Legends of Eisenwald Interview

Hello everyone and welcome to my next interview for the new year with the CEO of Aterdux Entertainment, Alexander Dergay. He shares his opinion on the games industry, lessons he has learned with crowd-funding, and the current state of his new game.

I hope you all enjoy reading it as I had fun making it happen. So please leave a comment as they help motivate me for future interviews, and allow the developer to get feedback.

Couchpotato: Thank you for agreeing to answer a few of my questions for RPGWatch, and to get started let me ask if you can give a brief introduction of yourself.

Alexander Dergay: Thank you for your interest in our game. I am Alexander, head of Aterdux Entertainment, the studio responsible for Legends of Eisenwald for over five years now. When I discovered Discord Times, the first title of our studio, I was very impressed with how the game turned out and it became my favorite game for many years to come. I considered myself the biggest fan of the game and decided to find the funds and reassemble the team to start working on a spiritual successor.

Couchpotato: Can you tell us a little bit about your studio Aterdux Entertainment?  For example, how was it founded, and what are your goals for the future?

Alexander Dergay: The studio was founded back in 2002 when two friends Nikolay Armonik and Denis Lomako decided to make their first game Discord Times. The game released in 2004 and was then re-released by the Russian publisher Alawar in 2007. I met Nikolay and Denis the same year and remember asking them if they planned to make a sequel or add more content. I learned that they both had other jobs and because Discord Times was only a modest success they had no further plans for it. My impression was that DT could and should have sold better but the localization and marketing was done rather poorly and even I who had no experience in this, at that time, could have done it justice. After few years of discussions and finding initial funds we decided to start working on the spiritual successor and see how it goes. Now the full release is finally in sight and I am sure this time around it will be much better.

Our goal is to make games that are challenging, interesting and fun that provide great atmosphere and allow a player to immerse themselves deep within the game. In short this kind of games is same that we enjoy playing.

Couchpotato: I was wondering if you could describe what your daily job is like at Aterdux Entertainment? Is there a lot of stress running your own studio and developing a new IP?

Alexander Dergay: My daily job is a bit chaotic due to the many tasks I have to do within our company since I handle the budget, general business, PR, localization, community and a bit of general management. So, on a usual day I walk to the office making up plans for the day and trying to beat my record of 44,5 minutes of getting there. I would show up in our office around noon (and probably would be the first one - we all start late and work late into the evening). I respond to all important emails and then go through the other tasks - checking with translators on progress, checking with my programmers on their progress and see if we are on schedule for the next patch. Sometimes we have to discuss unexpected design issues, like for example last week we learned from the closed beta that the economy balance was rather off. There are simple solutions that are not fun - say, taking away gold after each map, or there are more complicated solutions that require programming efforts. And we need to make a decision between these two options. In the past we always went for the more fun part but with a lot of pain and delays we realized that we need to take development time into consideration. Community management and social media also take up time but not as much these days as I have someone who helps out in that regard. He usually prepares the content, we discuss some of the ideas, I translate and then he posts the final version.

In regards to stress there’s isn’t much except the times when we run out of money! When I can't pay my team at the usual time it gets a little tough - both for them and for me. Other times are before large milestones like the Early Access release, or Kickstarter. A lot of work in a short period of time. Other than that it's not too bad. Just solid work and it’s quite rewarding. The game is shaping up really well and it is nice to get the confirmation of that from the closed beta testers. The finished content and stable finances make work quite a bit less stressful.

Couchpotato: What games do you play in your spare time?

Alexander Dergay: I play the same style of game to the one we are making. I love RPGs that have a good story and preferably turn based combat. I don't have much time recently but I hope to play a few things after our game is released. In particular, I am looking forward to play Divinity: Original Sin and Wasteland 2.

I am not trying to self-promote myself or our company by this answer but I would be lying if I didn’t say that both Legends of Eisenwald and Discord Times make it into my top five RPGs - I played both games extensively, over 500 hours each so far! Three other games would be Disciples 2, King's Bounty: The Legend, Space Rangers 2.

Couchpotato: What is your opinion on the current state of the game industry, and crowd-funding in particular?

Alexander Dergay: The game industry has become quite competitive, there are really a lot of games out there. Unfortunately, I feel that the result of all that is that the quality suffers. If we take Steam for example, too many new games are either rushed out or are simply ports from mobile devices that most players on PC aren’t looking for. While in the past Steam was a bit too exclusive in my opinion, it has now gone the exact opposite way and is slowly morphing into something like the AppStore and I don't like it.

Another trend I see in the industry and which I don’t like at all is the tendency of over simplification, especially when it ends up to be simply one mechanic per game. But at the same time there is a lot of good games coming out and I am really happy about the resurgence of old school RPGs and it was crowdfunding that made that possible. If we look at the past few years, 2012 was the year when many great RPGs came out on Kickstarter. Everyone thought - wow, great, all power to the players, no need for publishers anymore. The game industry kept changing however and with Steam becoming more inclusive I think publishers still have a shot. I think publishers will gain more weight in the near future and it is probably happening already. I just hope it won't be the to the same degree as it was before and that developers will still retain a sizeable degree of independence.

Couchpotato: In our preview last year, Aubrielle mentioned the slow out-of-the-box experience, and the need to add the game to the exceptions of her virus scanner. Has anything been done or are there plans to optimize the speed without the need for this workaround?

Alexander Dergay: We contacted all major antivirus software companies and our game have been included in the white lists for some of them. So, this issue is/will be greatly reduced but unfortunately not completely fixed. We have no control of antivirus software and no optimization will ever help if the AV software checks any single thing the game does.

But the game will be optimized on its own - we already drastically reduced logging and it’s a lot more stable. We will take other measures to optimize and polish it right up until release.

Couchpotato: What are you still working on at this point in time that prevents them from releasing the game?

Alexander Dergay: We are working now mostly on adding special effects, localization, balance and polishing the game - fixing bugs both in the game mechanics as well as in content. We are very happy to have completed all the content, it's now done in both English and Russian, other translations follow. The closed beta in English will start very soon with the focus on playability and fixing language errors. After the negative feedback on the English translation of Discord Times, we took the feedback on board and we plan to do a solid job on the English adaptation. We have a English-speaking published writer, Joel Martin, on our team as well as professional English-speaking editor, Luke Manly. But we’ve also invited a few members of our community to take a look at the texts and see if some things can be polished/improved even more with Joel and Luke overseeing the entire process.

Couchpotato: I often get asked by the members of the site when the game will be officially released, so I was wondering if you could give a probable date for release?

Alexander Dergay: We will announce a release date relatively soon. But to be sure, we need to complete the English closed beta and we don’t know how long it will take. And that's the one variable that stops us from announcing it right now. In the past we gave way too many possible dates and as a result we got quite a few unhappy members of our community, some negative reviews about us not holding our promises, etc. So, I don't want to say something and then once again explain to everyone why we missed it. As soon as the English closed beta is over, the release date will be announced. It should happen within a month or so.

Couchpotato: Your Kickstarter game, Legends of Eisenwald, was funded over three years ago. Can you share any lessons you have learned during the campaign?

Alexander Dergay: We made many mistakes and at the end of the campaign I wrote a summary of that (here is the link to that article). Now I would say that it all pretty much boils down to preparation. The biggest lesson is that any significant campaign takes a lot of preparation. In a way, we were lucky on Kickstarter because with no work with the press before the campaign we still managed to reach our goal. All what we learned back then we hope to apply now in preparation for the release. One challenge still remains: how to make game journalists play our main campaign which takes 40-50 hours.

Couchpotato: I'm also interested if you could share any advice on what you have learned about game development over the last few years?

Alexander Dergay: There must be a lot of documentation. We didn't do a proper game design document, for a game like ours a 30 page document is clearly not enough. Then, of course, once the game design document is done, it should be followed strictly. And a good practice would be to limit new features say by 10 and place huge white sheet of paper with 10 slots for new features that can be included and only if it agreed upon by the entire team agrees. And it needs to be clear that each new feature means more money and development time. We added way too many things and that's not always helpful since some of the things had to be removed because they didn't work.

One of the hardest lessons for us was that not a single task takes one hour of work. About two to three years ago we were making plans and scheduled some of the programming tasks to be an hour of work or two. But in the complex process that is game development there are almost no such tasks. Everything takes at least a day.

Another good idea is to show the design document to other, more experienced developers and ask for their feedback, not only about the details but about the time and funds needed to make the game that is described in the document.

Also, if deadlines are not met, new ones should be done by using a different process or estimates should have a multiplier. There is a saying: insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And if the times are getting too long, consider hiring additional personnel.

Couchpotato:  What main changes have you implemented to the game with respect to the state it was at during Gamescom?

Alexander Dergay: The main thing is that we finished the entire content and it's a huge step for us despite the fact that it's available only in the closed beta test.

Another is the new interface, it was added shortly after Gamescom in the end of August. We worked on it for a long time and its redesign is the biggest thing we did based on Early Access feedback.

We also added a large variety of potions that can be used in combat: now any character can skip a turn and drink a potion that will modify his parameters until the end of the battle.

And just a few days ago we added Trading Cards support - now the game has nine trading cards, each one of them refers to a legend within the game. Plus the first six achievements are there - we added a few to see if they work fine. We are planning to add more very soon.

Couchpotato: Now that Legends of Eisenwald is probably nearing completion, do you have any plans for future games, and using crowd-funding again to fund them?

Alexander Dergay: We haven't thought about future projects because there are more things we want to do in Legends of Eisenwald. Moreover, we have to port the game to Linux and Mac as we promised during the Kickstarter. We hope to expand our studio a bit and hire a few more people but it can be done only if the release goes relatively well. Most of our plans will be influenced by how the game does at release.

Crowd-funding is a good instrument to gauge if there is interest in a project and also raising some funds. In our Kickstarter campaign we were only successful because we were mistaken about how much more funds we needed to complete the game! That amount of money kept our studio afloat for 10 months and since then we spent way more. So, next time if we go to Kickstarter, we will use more adequate numbers in terms of the funds that we need.

Still, crowdfunding campaigns take a lot of time and effort and we will consider all arguments for and against them very carefully.

Couchpotato: That's all for now and to end the interview I would like to ask if you have anything you would like to add?

Alexander Dergay: Thank you for these questions, it was a pleasure to answer them. Also it’s great to reflect on what we’ve done and what the future holds for us. RPGWatch was and is a big supporter of our game, and our biggest curator on Steam. I would like to invite all of you RPG lovers to play our game when it is out. At first glance, our combat looks simple but there are many unique design decisions that are not obvious from the start. The story turned out to be nothing short of epic (in my opinion but confirmed by the beta testers), truly non-linear, with some rather tough moral choices leading to different consequences that you might not foresee until the very end. We’ve put our heart and soul into this and hopefully you’ll be able to see that, perhaps not right away but definitely when you finish the main campaign. See you in the Iron Forest! (That's what Eisenwald means in German, by the way!)

Remember to check out the official webpage for more updates as the developer usually updates every week.  You can also visit Steam to pre-order/buy into Early Access to help the developer.  

RPGWatch will try to do a new review after the the game is official released.