Gaming Week! - Castle Story

  Hey there guys!  So, that was fun yesterday, huh?  If you read the entry right after I posted it, you may have missed the update.  So, in a nutshell, Ouya has changed the rules of their Free the Games fund for the better.  Much better.  And as a result, Gridiron Thunder is no longer eligible for it.

  But, we aren't talking about that today.  Today, we're talking about Castle Story!  What's Castle Story, you ask?  This is:

  Castle Story is a game in development by the kind folks over at Sauropod Studio.  It's the strategy meets building.  You control all your little yellow guys, called Bricktrons, and you use them to cut down trees, mine into the ground, and build castles to help defend not just your people, but the crystal that brings your people to life.

  Oh, and the islands are floating high in the sky above an endless ocean.  So don't dig too deep or too greedily.

  I've personally been a part of the game in some capacity since early on.  As the Kickstarter was running, I became a moderator on the community forums.  While not directly associated with Sauropod in any way, much of the community spends their time on the forums at www.CastleStoryOnline.com.  The Sauropod guys don't manage that page, it's entirely community run.

  They ran into a pretty major issue during the Kickstarter campaign.  They realized that the estimated delivery dates listed in the pledges were just plain untenable.  There was no way they'd be able to deliver by those deadlines.  This became especially true as the project scope began to change when they blasted past their funding goal of $80,000, climbing all the way up past $700,000.  They made it a point, at that time, to tell everyone that the estimated delivery dates simply would not be met, and that Kickstarter wouldn't let them change those ETA's after launching the campaign.  They recommended that anyone who wasn't alright with that withdraw their pledge.  Few people did, if any at all.

  The game had gotten much more attention than anybody at Sauropod, or even in the wider community had ever expected.  Suddenly, what had started as a little demo reel for Germain and Francois had turned into a game that was getting a lot more press than anticipated.  And that's not always good news.  Suddenly, they had a lot more critical eyes on their Bricktrons than they'd expected, and that's enough to make any artist sweat bullets.  They started a weekly development blog to help get any information about the game out there.

  However, shortly after the Kickstarter Ended, the weekly development blog became...  Well, less weekly.  And the community quickly started to lose patience, becoming divided over people who wanted the news, and people who didn't care about the news and just wanted a game.

  Enter Thierry, the web man.  He took over the blog, quickly stepping forward to make it a weekly occurrence again.  At this point, I had started speaking with him pretty regularly.  When the blog fell to him, he asked me if I could help him with it.  The problem was that Thierry, while very intelligent, is not a native English speaker.  He's French Canadian, and his native tongue is French.  He can speak well enough in English to convey an idea, and have a conversation.  But when it came to a professional blog that is the singular news source for the community, it simply wouldn't do.  So, he needed an editor, someone to read through the blog and clean up the English.  That's where I come in.

  In the early days, he'd write the entire entry in a pastebin, then send me a link.  I'd copy the entire thing into notepad, edit it all, and then make a new pastebin with the completed blog, sending it back.  This didn't last long, as it was complex and couldn't be viewed and corrected easily in real time.  After about a month and a half, we realized we needed a better system.  So, we switched to google docs.  From that time forward, he'd write it all in a google doc, then just share it with me.  I'd go in, make all the changes, and then just tell him it was done.  This is still how we do it today.  I also eventually took over the Soundtrack of the Week, another element of the blog, as the team ran dry on new music.

  Once the rest of the team had the concerns of the blog removed, development accelerated.  Now, these guys are still new to the industry and game development in general, so it wasn't quite as fast as what you'd expect from a team of veterans, but progress was happening regardless.  The prototype of the game was released in October of 2012, and over the next few months saw a couple updates to help fix some of the more broken parts of it.  It was pretty bare bone, but it had most of the building and resource management in.

  After the second prototype patch, they decided that their efforts would be better spent progressing towards beta than continuing to support the prototype.  It was, after all, only ever intended to give a small glance at what the game would be.  Continuing to patch it and make sure it would work on all supported platforms at each released build would have taken a lot of resources away from the overall development.  So, they dropped support of the Prototype and went full steam ahead.

  Eventually, they did release one final patch for the prototype at community request, adding in a couple more mechanics and features, such as the new user interface.  And now, they're only days away from the big one, the game's release on Steam Early Access.  I'm certain the guys are all sweating bullets at this point, knowing that for the first time, anybody will be able to just pick up the game and play it.  I do not envy them the stress of the next few days.

  I've loved working with Thierry on this stuff every week, and watching the game slowly evolve.  I've never been paid for any of it, and that's OK.  I've wanted to work in this industry since I was a child with no concept of money, and this volunteer work has let me fulfill that dream at least in part.  I've routinely been told by my parents, by my ex-girlfriend, by many people that I should stop and tell them to pay me or do it themselves, and I've refused to do that every time.  I'd happily do it for another year if needed.  The window it's given me into the process has been invaluable.

  So, if any of them are reading this, thank you for letting me be a part of this project.  I've enjoyed every moment of it.  And good luck on Monday, I'm sure it'll be a hit.  I've seen the latest builds, and it's shaping up great.