Grim Dawn Post-funding Update #29: Delay Explained

Given August was the estimate release date for Grim Dawn during the Kickstarter campaign and the game isn’t ready for the larger public yet, the Crate Entertainment team has decided to explain what’s happening with a post-funding update. Here’s a large excerpt that had the unintended (?) side effect of making me appreciate the efforts of the team more:

The good news is that we’ve been conservative with our funds and expect we will still have a sufficient budget to carry us to the end of development. I want to give you all some insight though, into why development has been running behind. The following isn’t meant to be a list of excuses; only the explanation that I think you deserve.

Some of it is the usual of the usual suspects – the creative process, spending time on revisions when we think things aren’t good enough and adding in new features that we hadn’t originally planned. We also went sort of nuts on (Act 1) and made it much longer than we originally anticipated. We said in the past that we were shooting for about a 15 hour finished game and a 2-3 hour play-through for the alpha area but many people are taking 10-15 hours to clear the alpha. The upside is that you’ll be getting a larger game but, of course, that also adds time onto development.

Other things happened though that we could not have expected or weren’t able to plan for.

One of the first setbacks had to do with hiring. As I’d mentioned during the Kickstarter, my intention was to hire on a couple friends from Iron Lore who had significant experience from their work on Titan Quest. For years they had contributed to Grim Dawn as they were able and the plan had always been for them to come on fulltime as soon as we could pay wages. However, over the years, they also had children, took on car loans and mortgages, and earned raises that made it more difficult for me to provide adequate wages out of the KS funds. When we reached our funding goal and the time came for them to sign on, they started looking at their financial situations found they were no longer in a place where they could afford the risk of joining a small startup and taking reduced salaries.

The result was that I did not have experienced people who were immediately ready to jump onto the project and had to spend time hiring. This sounds really terrible to say but it ended up being sort of a lucky break for us when 38 Studios closed because it suddenly created this large pool of talented developers looking for jobs. We were able to hire on some great people and that lessened the impact of our hiring problem but it still took time to train up new people in the use of our tools and to get them up to speed with the project.

Another big problem area was animation and people who have been following development on the forum may remember me talking about this prior to alpha release. After the KS campaign we continued on with two part-time animators that we’d been working with for a long time. Thing went on as usual until around November when they both ended up having to crunch at their day jobs during the same period. It went on for months and animation started to fall behind. At the same time, we became aware that there were some issues with the male PC rig that were going to make it very difficult to reuse any of the animations for the female. Having to create all new animations instead of being able to reuse and tweak them would have been a massive amount of extra work.

We finally had the good fortune to hire an amazing technical animator who, through fantastical feats of techno-animagic, was able to fix all our problems and has been overhauling all our player animations. That was another unexpected bump in the road that slowed us down but we’re starting to see tremendous benefit to the game from having a dedicated technical animator. Some of that benefit will be rolling out in B12 and there will be more to come. One of our part-time animators is also back, working on a new enemy, so that helps as well.

Speaking of people having babies, I had one… well, technically my wife had the baby but I’m part-owner and naturally new responsibilities came with that. Is it a good idea to have a baby while trying to start a gaming studio and release your first game? I can tell you the answer is definitely no… sort of… The problem is, none of the last few years have been good times, I don’t know if any of the next couple years will be a good time either and time is flying by. At some point, you have to make time for life in between all the work before life passes you by. That time came last summer and while it has been an amazing experience, it did have its impact on my work schedule.

Last year I was budgeting things very conservatively and planned as though we wouldn’t get any more money from alpha release. I wanted to make sure we could keep things going long enough to finish the game even if alpha sales were terrible. I didn’t want to pay myself additional money from the project to cover the exorbitantly high cost of daycare. Instead, we made plans to have a family member take care of the baby when my wife returned to work and it seemed like the perfect situation. After just two weeks, misfortune struck and that person was no longer able to help us. Not knowing what else to do, I ended up having to become a part-time daycare provider for a time… yeah…

That situation has been resolved and I’m back to dedicating ridiculous hours per week to Grim Dawn development but time was lost and, since I’m responsible for skill mastery and world development, it is lost time that pushes out the completion of beta content.

Oh, but wait, that’s not all! Why not throw in a little lead poisoning as well? So yeah, right after alpha shipped I found out from a blood test that my family was somehow being exposed to toxic levels of lead. I ordered some test kits and discovered our apartment was totally contaminated with invisible poison dust. The upside, if there is one, is that we found out very early before it reached critical levels and required treatment but we had to get out of the apartment ASAP.