Hello again.
As esteemed editor of
The PixelCount Post, I'd like to pull rank and permit myself to indulge in a slight change from my normal sort of updates. Instead, I'd like to simply hang out with you all today and, if you'll pardon a minor fit of vanity, tell you a bit about myself and how I came to work on
Kynseed. There's some hot chocolate on the table and I've even brought some corn for popping. So please, pull up a chair by the fire. But not too close, mind you, as the chairs are wooden and quite flammable.
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Game community's can often be a lot like family in that you don't really get to pick your community and, if you find that you don't care for them, then that's too bad - you're stuck with 'em. Thankfully, this is a problem I've never known.
My very first dabbling in game communities was with Lionhead Studios, though many of you may know them by their reputative title 'Chicken Chasers'. And oh how they loved to chase those chickens. Lionhead was the first game community I ever truly became a
part of. I became absorbed, spending an inadvisable amount of time talking with the developers and other members. I still remember quite vividly getting into all manner of arguments with my parents due to often neglecting homework (and other sundry things) in favor of spending time on the Lionhead forums.
Those forums are where I began, for the first time, to think about games as a
career. I became good friends with many of the developers there. Among their number was Charlie, still known as Lionbum even back then, and compared to most developers he was unusually chatty in the community. As a natural consequence, he and I got on particularly well.
Over the years, the friendships I made with all those developers and members led me to getting my foot in the door with the industry. In fact, any opportunity I've ever had in games can, without any doubt, be traced back to the moment I registered for the Lionhead community.
Though, as is often the way with things, it was not to last forever. After over a decade of being in the community (an entire third of my life, at the time), Lionhead had its doors forcibly closed. Losing Lionhead and its community felt an awful lot like losing close friends or family. Sure, the Lionhead community was still
technically around in the world. But it was different now. Like spending an entire summer with friends at summer camp only to leave and return back to reality. Maybe you'd see each other on Twitter, or maybe you're friends with some of them on Facebook, but you don't really talk that much anymore. Not like you used to.
With the closure of Lionhead I was all but ready to accept that whatever magic that community had for me at that time of my life would be forever unattainable again. It was, to me, the result of being in the right community at the right time with the right people and the right game. Those stars were unlikely to ever align again. And I was okay with that. It was time to seek out newer pastures.
During Lionhead's final few years I'd been picking up game jobs here and there but Lionhead's closure had hit hard and I oddly found myself beginning to fall out of love with the industry. I still loved games themselves - always would - but none of the game jobs that were on offer appealed to me and the thought of working on a game that I myself did not enjoy playing seemed ridiculous, if not dishonest. So I decided I was due for a dramatic change in my life. I began making plans to move to Los Angeles with the intent of getting work in one of its numerous media related fields.
So I packed my bags and drove 2,300 miles across the country over the course of 3 days. On the third day I passed the Grand Canyon, pulled over to watch the sunrise, and then later that day arrived in LA on the 19th of March - the first day of Spring.
Luckily I was in the fortunate position of being able to work remotely on all my active freelance contracts and so I was able to sustain myself for a handful of weeks in LA. However, I knew that once those contracts ran out I'd be in the position of needing to look for new freelance opportunities from there in LA. And before long, that time came...
I woke up that morning, did my morning run, took a shower, and was firmly planted behind my computer at 10am. Thus, I began the difficult process that all freelancers are intimately familiar with: looking for contracts. I'd been at my computer for only 30 minutes or so when my phone gave off the telltale sound of a new email. So I went to Outlook on my taskbar, clicked over to my inbox, and there at the top I saw an email - from Charlie, no less. I opened it.
Looking for any excuse to distract me from my job search, I immediately replied back. His reply was similarly immediate, which I shall quote directly for you now:
"Getting a small team together to maybe go indie. We are researching funding avenues, businessy side, tech, and I am just typing up one of the game pitches...
Something you might quite like..."
The timing was uncanny. I asked him what the project was. He said, "2D Project Ego to sum it up." And over the course of a few emails, Charlie filled me in: the game was to be an RPG, pixelated, in a sandbox world, where NPC's and the player's character age, and the player plants a family tree to continue playing as their child. Neal Whitehead was working on the engine, someone I knew only by reputation from his work on numerous Lionhead projects.
Charlie asked me if I wanted in. I said yes.
Numerous emails and Skype conversations later, a solid plan began to form. Naturally, there was no money at this early stage of the game so for quite some time I had to juggle freelance work with working on the game in every ounce of spare time that I had. Many months later, Neal's engine was coming along nicely and it wasn't long until we began to see the vague shape of a prototype forming. It was around this time that it became clear to us that if we were ever going to make a real go of this, we'd have to do a Kickstarter.
The curious thing with Kickstarters is that no matter how much experience you may have and no matter how well you might think you know the market, it's incredibly hard to
truly predict how a community might react to a game. So we braced ourselves for all manner of reaction, riding that fine line between hoping against the worst while not being foolish enough to expect the best.
During the month of that successful Kickstarter, and in the months that followed, we began to see a community slowly form out of the primordial soups of the internet. Many were old Lionhead members, many were
Harvest Moon and
Stardew Valley fans, and many were brand new faces entirely. It was fascinating to see a band of supporters and enthusiasts come together out of seemingly nowhere.
Something that I did not expect to happen, even when entertaining notions of wild optimism, was that this community would once again bring me the magic that the Lionhead community had done for me so many years ago. I know that it may seem like we point out our connection with Lionhead incessantly, but to us it's a very real and very genuine part of where we came from.
And this is the part of my story where I wax poetic about the Kynseed community:
I honestly hadn't meant for this article to grow so lengthy or, if I'm being honest, to be filled with such gratuitous sentimentality. I'll bet Charlie is rolling his eyes so hard right now that he's liable to pull a muscle. That said, thank you all for choosing to be a part of this community. Your faith in this project is having a more profound effect on
Kynseed than you know.
The people that have been following this game from the very beginning as well as the people that joined this journey a month ago or an hour ago - they really do mean a lot to us. It's all kind of wild for us, if I'm being honest. Working on that initial prototype, not even that long ago, we were never sure if anyone else would find this game as intriguing as we did. So to see the community support the game and get excited about the game is a bit unreal to us. Because the thing is, we get excited about the game too. It's that excitement which we have in common with the community. That's why it's often hard for us to put a line between 'the developers' and 'the community' because, at the end of the day, we're just as much fans as you are. Perhaps that sounds a bit vain, being fans of our own project and all, and perhaps it is. But we welcome you to come be vain with us, as this is just as much your game as it is ours.
And this is the part of my article where I wane poetic about the Kynseed community:
They're alright, I guess.
