Beamdog working on a new D&D CRPG (cancelled)

[Jedi Master Radek]

"Customer Success Agent" (customer service)

I feel like a grandpa. Can anyone explain what this means?

They just came up with a new title for the same old customer support role.

It's a way for the employer to pretend that he provides some extra value to the worker without providing anything.

 

[Tyrr]

An old trick is to add "manager" to a job title.

"Waste Disposal Manager" sounds way better than "Garbage Man".

 

[rojay]

"Customer Success Agent" (customer service)

I feel like a grandpa. Can anyone explain what this means?

On behalf of the rest of the tribe as we watch you float away on the ice, we'd like to tell you how much your wisdom and experience have meant to every one of us. Good luck with the polar bears.

 

[Cael]

An old trick is to add "manager" to a job title.

"Waste Disposal Manager" sounds way better than "Garbage Man".

Don't forget: Vertical Transport Officer (a.k.a., lift boy)

 

[LESS T_T]

There are also references to "Virtual Production" team, suggesting VR/AR development. I *think* they're working on multiple games including big flagship title and some smaller VR title.

I was reminded that "Virtual Production" refers to a method in film production that makes use of VR/AR devices and game engines for filming/VFX. (It's a hot thing, you know?)

With this and that they hired Project Director with cinematography background that will do "Leading new innovative media creation pipelines", I guess they want to expand their business to virtual production services.

 

[LESS T_T]

System Designer job posting gives more hints that their new IP game might be session-based game. "World mutators" and "roguelikes" and all that. https://beamdog.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=93

• Create gameplay systems for components such as player leveling, magic, gear generation and more

• Experience working within the CRPG style and it's gameplay systems
• Familiarity with areas of systems design such as player leveling, gear stat generation, player progression balancing and world mutators.

• Able to work closely with programmers in order to ensure quality execution of the title's RPG and Roguelike gameplay systems

So first-person (co-op) action RPG exploring procedurally generated dungeons full of traps and monsters?

They're also looking for 6-month contract QA tester. https://beamdog.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=97

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Experience working within the CRPG style and it's gameplay systems

"its" as a possessive takes no apostrophe, you pinkhaired embarrassment.

Who'd want to work for a company that writes like that, eh? Nobody with a modicum of self respect.

>We welcome applications from all qualified persons. We do not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, colour, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, marital status
>Work from anywhere within Canada or come join us in Edmonton!

"We don't discriminate based on anything, except on where you're geographically located HAHA."

(i don't want to work for them, I just get triggered by this nonsense every time)

 

[LESS T_T]

An interesting interview with Trent Oster, on how their effort to make a big game was hindered by the loss of video game tax credit and COVID, and commitment to make it through. Also a little tease about the new game: it will be a PC game, and sounds like it will be more stripped down form of an RPG but dynamic and procedural as implied by the above job posting.

The interview is removed from the site for some reason but archived in the Internet Archive. https://web.archive.org/web/2021102...bertamakesgames.com/beamdog-stubborn-as-hell/

Beamdog: Stubborn as Hell!

I had the chance to chat with Trent Oster from Beamdog about all things games, surviving the pandemic as a game studio, what keeps him and Beamdog in Alberta, blacksmithing, and racing. Along the way, he tossed in some seasoned wisdom that comes from being in the trenches of the video games industry for more than 20 years. I decided to lightly edit our conversation and keep Trent’s words as straight-up raw and real as possible. Enjoy. (with thanks to Meagan Hampel for some crucial edits)

Owen
Tell me a bit about the past couple of years because we’re headed into an almost two-year anniversary of this crazy pandemic situation that is affecting all businesses. Being a game design studio and intellectual property creator is a big investment of time, energy, and people.

Trent
Well, about three years ago, Cam (Trent’s business partner) and I had this happy little company of about 24 people. We did Enhanced Edition video games, and they made good money. We were actually profitable. This is almost unheard of for a game development company. So we thought, “this Interactive Digital Media Tax Credit (IDMTC) has come in. Finally, the government’s behind us! It’s our time! Let’s go BIG.”

So, we leased a new, 11,000 square foot office space. We had aggressive plans to scale up and grow. We had literally 20+ hires planned. We moved into our new office, and we started hiring people to work on a new game and a new intellectual property. It was pretty intense. Times were exciting. It was more expensive than we had anticipated, as always, but we were doing pretty well.

And then, the IDMTC — which we had built our aggressive expansion plans around — was cut. We’d been waiting decades for something like the IDMTC to show up. I had been at Bioware since it started in 1994, and without any support, we built that company from the original six people to over 420 people when I left. But it was a lot of work alone.

When the IDMTC was introduced in 2018, we saw it as the playing field leveler that would put Alberta on par with other provinces in Canada.

So we invested. Everything was going well, and then the IDMTC is pulled out from under us. But we decided not to change our plans. We said: “we’re committed to developing this new IP, let’s roll with the punches and keep moving forward.”

And then COVID starts, and at first, we weren’t sure how bad it was going to be. I wasn’t thinking about the 1918 Spanish flu or anything like that, but that’s really what it became. At one point, we had to shut down the office and start sending everybody home. Previous to this point, I was really uncomfortable with the idea of remote work. I had seen it fail on numerous occasions. But now, we had to go remote and see how it worked.

I learned two things. One: remote work turned out better than I expected in many areas. We found that casual work or individual contributor work stayed at the same pace. Two: the area I was most worried about being impacted — the high collaboration tasks — were impacted exactly as I expected. Any time team members had to tightly collaborate on something, video conferencing just wasn’t a good solution. We were just lacking so many extra channels for communicating.

We’re still working on trying to structure meetings so that we capture the right features out of something, and it has forced us to be less collaborative. Our work-from-home meetings have changed, so now we say: “Okay, let’s get together to talk about the problem. We’ll then send you away to figure out a solution, build a proposal, and come back to us. We’ll then review the proposal, take some time to digest, and meet again to provide feedback.” So it has taken what should be this really short window of collaborative interaction and pushed it into this multi-stage process, which has definitely slowed down our cycle of innovation.

Owen
What kind of effect does that have on your timeline when you’re sort of forecasting? If something was going to take a month or two months, are you now looking at six to eight?

Trent
In some ways, it’s really hard to analyze, because it’s a lot of combinatorial design iteration. What we’re noticing isn’t that the iteration isn’t happening as fast, just that the results are taking much longer. The time from identifying a problem to actually seeing some kind of action to resolve it has become, in some cases, two to three times as long. In many cases, the solutions we’re seeing are kind of rushed and not well designed or thought through, because not enough people were involved in the collaboration. Doing a 10-person Zoom call is essentially two or three people talking and the rest having a nap.

COVID has been disastrous for our workflow. When you pile that in with the loss of the IDMTC, it has just been a double punch for us. So it’s definitely taken our future growth plans and really slowed them pretty aggressively. It also took our cash flow and profitability plans and put those on hold. We committed to an investment stream years ago. We’ve been carrying through and unfortunately, that has left us without a war chest. There isn’t a big pile of gold at the end of the rainbow, there’s just us paying the bills and keeping the lights on and struggling to keep the studio rolling.

Owen
Have any of the business support credits or other business grants been something you can utilize at all?

Trent
We’ve seen little to minimal supports. Our sales aren’t linked to our productivity, but to historic products that we have already published. Our sales have been constant, it’s just our progress on new projects that have been diminished greatly. For us, the problem isn’t about the current revenue, it’s about our future revenue. Our future revenue is taking longer to get to the publication of our next title. It’s taking us longer to reach the potential of the projects we’re working on.

Spoiler

Owen Brierley
What do you think about alternative funding sources like crowdsourcing?

Trent
Well, fundamentally, I believe that every product has one major market opportunity. There’s that one moment when you can galvanize interest and excitement in your project, and turn it into either investment or profit. And when you do it at the Kickstarter phase of the crowdfunding phase, you’ve basically said, “I’m going to take all the future potential of this project and I’m going to leverage that today for the funding that I can raise.” The end result is you wind up at the finish line out of money, waiting for additional sales to hopefully come through. Crowdfunding is just borrowing against all future revenue. And it’s pretty easy to get into a scenario where you can actually pre-borrow more revenue than the project can make.

Owen Brierley
What keeps you in Alberta?

Trent
At Beamdog, we have employees all over Canada right now. We have employees in Nova Scotia and Vancouver, and we’re continuing to recruit remotely because, while there are some areas where it’s easy to get certain skills in Alberta, some skills are really hard to find here. We have to go looking afield for those.

Going forward, if there is no IDMTC replacement and I’m looking at our future growth, it’s not in Alberta. That could mean setting up a branch office. We have those discussions on a weekly basis.

Owen
You mentioned people and the availability of the skills in Alberta, what are your thoughts on that?

Trent
It takes time to build skills. Especially if you’re in an industry that’s really competitive. The joke in video games is: “Every five years you get to relearn everything.” The tools change. The platforms change. There’s some major disruptive event at least every five to 10 years. A new console cycle comes out and everything you knew about the previous cycle is no longer valid.

You also need to change the way you do things. Toolchains rapidly iterate. The tool of today is the relic of tomorrow. So you’re jumping on a new tool and relearning. It’s a constant evolution. What we really want in the video games industry, and I think tech as a whole, are people who have an aggressive learning philosophy and who can jump in and move from tool to tool. We don’t want technicians who are hyper-specialized in one tool, because in five years that tool is irrelevant. It’s a mindset and an enabling kind of education. It’s an industry of autodidacts.

In many cases, the things that people really love about video games, the great little one-off moments, are created by somebody thinking: “I wonder if I could do this, I think it might be interesting.” And they chase it. One of the empowering wonderful things about game development is it’s filled with a ton of initiative and curiosity. And that’s what is so hard to communicate outside to those in school.

We’ve weathered the hardships of the past couple of years. We will continue to weather what’s happening with COVID. We’re working on projects that interest us. And I think that’s why we’re continuing to invest. And that’s really why we’re still in Edmonton because we are surviving despite some horrific scenarios. We’re still succeeding because we’re excited about what we’re working on. We’re stubborn as hell, and we’re committed, we’re gonna make this happen.

Owen
Can you tease us with a little bit of what’s going on with this new intellectual property you’re working on?

Trent
It’s something totally different than what we’ve worked on for a long, long time. If I think philosophically about where we’re at, I imagine us, over the years, as a group working on orchestral music. We’ve been working with an orchestra, we got our strings, we’ve got woodwinds and brass. And then one day we thought: “What if we stripped it back? What if we went to a three-piece hardcore rock band? No bullshit. All Metal. All fun. Let’s just go for it.” So, whereas previously we were doing Vivaldi and Wagner, now we’re doing the White Stripes.

I think our hearts are always in the same place. It’s just a question of how we express ourselves. This is definitely a good shift for us. I love to say: “I’m having a lot of fun playing the game we’re making.” It has been a long time since I can honestly say that, because previous games I played, even back during the Bioware days, I knew the story. I knew how things were going to play out and I knew the mechanics and how things were going to be way in advance. And I think what we’re doing now is just so much more actively generative. It’s much more engaging. People will be surprised when we start showing the game, I can definitely say that.

Owen
I am super curious now! I can’t wait for it to launch. What platforms are you targeting?

Trent
We’re shifting platforms and concentrating on PC. It’s kind of our happy place. As always, we got an eye on consoles, and what’s happening in that world.

Owen
What do you think about the developments in XR?

Trent
So, I’m old. I’ve been around since the first time we took a kick at VR. I worked on Shattered Steel, which, back in the day, had these IO glasses and the VFX1 headset. We ported that game to VR and it was actually pretty decent because you could turn your head, and that would turn the head of the robot. But even then, it wasn’t that great. I mean, back then the technology was horrible. The refresh rates were brutal, with no resolution. The IO glasses were 320 pixels by 200 pixels or 320 by 100 per eye. It was a brutal resolution. But it was is pretty cool at the time.

The thing that I’m now seeing with VR is it’s still so different from what a lot of games do. Just movement in VR feels inherently wrong. So rethinking movement, conceptually, from a VR-specific standpoint, you just have to do.

I’ve always thought, if I did a VR game, what would I do? And the answer is something totally different, something that really plays to the strengths of VR, and completely avoids the differentiation from current games. I would never make a third-person shooter for VR, for example.

For me, AR is the more exciting opportunity, but less from an entertainment perspective and more from a functionality standpoint. What gets me excited about AR is the building on the future, like being able to architect things, being able to look at something with an overlay. To be able to put what you’re thinking about on top of what’s already there, and just essentially do interactive engineering, that excites me.

Owen
Let’s talk a bit about the world outside of the game. What got you into blacksmithing?

Trent
I got into blacksmithing in a strange way. Cameron and I had started doing another startup, specifically around solar panels, and building a system for solar panels that actually tracks the sun throughout the day. One of the challenges in Alberta is we’ve got great amounts of sunshine, but in the summer, it goes straight overhead, and in the winter, it just bubbles up on the horizon. Also, we have to deal with snow that piles up on the panels. Having panels that at least do some kind of tracking made a lot of sense.

I designed and built a prototype array mounting system, and had to rent shop space to do that. Cam was supposed to do the control software for it. So I built this thing and shipped all these bits up to him. And then I thought, “okay, well, I’m waiting for Cam. I’ve got the shop space so I might as well do something with it… Hey! Blacksmithing!.” So I did some research, and built a forge and then a belt grinder. So I really got into blacksmithing by making all the tools that a blacksmith needs.

Then I found a local fellow, Sean Cunningham from Front Step Forge (https://frontstepforge.com/), who teaches Blacksmithing 101 at NAIT. He agreed to mentor me. So we started building some stuff.

Blacksmithing was very satisfying for me, because in my day job as a CEO, especially in the game industry, I need a whole team of people who actually are doing the work. My role within that group is to make sure that we’re all aligned, that we’re doing the work that’s going to offer the most value, and that we’re creating the product that we’ve all agreed on. I actually personally do no direct work on a video game anymore. And I missed that creative outlet. Once I started blacksmithing, I rediscovered how much I like creating things, and how much being able to do that by myself without needing anybody else was an important part of who I am and what I enjoy in life.

One of the great things about it is, I do a lot of things outside of the office… I always have. Even during my time at Bioware, I always had some other thing that I did that was away from the office. It kept me balanced and it relieved my stress. In many cases, I had a different peer group outside of the office, that in some cases was completely unaware of video games and what’s going on in the industry. As a result, I was involved with two or more completely different groups of people at all times. I think that’s really helped keep my head pretty level. You don’t get caught up in the video game industry drama. These other friends of mine don’t even care about video games. They don’t even know about it.

I try to encourage people to have some kind of interest outside the office. There were periods at Bioware where I was working insane hours, I was crunching to finish a game for a long time. I dialed back every other activity that I was doing. It was some of the loneliest and most miserable times in my life. Ultimately, I was proud of the product that was created from that work, but it took me years to get back to a personal balance and feel like a normal robust human.

Owen
Tell me more about getting into racing.

Trent
Years and years ago, when I was still at Bioware, I decided I wanted to get into racing. In the want ads, a Mazda RX-7 came up that was in my price range, but it was blown up. I thought to myself, “I am mechanically competent. How hard could it be?”

I bought this car and drove it to my house with the engine smoking like you would not believe. Obviously, there was something very, very wrong going on inside. I discovered that it needed new parts, so I went to a shop that caters to Mazda RX-7 specifically. In the back of their shop was this car that had a roll cage welded in. I asked what it was and they said: “Oh, that’s a Challenge Class car. We race those down in Calgary. There’s a race next weekend, why don’t you come to watch?”

So, the next weekend, I drove down to Calgary and I watched the race. I knew after that event that this is what I want. A couple of weeks later, I had signed up for my license, done my licensing course, and started building a racecar. Later that year, I started racing a Mazda RX-7 in the Challenge Car Class at the back of the pack. Over the course of the next couple of years, I raced my way up to near the front and then branched out to different cars.

Currently, I’m road racing in an endurance series with other drivers. We have a team and share one car. We typically do longer races — the last one we did was eight hours in length. Each driver gets a two-hour stint. When you’re not driving, you’re the crew and are responsible for taking care of the car when it comes in: fueling it, getting the last driver out, getting the next driver in. It’s like the best team sports and individual contributor thing you can imagine mashed together into eight hours of moments of crazy highs and lows. It’s so much fun.

Owen
Tell me more about why you champion hobbies or passions outside of video games for your team.

Trent
I have yet to do a hobby that hasn’t had some application to another aspect of what I’m working on. When I’m making video games… you want to talk about blacksmithing? You want to talk about how weapons are made? I happen to be an expert on that. You want to talk metallurgy? I can go pretty deep on metallurgy. You want to talk about aerodynamics, or how things work from the racecar side of things? Or remote control airplanes? (I used to be pretty involved in those). I’ve got all these experiences that I look at as my life experience toolbox.

I’m a firm believer that, when making video games, the best way to create something really compelling is to create something that has aspects of something you love in it. That’s what I bring to every product I work on. I bring aspects of what I love, and I throw what I’ve got into the mix.

Also they got some old tabletop RPG writer Dave Gross as narrative designer. https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-gross-67535a1b5/

After teaching at James Madison University and a local business college, I moved on to edit successively most of the periodicals published by TSR, then Wizards of the Coast, and then Paizo Publishing. Highlights included working as editor-in-chief of Dragon Magazine, Star Wars Insider, and Amazing Stories.

I first joined Beamdog as lead writer for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition and its first expansion. My freelance writing career was heating up at the same time, so I left to focus on novels. After more than 10 novels and many shorter works of fiction published, along with occasional design for tabletop games, I returned to Beamdog to work on exciting new projects.

 

[Camel]

how I can train myself to properly qualify for a narrative design job

Step 0: Wear horn-rimmed glasses and snazzy hat
Step 1: Get mad skills writing railroaded pathfinder modules where every NPC is a tranny
Step 2: Call out old ''classics'' like Baldur's Gate for the misogynistic tripe they are, you can do much better
Step ⚨: What did you just say to me you fucking cis scum? *ding dong bannu* *review deleted* All criticism is hate speech and thoughtcrime
Step C: I'M BEING ATTACKED BY GOOBERGATE NEO-NAZIS LITERALLY RAPE CALL IN THE TWITTER TROOPS ANITA HELP
Step ???: H-hey this is beamdogg brent swole pls buy our game we are being review bombed by evil bigots

gg ur now beamdog king


Dikirim saka G3502T SM- sandi nggunakake Tapatalk

You literally described the Owlcat narrative designers/writing in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous six years before it's release!

Spoiler

 

[fantadomat]

stripped down form of an RPG but dynamic and procedural

Yeah....hard skip. There is plenty of roguelike garbage out there.

 

[Sacibengala]

Beamdrag itself to oblivion a long time ago. Blaming COVID is just laughable.

 

[Kruno]

Beamdrag itself to oblivion a long time ago. Blaming COVID is just laughable.

COVID made my game shit!

 

[AdamReith]

Beamshit are almost as convincing as Larian when it comes to paying lip service to the classic CRPGs and understand why they were good almost as little.

Making a great CRPG is basically a known science at this point but is a shit tonne of work so we get procedural landscapes and stories written by whoever is desperate enough to write 1,000,000 words for a half hearted slap on the back and half a pack of wine gums.

 

[pickmeister]

In other words

So yeah we've made money at first WHICH IS UNHEARD OF by putting our logo on some old classic games, rehashing them to include mods anybody could download for years because you see, you can't buy the originals anymore. We've also released them as buggy mess and we had to fix that which took 2 years each. Shame, we really thought we could get away with that.
Then we got a promise of money so we started spending like retards and wouldn't you believe it, it wasn't very smart!
And now we have to work remotely which reveals organizational problems that absolutely weren't present before.
That damned COVID..

I sincerely hope these hacks go bankrupt.

 

[LESS T_T]

A few trademarks they applied last year.

FUN FED https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=97170992&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch

MYTHFORCE https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=97024664&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch

Mythforce sounds like that dungeon action game they're working on. (They also registered domains like tombsmash.com, heroesoftoldar.com, dungeonsmash.com earlier than that. Probably earlier ideas about the title of the game.)

Fun Fed looks like a new studio or something. (They registered a domain funfedstudios.com.) Maybe they will use this name for virtual production business?

 

[Theldaran]

(...) to the classic CRPGs and understand why they were good almost as little.

They literally called BG sexist. Maybe they actually paid attention to all the whores in the streets, but I wonder if they played it enough for that.

 

[LESS T_T]

 

[ADULF HITLOR FAN KLUB]

I wouldn't be surprised if it is just Icewind Dale 2 ENHANCED EDITION...

...but that is actually what we have all been waiting for, right guys? Riiiight?

 

[Melcar]

I wouldn't be surprised if it is just Icewind Dale 2 ENHANCED EDITION...

...but that is actually what we have all been waiting for, right guys? Riiiight?

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Wasn't it confirmed multiple times there's no chance of IWD2 EE ever being a thing?

 

[ADULF HITLOR FAN KLUB]

Beamdog said they would definitely release IWD2 EE if a copy of the source code was ever found.

The only other option would be to reverse engineer the game's code.

 

[Melcar]

Just believe man. Believe in the magic.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The tag on this thread is misspelled.