PAX is a special time of year in the game industry. Major publishers and indie developers alike gather in the Emerald City to discuss and promote their work. This year, City of Titans held not one, but two panels for PAX. On Wednesday, August 30th, Missing Worlds Media presented a panel to a developer-only audience on neuro-atypical management approaches, and on Sunday, September 3rd, we held a panel at Pax West on making a successor to City of Heroes, inviting Heroic Games and Silver Helm Studios to join us.
While at PAX, our President, Nathaniel Downes, had the opportunity to meet with many game developers, from titles as diverse as Atlas Reactor to Super Meat Boy. Developers you would consider natural competitors were instead good friends, and several times they wound up in shop talk. There is a moment of pride when a guy who helped make the combat system for a multi-million dollar AAA title calls your system “elegant and beautiful.”
PAX is also the place where announcements take place, and we all had timelines and goals for the assembled audience. Our fellow successors will of course be spreading their own revelations in their own ways. For City of Titans, our remaining goals for this year (2017) are to deliver the pre-Alpha for testing, and that we would be finally delivering the Second Chance promised back during our Kickstarter.
The pre-Alpha release has taken us longer than other games due to our compartmentalized approach to development. It works for us in that we have fewer roadblocks due to our distributed nature of development, but the drawback is that as we integrate, we will find new bugs and challenges to overcome. That’s what testing is for, and once delivered, our progress will continue apace.
As for the Second Chance, it is literally a second chance at our Kickstarter rewards. This will not include the add-ons included in the original Kickstarter, nor will it include the last two tiers of rewards. We will be offering all the tiers that did not exceed their stated limits in the original Kickstarter until those limits are reached, and offering the unlimited ones, well, without limits.
Our first Kickstarter was to secure funds for equipment and the direct costs of development, and it succeeded in this. The Second Chance has a different goal. This time, the goal is to convert some volunteers over to full time workers and hire other people who have been interested, but could not join us due to needing that steady 9-5. We have reached the point where our all volunteer nature is hitting its limits. We need to take things to the next level, and that means an actual office, with actual people working a 40 hour work week.
For our panel, we did hit one technical issue. We wanted to stream the panel to Twitch, but found that streaming from the phone was too low quality. As a result, we opted to use the laptop brought to the panel, which meant it was no longer available for the video we had prepared for the panel. But why waste a perfectly good video? So here it is, along with Nate Downes’ spoken presentation to help deliver the impression we had aimed for. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did in preparing it. As ever, thank you all for your support. We would not be here without you.
Written by - Nathaniel 'Doctor Tyche' Downes, President of MWM
The MWM animation was made and donated to us by Wolfgang8565. You did a great job, thanks.