TedToday at 7:51 PM
@everyone As some of you know, the following article was recently published by Ian:
https://medium.com/@indigogaming/how-i-almost-made-the-game-of-my-dreams-da8b327e50f3
Ian Phoenix said a lot of nice things about me as a writer, game designer, “glue” in the community, and as a decent human being in his article in Medium. The feeling is mutual. One thing I regret, however, which is all on me, is when he left the project. He wrote a long email to the founders, basically stating a lot of the reasons he gave in the article about his reasons. I replied back with a quick email, and basically he said he deserved a longer response but there was a lot to process. He was owed a more thorough response, but I never sent him one. We have texted and emailed since then, mostly trying to figure out how to transfer ownership of our various company systems, including our website, but I never sent him the real reply I promised. I apologize for that. I had not meant to do this in public, but as it’s now in the public sphere, this will have to do.
What Ian wrote about the start of the project is true: it all started with him. He did the first interview with Julian, which caused me to reach out to both of them. And that prompted Stefan Metaxa to get involved and the whole ball rollin’.
I am also not going to dispute or really get into the general facts of what we’ve gone through in terms of financing and staffing the project. However, there is a question of perspective, and anyone who has ever seen Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” knows that perspective changes everything.
My first game came out in 1993, and I’ve been credited with (have to pull out my resume because Mobygames.com doesn’t list them all) about 25 games since then. And for every game that was published, there was at least one that never came out. The studio went under, the publisher went under, the game was too far behind schedule, a similar but higher-profile game was coming out to market first, a disgruntled programmer destroyed all the code (true story), and so on. Everything that can go wrong eventually does go wrong, and if being a veteran means anything, it means you have seen it all and have rolled with the punches.
That is to say that financing and staffing issues are at the very top of every likely problem with getting a game out to market. Usually, of course, there’s some meager financing at the start during pre-production, so we aren’t all volunteers working on a passion project. When people are being paid, have an office, and regular work hours, it’s easier – to say the least – to manage production in all ways. If you’ve ever tried to rally unpaid volunteers around a book sale, you know what I’m talking about. And that’s no massive role-playing game.
I’m not going to bullshit that it’s been all smooth sailing, and that we won’t face rough waters in the future. Some weeks, it’s going to feel like two steps backwards, one step sideways. But contrary to reports, we’re not dead. We’re going into this eyes wide open, aware of the fact that there’s a reason no one has done a real spiritual successor to Daggerfall, even with full financing at the start and the resources of an established company. It’s fucking hard.
So you accept baby steps, because that’s progress.
One last thing I want to clear up. In the article Ian wrote that he didn’t intend to make his frustrations public, but “some of the newer contributors to the project have taken over community management, and were spreading misinformation about my involvement in the project.”
No one who is handling community management is new to the project. We’re at one year on the Discord channel, and these guys have been on since the nearly the very start. I don’t know what was said, but it must have been misinterpreted, because everyone here has nothing but respect for Ian and his early and enormous contributions to Wayward Realms.
