Postmortem of Partia: The Broken Lineage

     Partia: The Broken Lineage was released on November 20th, 2012. It is Imago Software’s first title, the result of almost three years of work and countless years more of consideration.

     Before I get too far into this, a brief explanation on video game Postmortems for the uninformed:

     Most people know the term from their favorite TV crime drama, wherein a body is examined postmortem – literally “after death” – to determine how a victim met his or her grisly primetime fate. When applied to video games, however, the term is slightly less macabre. It still occurs after the “death” of this game, which can be anywhere from a few weeks to several years. We still manage to move a few copies each day even after almost a year in the appstore, but enough time has passed to give the verdict on Partia’s performance. This process is interesting for consumer and developer alike, the former getting an inside look on game development and the latter getting a better understanding of how to ensure the success of future titles. Think of it as a the director’s commentary on a movie or an author’s foreword on a revisited work, just with a hair more depth and purpose.

     As is tradition, bad before the good:

What Went Wrong

1.  Unreliable Outsourcing

     Imago Software is a tiny studio. No, really – only two members can be considered “permanent” fixtures in the company. Though some games are the product of the feverish workings of a single person, Partia’s demands proved too much in the realms of art and sound for our humble duo. Many of the art elements did get handled in-house (see number 1 of “What Went Right!”), but the majority had to be entrusted to freelancers.

     Outsourcing is not in and of itself a bad thing. There are many major gaming companies for which their titles would impossible but for the aid of hired help. The driving difference, however, is the level of quality they can afford. Imago was – and still is – the dream of a couple struggling indie developers, and with no outside investors or capital from previous titles, funding for all extra assets had to come from our producer/programmer, Dustin.

     Sound was the simpler of the two holes to fill. Music for a game of this type can often be found royalty-free on various sites and easily sampled before a purchase. Although it was time-consuming to trawl through literally hundreds of songs before we found a set that fit together, it was a simple task compared to our experience with art.

     Our artists had to fulfill three simple requirements: Skilled, reasonably priced, and reliable. Out of dozens approached, very few met even two out of the three standards. Some of our best artists would produce outstanding work only to vanish after a few commissions. Others would create work on time but without enough consistency to make the final cut. One artist even convinced us to pay up front before making himself scarce, leaving us with neither his art nor his commission. Though we did end up with a large volume of usable – if varied – assets, every miss was a setback in time and money that jeopardized Partia’s chances.

2.  Long-Distance Workflow Issues

     Working together literally across countries comes with a set of challenges regardless of your occupation. Sometimes even the simple scheduling of a meeting could be thrown off by the disparate timezones and their two hour difference. But even more difficult to overcome was the lack of a clearly defined workflow.

     Without regulated check-ins or the other trappings of a standard office, coordinating tasks and monitoring progress was haphazard at best. Days could be lost on a low-priority project while important tasks went undone, punctuated by weeks of spotty progress owing to the complexity of holiday scheduling.

     On top of these issues, we both had very different schedules in our day-to-day lives. Dustin still keeps a full-time job and managed to work on Partia while juggling work, family, and personal life. I only worked part-time myself, but still had other obligations that further complicated the scheduling of meetings.

     Budgeting our time and making sure we are on the same page with Partia is still something we struggle with today. If we are ever successful enough, there have been talks of trying to live in the same area; but that is another story entirely.

3.  Overambitious Initial Design

     Partia’s development began with high hopes and lofty goals. Although our team was small, our ideas were sound and our resolve was strong. This was the game that would get us noticed.

     It wasn’t until months into development that we began to realize how far our reach exceeded our grasp. Some game elements were sidelined due to technical limitations, but others were put aside for simply being too big for our small studio.

     The initial narrative in particular proved too sprawling and epic to safely condense into our humble debut title. It was decided that we would rather get our bearing with a smaller endeavor and then use the tools and skills from the new project to revisit what Partia was meant to be. Our second script – a prequel – was hired out to a ghost writer whose ideas ultimately wanted too much refinement to fall in line with our original vision. The Broken Lineage was our third attempt, a story scaled down to fit our reworked timetable.

     Although we worked on Partia for three years, the bulk of TBL’s development occurred in the final year with much of the previous two years scrapped or archived. This process was a necessary step for us as new developers, but it still hurts to spend hours, days, or weeks on something only to discard it entirely.

4.  Kickstarter/Marketing/PR Inexperience

     When it became apparent that we lacked the resources to bring the game to our standard of quality in the time we had left, we did what many other devs have done: turned to Kickstarter.

     This decision revealed a major problem with our PR; namely, that it did not exist.

     This isn’t to say that we didn’t engage our potential fanbase at all. Dustin would occasionally post on related forums trying to discern the demand for our game, but we would never name drop or share any assets.

     Although this seems like a gaping hole in our developer acumen, remember that our art assets were always in doubt. We wanted to have the game’s portraits and tiles be unified in style, but we had yet to find an artist that stayed long enough to ensure what we shared with fans would match the final game. Even our early level design looks laughably basic (which, as the level designer, I can admit) in comparison to what shipped in TBL. We had nothing we could share with confidence.

     Still, we knew we had to get SOMETHING out there if our Kickstarter was to have any chance of success. In only a few short weeks we threw together a website, rigged up a blog, and created accounts across various social media platforms. With everything in place, we launched our campaign.

     …or tried to. After the euphoria of the first few days of backers wore off, it was clear that our goal would be hard won, if at all. We had waited until too late to engage our fans, and then did not devote enough time cultivating what interest we had found. The KS did earn us a small following on our Facebook page, but it’s uncertain whether or not it was worth the time and effort when we were still underfunded.

5.  Undertested/Underpolished Final Release

     We had only subjected Partia to the barest array of testing (there were, after all, only two of us), and many features we had hoped to add remained on the drawing board. But without KS to bolster these unrefined aspects of our game and with finances growing tight, we were forced to make the decision to release what was ultimately an unrefined game.

     We had hoped for at least a few weeks without major issue, enough to shine some of the rougher edges. But the first error we found was right on release day, and boy was it a show stopper.  Mission 3 was guaranteed to crash if you took more than a specified number of turns to finish, and it was designed so that only a very few elite or lucky could move so quickly. Players were (rightfully) vocal about the bug, and even though we had already found the issue and submitted the patch, it would be seven grueling days before the update came through. How much damage this early error did, we will never know.

     Subsequent patches have addressed several of the more glaring issues Partia: TBL faced, but it will never reach the level of polish we had hoped for at the beginning.

What Went Right

1.  Team Members All Wear Many Hats

     When I was originally commissioned to join Imago there was a single job I was meant to fill: writer. I was glad for the opportunity since I didn’t have enough experience to manage much else. It wasn’t long, however, before long meetings turned to talks of what other areas needed work. With Dustin programming and me writing, the holes were too many to count.

     One of trickiest positions to fill was level creation. It was simple enough to commission specific background tiles, units, or other sprites, but organizing them in a way that was informed by the story, visually appealing, and conducive to interesting strategic gameplay required too much insider information and genre understanding for any freelancers we found. Eager to help, I volunteered to try my hand at sketching maps on gridded paper which could then be scanned and turned into a level by one of our pixel artists.

     This…was a slow start. I’d played a number of tactical games before but never quite at the precise scale or with the tactical demands specific to our game. The first few maps were made without recognizing the importance of isolating each tile graphically, creating confusing borders where characters would be on multiple types of terrain at once. Unpassable walls were placed with little thought to how they would impede movement, and open spaces were prolific and visually uninteresting.

     None of this changed the fact, however, that we still did not have a level designer. I continued to practice, Dustin continued to provide invaluable feedback, and my maps improved in both form and function. More importantly, I was becoming increasingly adept at constructing them myself from the provided tiles, editing the ones I needed and creating entire new sets for specific situations.

     Though we still outsource much of the tile creation, it’s reassuring having somebody inhouse capable of both creating and utilizing these tiles.

2.  Made Use of Open Source Assets

     We pushed our budget to and beyond the breaking point, but some areas simply could not be commissioned or handled in-house. Music was one of these areas.

     There are plenty of online musicians looking to make a buck, but hiring one to provide the range and quality of music Partia needed was a huge challenge. We dealt with the same problem that plagued our search for artists: finding a talented, reliable composer at a good price. There was no shortage of eager young talent, but none were able to prove themselves capable of creating the breadth of music we needed. Those with proven portfolios were well out of our price range.

     Thankfully, we discovered that there is a treasure trove of excellent tracks available for use royalty-free online. We dug through hundreds of songs to find those that thematically suited our needs, and threw together a soundtrack we didn’t imagine we could afford on our budget.

     We are keeping our options open for future titles, but now we know that affordable options exist even for a la carte music.

3.  Filled a Niche on iphone

     Explaining Partia to friends and family has always been a trick. Mention “Angry Birds” or “Candy Crush,” and they’ll know exactly what you’re talking about. But “turn-based strategy roleplaying game” raises more eyebrows than it answers questions.

     That might be a strange way to segue into one of our “what went right” bulletpoints, but the fact of the matter is that these kinds of games are underrepresented in the appstore. They can’t promise the same broad appeal the top ten do, and thus don’t generate the same revenue.

     But lack of revenue does not mean complete lack of interest. There are other successful games of our genre that prove a fanbase exists, and we hoped they would be hungry enough for an SRPG app that they’d be willing to spend a little extra. Thousands of sales later at a slightly higher price point seems to have proven our theory – and also funded future games!

4.  Assets and Code Created to be Reusable for Sequels

     Partia was never meant to be a one-shot game. We always wanted an extensive, fully realized world, where we could thrust players into conflicts both large and small. Telling all that could be told in just a single game would never be possible. Why, then, should we restrict ourselves to a single game?

     Thankfully, SRPGs of the 16bit era (like the ones after which Partia is modeled) lend themselves to extended storytelling with minimal assets. The tiles that made the maps in Partia can be reconfigured like LEGO blocks to quickly construct new levels for new games. The underlying system, too, was geared for future expansion, and was created to more easily string together future levels and events.

     Building a flexible engine with assets to match made the investment into a first game a bet on future titles, and it’s one we’re keen on cashing in.

5.  Unused Assets Saved for Later Projects

     As mentioned before, a lot of the assets we created early on were either discarded for lack of quality or shelved for want of time. Characters with intricate backgrounds and portraits were filed away. Special dialogs between these characters – some of them pages long – languish still in shared Google documents. Pages and pages of notes that detail both the story and the minutia of how a map might be made to serve the story gather dust.

     The decision to set aside so much work was not made lightly. We labored for months believing we would find the time/resources to make it all happen, and each reduction in scale felt like a tiny defeat. When we ultimately settled on the story/missions of TBL, it was with some fear that we would never get to revisit all our dreams deferred.

     What we’ve actually ended up with is a deep portfolio of assets to draw from for future games. This has taken a tremendous amount of pressure off of us for Partia’s sequel(s), springboarding our development ahead by months.

The Final Word

     Partia was our first foray into independent game development. It was exciting, scary, stressful, and rewarding. In spite of the various hiccups and outright failures along the way, we are proud of the game we were able to put out.

     Financially, Partia: TBL has managed to break about even. The money that might’ve pushed us into black went immediately to the development of Partia 2, which you should be hearing more about very soon.

     I’d like to end by thanking all the fans that have not only followed us long enough to see this post, but with enough interest to read to the bottom. Whenever the future of Partia has looked grim you have always serve as an inspiration and a reminder that not only can it be done, it’s worth doing.