Archmage Rises Development Continues in 2022
I have always attempted to be straight forward with you, the fans and our partners in this amazing game.
2021 was an eventful year for our studio. We started the year with 3 full time people: Daniel, Michel, Thomas.
In just 12 months we have grown from 3 to 9:
6 programmers, 1 artist, 1 artist/programmer, 1 audio/composer.
I took a contract project to financially support and grow the studio, which turned into 2 projects, and the need to really ramp up. This took up all my time and mental capacity from mid June to Dec.
We know how to work just on Archmage.
We know how to work just on contract work.
We now need to learn how to be both a contract studio and internal IP studio.
This is much easier said than done.
People working on contract work pay the bills, but don't achieve the long term strategic goal of releasing our own games (IP).
People working on Archmage (internal IP) don't pay the bills, they just suck cash, but achieve the strategic goal.
Many studios struggle with this, like:
Bioware in the early years
Psyonix makers of Rocket League (see the NoClip documentary)
Digital Extremes makers of Warframe (see the NoClip documentary)
Now it is our challenge to overcome.
If I ever get to make a strategy sim game about game development, and I want to, it will be about this balancing act. It is completely missed in Game Dev Tycoon and Mad Games Tycoon.
My goal is to run two teams, one doing contract work and one making Archmage Rises. Clients actually like this, because we can bring tech/solutions from our internal game into their projects, and if they suddenly need more resources, we can pull them temporarily from the internal game to the contract project, and then send them back once we're over the hump.
As some may know, I'm an associate prof teaching game dev at a college. It helped support the game dev team and wasn't too hard. But recently I've just become too busy and need to focus on Archmage. So I quit. Which is sad, because of the union rules I had 7 courses I could teach for the rest of my life... but the difficulty in life is not choosing the good from the bad but the best from the good. Not teaching and prioritizing Archmage is what is best.
We have a lot to setup 2022 in Jan, but after this I expect to resume some progress on Archmage.
Hey, thanks for being here and caring about Archmage. I think about it every single day!
