I never sleep. ;)

Hey it's not good! Get some sleep and eat something edible! Don't just eat bread and water! Go out sometimes and eat some pizza and play something for workout.

I'm sure we all here don't want GD to suffer any quality losses because lack of sleep :D

Of course I hope it's will come out before D3 since it's most likely to help GD success in sales (regarding the discussion about this already :)

medierra

02-08-2010, 10:45 AM

I'm sure we all here don't want GD to suffer any quality losses because lack of sleep :D

I only do my best work after I've been awake for 15-20 hours. Plenty of time to sleep once we're dead! ;)

Ok... maybe you have a point. I just started coming down with a cold, so perhaps more sleep is in order.

heron

02-08-2010, 11:42 AM

What caused the bug to begin with? There were some speculation but never anything concrete.

alexei

02-08-2010, 01:06 PM

I think medierra already explain it before it this thread. Look likes performance suffering from too much complicated and dynamic lighting, bloom, shadow, shader, bla bla..
http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showpost.php?p=793&postcount=8

I think we may have fixed rubber-banding but I'm not 100% sure. Rubber-banding is really just a symptom of bad performance. Specifically, it tends to happen when there are frequent, sudden spikes in performance. So, the problem is not necessarily that the memory manager can cause the game to rubber-band, its that there are terrible performance spikes. The alternative would be a game that just hitches horribly and I don't think that is much better of a solution. We think we fixed the underlying problem that was causing the giant performance spikes and haven't seen any rubber-banding since. As long as we take measures to ensure good performance, there shouldn't be anymore.

medierra

02-08-2010, 01:13 PM

What caused the bug to begin with? There were some speculation but never anything concrete.

Well, the rubber-banding itself isn't a bug really, it is a symptom of an underlying performance problem. The alternative of rubber-banding would be horrible hitching, which I don't think would be much of an improvement. The key is to eliminate the drops in performance that caused the rubber-banding to occur. We've fixed a couple of issues that we believe were the major contributors to these sudden performance drops. The next step is to ensure that we are more conservative about our use of assets and special effects in the design of the levels. The crystal passage in TQ:IT would be a good example of where we got a little carried away in the past...