Pre-production of the new episode already started

After a few days of well-deserved rest, we already got our hands dirty with the development of the new episode. In this new stage, considering our new and promising working pipeline, we’ve set ourselves the goal of mastering the production process.

We want to avoid at all costs unnecessary delays in the development of the new episode, like the ones we suffered during the making of “The Playwright”. We always wanted to achieve a 3 month per episode development cycle, but never before had all the ingredients to achieve it. So this time, a big part of the plan is to walk towards this goal.

Production schedule

The first step was to make a deep analysis of the production process of S02E01, identifying major milestones along the way. Each one of these milestones, is basically defined by the ‘outcome’ expected at that particular point of the development process. First, in pre-production, these ‘outcomes’ would be in form of design documents. Soon after, the main ‘outcome’ would become playable builds of the episode, which deliver a particular set of the expected features.

Once we put together the list of milestones, we hang those in the office’s wall in the form a calendar, placing each one in the expected delivery date. From now, if we miss a date, we’ll know something is going on, and would react sooner, adapting whatever is needed to ensure the project as a whole continues on track.

Wall poster made with post-its, with ‘milestones’ in their expected dates. All these dates are obviously estimations, subject to changes due to production circumstances.

Pre-Production milestones:

• 7 Nov 2014: Episode Synopsis
• 22 Nov 2014: List of puzzles, List of scenes, List of scary situations
• 28 Nov 2014: Map of rooms, Placeholder room’s backgrounds, Second iteration of production lists.
• 5 Dic 2014: End of pre-production: Screenplay (walkthough) document. Script document. First episode build (#1) (includes all rooms in navigable state, with placeholder backgrounds).

Production milestones:

• 19 Dic 2014: Build (#2) with first iteration of all puzzles implemented, but still with placeholder art. Must be playable from first to last room.
• Now come 4 weekly iterations of the episode: planning each Monday, new builds each Friday (builds #3 to #6). Last build (#6) is published as the Episode Beta for Premium users.
• 23 Jan 2015: Texts for beta are “locked” and sent to reviewers.
• 30 Jan 2015: Reviewed texts are imported back into the game.
• 12 Feb 2015: Texts for final version are “locked” and sent to reviewers.
• 17 Feb 2015: Reviewed final texts are imported back into the game.
• 20 Feb 2015: Final episode target date. We’d do our best to publish this day, but please note that unexpected events will occur during development 😉

Hope you guys like this insight in our production process, we plan to continue offering you interesting details on how the new episode is being made. Please use the comment section if you want to ask us something, we’ll be happy to answer 😉

cheers.