Hi Rousseau,
ORIGINAL: Rosseau
It was unavoidable, but please note that I said that I own (and love) all of the games I mentioned in the initial post.
And yes, the "batch processing" comment was a cheap shot against WitE2. Erik Rutins is my true Matrix hero from day-one, and I am deeply distressed I annoyed him after so many countless hours he and the team worked on that game.
Erik, please accept my sincerest apologies.
I understand you meant well and I'm sorry I caused you distress. I think we're all a bit frazzled after the last two years.
One last observation: The latest version of Flashpoint Campaigns (the Red Storm Player's edition) was released seven years ago. The initial release long before that blew me away. But because we are relying on the incredible efforts of a sole developer, the latest version of the game takes forever to release.
The paradigm seems to be that the lonely dev does all the work, releases beta to Matrix for testing (albeit, a significant step) and it's released whenever.
I can help with this observation, which is incorrect. Let's take Flashpoint Campaigns as the example. Flashpoint Campaigns began when we (back then, Dave and I) thought about our fondness for the old Simulations Canada games and proceeded to secure the rights and the old code. As part of that, we got in contact with Rob Crandall, who had worked with Simulations Canada way back in the day. We spoke with Rob and came to an agreement that he would work on a game for us. This idea for a game which started with the Simulations Canada designs eventually changed quite a lot and became Flashpoint Germany. In the process of making Flashpoint Germany, as we did with all of our games back then, we put our whole Matrix team into supporting the development. We were involved in decisions as well as work on the core design, the content, the user interface, helped coordinate and create the graphics and sound (when you year Contact, Wait, Out or Gas Gas Gas, that's my voice
, project management, did internal testing as well as organizing closed beta testing, etc. Over the course of Flashpoint Germany and after release, we also helped Rob build the beginnings of the Flashpoint Campaigns team. It was a very cooperative endeavour in all of those areas, as most of our games are and while we could not have done it without Rob, I think he would also agree that it would never had happened without us.
Fast forward to Flashpoint Red Storm, now about 8 years ago. Leading up to this, Flashpoint Germany had done reasonably well and had even been recognized and used in some military education. The Flashpoint Team was basically Rob and Jim. Both had full-time day jobs and both were a bit overloaded. We all had discussions about doing a new release and really upgrading the engine and gameplay and Rob and Jim had some fantastic ideas, but they really needed a larger team and more support to realistically make those possible. We worked with them again to match them up with a great scenario designer (Steve Overton) who I'd worked with previously on Panzer Command and also helped them expand the team to add a dedicated map artist and a dedicated test coordinator to help Rob and Jim focus on the core design and data development. We worked with them again throughout Red Storm's development and I remember many late nights I personally put in both on team coordination calls, team building and in testing, validation and feedback to be sure things were coming together. We all pushed hard together to make that release happen and when it did Flashpoint had a great new basis for the future and we'd also succeeded in helping to build a team that was much more self-sufficient and resilient than where we had started with just Rob with external support from us improving on a Simulations Canada game. They've only continued to grow in expertise and experience since then.
After all the Red Storm releases, the team and we were eager to keep going with more commercial releases, but something that was very good for the team but unfortunate for the short-term commercial plans occurred. Our ongoing work with the professional military resulted in a request for OTS to adapt Flashpoint Campaigns for the military's needs. This started with one relatively short project which snowballed into multiple projects and took up at least 90% of the team's time to make sure all requirements and deadlines were met in a complete and timely fashion. We've worked with them throughout this process, adding more personnel both on the team as well as internally to help with coordination, testing and delivery. There has been a constant discussion of getting back to the commercial side as soon as possible, but the professional work has had to come first. An additional obstacle was that due to personal reasons, Steve Overton had to step away from being the lead scenario designer, but we were able to match the team up with a new scenario designer so that things could keep moving.
Late last year, we were finally able to see a path clear to getting some progress on the commercial release again while continuing the Professional work. A lot of effort has gone into that over the course of this year, which is why we're currently recruiting for the beta test, which is about to start. We're expecting it to be finished by early next year, but one of our other policies is that we really try to make sure a game is "done" to the best of our abilities and the feedback we have from our testers, before we release it to the public. This results in release dates periodically moving back, but we'd rather do that as a matter of policy and make sure the quality of the release is as good as we can make it than release games too early as a matter of course just to keep a release date window.
Switching away from Flashpoint for a moment, this story is not unusual among our development teams at Matrix Games. While we cater our support on each project to the developer's needs and wishes, it's never the case that a developer who needs support or help doesn't get it from us and it's typical that this help happens throughout the design and development process. It's quite unusual that a developer has minimal involvement from us until they deliver a beta. This perception that you describe where they then deliver it to us and we "release it whenever" as if we're sitting on it for no good reason is never the case. If a beta is in testing and has not released, that's because there's a good reason for it to receive more testing and polishing before it goes out to the public. When both we and the developer agree that it's ready, that's when it gets a release date and more marketing attention.
Why can't we change this dreary cycle by using some sort of crowd funding to support the dev's efforts? Maybe I'm a dreamer, but I feel many Matrix customers are fairly well-endowed and would support the efforts of superior games like this with their own cash to speed things along?
If you read the above, then it likely would become clear that funding was not the issue for the Flashpoint team and is not the key issue for most teams that work with us. We do our best to make sure that we support our developers by meeting any financial development needs. We also work regularly on team building and increasing the capacity and capability of our developers by supplementing both with our internal staff as well as coordinating external assistance in whatever area is needed.
In our experience, while there are many game designers, developers and programmers in the world, only a very small fraction have the passion for wargaming that leads to the experience and understanding required to really make the games that we all enjoy at a level that moves the state of the art forward.
The main bottleneck then is that there are only so many developers and designers that really understand wargaming and that can really pull off a good game in a reasonable amount of time. We're fortunate to work with many excellent developers and designers, including legends like 2by3 with Joel and Gary, but every wargame developer benefits from additional support and feedback and we do our best to provide that to make sure the result of our involvement is less stress for the developer and better games for the customer.
I hope that helps explain what we do.
Regards,
- Erik
Please tell me, what do you think?
; Julia Child
