Larian’s Swen Vincke Talks Preparing Press Demos

In the latest of his blog posts Larian Studios’ Swen Vincke talks about “the side journalists never see”, the hardships and tricks of preparing a demo for the press to see, based on some of his most recent personal experience with preparing two press demos for Dragon Commander and Project E that will be shown to journalists in a visit to their office. Here’s a generous excerpt:

We agree that we’ll work until 2 am and then come back the next day it happens to be a holiday. We’ve been at it for a few weeks now, so we’re tired. I’m also proud, because a resilient core team refuses to admit defeat in the face imminent disaster. As long as they struggle on, there’s hope.

Plan B’s & C’s are being formulated. If we can’t get this to work in time, we need to fake it. Can we ?

We’re long past thinking about the ethics of faking things in presentations it’s accepted in our industry, everybody does it, even if nobody, including the developers themselves, like it. It’s a waste of work after all.

We agree to follow two tracks one team tries to get the real thing working again, the other rapidly develops a plan B implementation that looks like the real thing. If first team fails, we’ll go with B. We also cut a couple of things from the presentation. We nod in agreement and go home.

It’s raining. I drive a designer home, get stuck in a traffic jam caused by a series of cars window-shopping the local prostitutes and curse I’m really feeling sick and want to hit my bed asap.

Arriving home, my newborn son, two weeks old, decides it’s concert time. My girlfriend is trying to appease him. She looks at me, smiles but I can see she’s tired.

I feel too sick to help her and hit the bed, coughing to the rythm of my baby boy’s cramps. I drug myself with painkillers, and try to get some sleep.

The next day I can hardly talk and everything hurts. A useful feature to have at this time I think. I arrive in the office later than agreed I feel bad about that, but thankfully the emergency team is already hard at work, and they don’t seem to mind.

They’re making progress. I look at the games, cough & smile they do look good. It’ll be worth it.

Thanks RPGWatch.