November has been the month of gains, after a year of creative WIP content for our socials we’re finally in a position to show real polished work – my god is it helping us grow our following. That coupled with a great social strategy from Lauren. In her own words all we need to do is “talk”. It turns out Indie Devs kinda forget to do that stuff whilst knee deep in dev.
As you read in October, we questioned our decision to postpone Kickstarter – we needed the funds and it felt like we were delaying something yet again.
Within the first week of November, our decision was completely re-affirmed. We realised our lack of prep: building up our following and community, rushing our trailer, not having released a polished build, and underestimating the impact of a December campaign end date would have. You might be thinking ‘no sh*t’, but when you’re to start full dev on a game which is nearly there, sometimes you’re not the most patient (it turns out). As a team we realised another few months of bootstrapping and hard graft is nothing compared to a year’s worth, so we better suck it up.
We’ve rocketed from under 50 Twitter followers to over 600 (huge props to Lauren), as well as 50+ Wishlists on our Steam. Huge effort from Lauren, who’s really beating on the drum for everyone at Antler whilst we dev, including contributing to some production work too! Tom has been hard grafting with the trailer and the level design, with Harry combatting those pesky bugs. Emily has been working, then re-working, and then re-working even more the production timeline and budget, as well as Kickstarter and Dreamhack prep.
Both of this prep had cross-over. We’re currently redesigning both the Project Grove Logo and the Poster, hoping to get it done in time for Dreamhack and most definitely in time for Kickstarter. Unfortunately, the HDMI port (unbeknownst to Emily who assumed her tablet was faulty) is dead – meaning there was no chance the poster would be completed in time.
The worst part: we only fully realised this the day before Dreamhack. Emily, Lauren, Tom and various members of Microsoft support all gained 10+ greys over this night – but I’ll let you read the Dreamhack blog to find out about that story…
We won’t go into Dreamhack much, to summarise: amazing fans and incredible industry contacts. We made some great friends over this period, ranging from Devs to causes such as Female Legends, as well as all the gamers who just came to play games and enjoy the stand. You guys made any crap we faced all the worth it – seriously.
We carried on searching for our Senior Artist to join Philippe. After some headhunting and interviews, we struck gold with Marvin. Marvin has over 11 years of industry experience, he’s a seriously talented artist and he loves what we’re doing. He starts in December, so brace yourselves with some serious asset overload on our socials.
With December looming, expect to see some exciting announcements for January. You heard it here first.
STAG x