Jagged Alliance: Flashback - Update #18, Production Plans

Well it's time for update #18 for the Jagged Alliance: Flashback kickstarter.

Production Plans for JA:F

So a lot of people have been asking what happens when the Kickstarter is successful. Will the game suddenly appear out of nowhere after a month and what does pre-production mean?

I just wanted to take the chance to give you a quick overview of how games are made.

In very! broad terms you have the following phases:

- Idea conception

Where you sit and throw ideas around of what would be cool to do, the overall settings, making some concepts and pulling things apart and reassembling them. You also need some business sense here to spot what you can actually sell and make a living off.

- Pre-production

This is where JA:F is right now.

Here you sit down and produce concept art, write overall story, settle on the major game mechanics as well as produce production plans. Who does what when, how much money is allocated to the story writing, who to hire for level design and so on.

- Production

There is a slide into production then, where more and more people get added to the production team. Artists will start taking the produced concepts and create core art assets (terrains, trees, houses, a few characters), level designers will start blocking out levels with boxes, coders will implement basic core functionality like movement and camera.

So what specifically happens with JA:F after Kickstarter success?

First - the JA:F team will take a week of vacation :-)

Then we will resolve the Humble Bundle pack distribution of the Classic game pack, as well as calculate in detail what the final development budget will be. Kickstarter and Amazon are taking their cuts, we have obligations to especially physical tier pledgers that costs money.

Then we can turn our eyes onto the game itself.

As we’ve said, we are in early pre-production - on purpose! We want to engage with the modders and with the old JA2 crew to make the final designs and talk openly with them (and you) about what we want to do, scope it all into budget constraints and so on.

We plan to run pre-production through summer and into September’ish with a small 2-3 person team. And then gradually move people from Space Hulk production onto Flashback over the fall.

Production will then run until sometime next Summer/Fall 2014, where we can then enter into polish/testing/release to get you the game end of 2014.