Jagged Alliance: Flashback Kickstarter Update #18, $209,059 and Counting

Speaking of the Jagged Alliance series, there’s new update for the Jagged Alliance: Flashback crowdfunding campaign up on Kickstarter, revealing a new secret sector, some of the production plans and what happens right after the Kickstarter finishes (assuming success). Here’s a snip:

Production Plans for JA:F

So a lot of people have been asking what happens when the Kickstarter is successful. Will the game suddenly appear out of nowhere after a month and what does pre-production mean?

I just wanted to take the chance to give you a quick overview of how games are made.

In very! broad terms you have the following phases:

– Idea conception

Where you sit and throw ideas around of what would be cool to do, the overall settings, making some concepts and pulling things apart and reassembling them. You also need some business sense here to spot what you can actually sell and make a living off.

– Pre-production

This is where JA:F is right now.

Here you sit down and produce concept art, write overall story, settle on the major game mechanics as well as produce production plans. Who does what when, how much money is allocated to the story writing, who to hire for level design and so on.

– Production

There is a slide into production then, where more and more people get added to the production team. Artists will start taking the produced concepts and create core art assets (terrains, trees, houses, a few characters), level designers will start blocking out levels with boxes, coders will implement basic core functionality like movement and camera.

In production you have (we do at least) 4 sub phases

* First up there is a core asset production. Tons of art created and code created in isolation of each other – mostly using placeholder art or code/art from earlier games

* Then we assemble this into a vertical slice to get 1-2 sectors/levels totally playable with an ingame UI

* After that we produce a lot of sectors/levels

* Lastly it then gets assembled as a complete game

– Polish and testing

Ongoing and especially at the end a lot of polish is added, the vertical slice gets tested by early alpha testers. The adding beta and external testing. Alpha testers will get access to very early slices of the game and be able to give feedback based on these to the team before we mass produce content. Beta testers will get access to almost content complete builds.

– Release

Party time!! Beer Time!!! Time to freak out!!! Time to think about adding more content!!! Realizing that it wasn’t such a great idea to drink that much beer!!!! Using way too many exclamation marks!!!!!

– Post launch support

It doesn’t stop here. Usually you had to cut a lot of features to make the deadlines. So there is considerable effort post launch to support the game, fix bugs that get reported, add features – and then start to think about making expansions.