Messages

Thanks so much for the comments! Glad you're enjoying the game. The next big patch will be out in a day or two, and then its working on the Linux port and iOS port.

Ill admit that I was a little surprised by the resolution comments when they first started. I would have loved to do the game at HD, but for just one person with 1 computer - rendering out and detailing everything at almost double the resolution was a little too much to take in. I started the game 5 years ago - 1280 was plenty big enough then!
It was also a decision to make sure the game ran on as many computers as possible. Its our first game - market penetration was more important in the long run than higher resolutions. I sort of saw Stasis as the kind of thing someone could load onto an older laptop and take with them on a long journey.

I will say that the next game will definitely be at a higher resolution - and we will hopefully address all of the major concerns!

Thanks guys! Im working on the next patch now, adding in new options and a scalable interface. Fun!

Not AGS - But I've been using these forums as a source of inspiration for years now.

[http://www.stasisgame.com/http://store.steampowered.com/app/380150https://www.gog.com/game/stasis]

Hey guys - I have joined the few and the proud who have actually FINISHED a game! Woo!

http://www.stasisgame.com/

http://store.steampowered.com/app/380150

https://www.gog.com/game/stasis



LAUNCH TRAILER:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACFynCVApZ8

GAME PLAY TRAILER

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0Bex90OgkQ

REVIEWS:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/09/01/stasis-review-pc/

"I should emphasise here that STASIS does not pay mere lip-service to body horror. I can't say too much without spoilers, but Christ, it really goes for it. Some of it is mercifully obfuscated by the bird's eye view and constant gloom, relying on written description to get across how horrendous the purported sight in front of you is, but other scenes pull no punches. STASIS' isometric, 2D art sometimes looks a little retro, but other times like baroque, ludicrously elaborate movie concept art, and it employs its minimal animation to spectacularly gruesome effect."

http://za.ign.com/stasis/93707/review/stasis-review

"More than five years in the making, Stasis is an extraordinary testament to the ambition and genre genius of creator Chris Bischoff and his colleagues. It's more than just "good for an indie game", it's a mandatory experience for fans of sci-fi horror." 9/10

There are quite a few others. I'm working on a link page to all of them which I will post up here!

If you guys have any questions - please fire away!

Ah yeah - was still waiting for the GOG page to go up when I made the above post.

Hey all,

Im about to join the few and the proud - people that have FINISHED CREATING A GAME! Now granted its still a few weeks away, but we are in the final stages of production (essentially polishing it all up!) and getting ready for release.

Here is the games trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACFynCVApZ8

And a link to the Steam page:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/380150/

So far the reaction to the beta has been very good - so Im hoping that people will really enjoy the final game when its out.

An update showing the new lighting in the game..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4EE76yb5uM

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDywToYQUrw]

KICKSTARTER UPDATE!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDywToYQUrw

Music is incredibly important to me. While I'm usually a I-can-do-it-on-my-own person, I knew that having the perfect music for Stasis would mean having to find a pro.

One of the main goals of the Kickstarter campaign was to bring on a professional composer to translate the Stasis world and story into music. That is way easier to say, than do!

When Mark Morgan asked to be a part of the project I almost fell off my chair. It's no secret that the Fallout series was a transformative experience for me when I was younger; to have Fallout's composer work on this little project of mine... well, I was more than a little intimidated!

From the get go, Mark and I shared the same vision for the sound of Stasis. The main sounds of the game come from John's surroundings (you know who John is by now!) but the music comes from within. It's his experience - his personal story - that is being told through the score. Mark instantly understood what I was trying to put across and has created a haunting internal score.

The idea was to have a strong melody base around a lullaby. Creepy, huh? There are early leanings towards this idea in the trailers, as well as the opening piano music in the Alpha (played by me when I was in my I-can-do-it-on-my-own stage). Mark took this concept and created a beautiful melody that we are using as a foundation for the score.

Instead of focusing on scene based music, we're using the score to accentuate John's emotions. HOPE, FEAR, TERROR: these are the central themes for the music of Stasis - the skeleton that everything hangs off of.

I'm incredibly proud to give you a small glimpse into the musical world that Mark has created.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDywToYQUrw

Q&A WITH MR MORGAN! 

The main lullaby is a strong piece of music as a melody - something I know that was difficult to pin down. When creating 'Dream Of Us' (the main lullaby tune), what were the inspirations for the piece?

Mark Morgan: To me, it was about John singing a lullaby to his daughter so I envisioned what that would be like and went for a simple melody that could be sung by itself.

Is it difficult to create the emotional aspects from this melody? Do you draw from previous experiences? Or is it a process of trying different keys and instruments and seeing what fits?

Mark Morgan: I think it's a combination of both. The goal is to have a melody that can speak to you differently depending on the vibe. I believe that it all indirectly comes from your existence and experiences as a human being, rather than finding that emotion though the music. Certain orchestration portrays a certain emotion. Both Chris and I decided that for the more emotional pieces, cello, violin and piano would be the solo voices for the sound of Stasis. Then it's just a matter of fitting the puzzle together.

While John's external journey is being told visually, his internal journey is being told through the score. Are you still using the visuals as inspiration or does it help to focus JUST on the story elements?

Mark Morgan: I think for John's internal journey, musically I am focused on the story elements but I'm always aware of the visuals so not to lose sight of where he is. The visuals directly or indirectly have a huge influence on the musical palette.

Is working on Stasis any different to the other game projects that you have worked on, and if so how?

Mark Morgan: As of late, most of the games I'm involved in are in some way story driven, but in then case of Stasis, the story is so important and the music plays a huge role in telling that story. Sometimes I have found when it's just about gameplay, musically it's hard to feel that you're immersed in the moment. It becomes about broad stokes as opposed to written for the moment.

PROJECT UPDATES

We are past the halfway point and things are moving as smoothly as ever! Nic and I have spent the last few weeks focusing on our writers, even adding another to the team. Mark Odell has provided us with an incredibly terrifying piece of writing. Each body you find has a story to it and exists as a small piece of the puzzle. It's satisfying to see all of this come together.
Graphically, the game is pushing to completion. 90%, with one final scene being added. I'm purposefully leaving this screen towards the end of production because of how intense it will be to produce.
I've also been implementing some additional effects - courtesy of the latest release of Visionaire. GET IT HERE! The implementation of camera effects and screen shaders will add extra life into Stasis.
The script has only the last two chapters to be completely refined before we can send it to the copy editors and the voice artists. There will be a time when I have to say, "enough editing!", but until that day, I will continue to tweak!

-Chris

If you guys have a chance, check out 4.0. The main engine has been completely rewritten with major focus on the animation systems and memory systems.
There is also full support for 3D characters (although I haven't had a chance to play with them yet!).

I am an unapologetic lover of big AAA games! Although I rarely play them...contradictions, I know.
The reason for is it that I find their level of design and artistry to be on par with - if not better than - films. I grew up loving the big blockbuster films of the 80's and 90's, and I see AAA games as the natural progression of those.

When approaching my game I looked towards the larger AAA titles for inspiration. Specifically I looked at 2 franchises, and 2 games in particular.

I love how Bioshock introduced its characters, story, and world - and I figured that those are things that I could copy in my game. I certainly couldn't make a game LIKE Bioshock in terms of its game play elements, but I could certainly try to emulate those aspects of it that I fell in love with.
The atmosphere in Bioshock is incredible and is something I really tried to push in Stasis.

The Dead Space franchise, with a particular focus on Dead Space 2 for its world building is a constant source of inspiration for me. I love how the world itself has this incredible sense of history to it - the spaces all look 'lived in', giving the player a sense that they are more visitors than the main piece of the puzzle.

I even tried to emulate the Dead Space interface. Not necessarily in terms of visual quality, but more in terms of the theory behind it - having a truly minimalist interface provides a huge source of immersion for the player, something very important in a horror game.

Now these are certainly not new concepts but I found looking at how these large scale productions implemented them into their games gave me some incredible ideas for my own. I love listening to the GDC Vault talks about game design and art, something I would seriously recommend to everyone!

I would love to hear your thoughts.

Im completely fucking terrible at these hangout things....is it a permanent link (like IRC), or does it kill it whenever the room is empty?

Thanks so much Shane.
I would love to do a 'larger' game at some point, but its still currently just myself working on the game (for the majority of the work at least!). I recently hired a writer, and we have an amazing composer on board, so I am slowly getting used to delegating the work around!
That said...I don't know if I could ever leave the Adventure Game genre behind. It really is just an incredible vessel for stories and games...every time I sit down to think about game design the result is inevitably something around the AG mould!

Congrats on the funding! So excited to see where you go with this!

Shoot! I just sent out my update on KS! If I saw this I would have thrown it a shout out.
I will try to pimp you out on twitter where I can! Good luck! Looks really nice! Love the sound design and music!

If you guys can, try to put an alpha demo out for the masses. We found that most of our 'word of mouth' came from Lets Plays.

Chicky...your avatar is annoyingly mesmerizing...

But thanks so much for the comments! I love pre-rendered 3D art...I find that its much more 'personal' than the low poly stuff, and acts as a nice bridge between the traditional 2D stuff and 3D works.
I think that the future will have many more pre-rendered 3D games, so that era may yet see a resurgence!

Sunny - thanks!

["The skeletal remains lie clustered together around the room, as if they died in a stampede, or clutching each other. Somehow the bones hold no scraps of flesh."]

I still lurk here really often, so I wanted to keep you guys in the loop.

A TRAILER SHOWING SOME OF THE NEW ENVIRONMENTS IN STASIS!



LINK TO THE KICKSTARTER UPDATE

I'm at the four month mark of full time development on Stasis!

The majority of the Alpha bug fixes and new systems have been done and dusted, and so I have been able to move onto entire new and exciting Stasis environments.

The medical suites are stark and white with a vastly different aesthetic, compared to the rusty, industrial grime you've seen so far. It's refreshing to work on a new experience point with an unfamiliar tile set. I've also now created the medical puzzle that was alluded to in the last update.



NEW MEDICAL LOOK & FEEL



CONCEPT ART




SCREENS FROM THE ABOVE CONCEPT ART - IN GAME

.......

"The skeletal remains lie clustered together around the room, as if they died in a stampede, or clutching each other. Somehow the bones hold no scraps of flesh."

We've received some new writing from Christopher Dare and it is excellent! I can already see how the extra depth of this writing will echo through the environments, and really draw a player in.

I'm now moving onto the Hydroponics Bay... wish me luck

AND SOME MORE ART!





-Chris

I wrote up a Post-mortem about my Kickstarter experience. If you guys have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask!

When Nic and I decided to take on Kickstarter we wanted to run the smoothest and best campaign possible. Now, while the road certainly wasn't without its bumps and bruises, I think that the campaign for STASIS went remarkable well.

Below are a few thoughts and things to consider when setting up your own campaign. Some are obvious, and others are things that we only realized once we were neck deep into our campaign.

SETTING UP YOUR KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN

When you're planning your Kickstarter campaign, it's very easy to be caught up in the excitement and forget a few fundamentals when dealing with Kickstarter. One of the main points to remember is that Kickstarter has to verify your campaign before you're able to hit that big green launch button.

This can throw a spanner in the works of any 'preKickstarter' marketing campaign you're planning, as this is a manual process and could take a little longer than expected. You are completely at the behest of Kickstarter's all-too-human managers who have to manually sift through your campaign – amongst others – to ensure that you have met all of their requirements.

I'd recommend that you set up the base skeleton of your campaign as early as possible, and submit it to Kickstarter. You're able to modify the campaign indefinitely afterwards, right up the launch.

We didn't do that. We put the entire 'final' campaign together, announced our launch date and submitted to Kickstarter with (what we thought) was a healthy lead time. Our idea behind this thinking was that Kickstarter would be awestruck with how complete the campaign was, that they would approve everything in a day or two.

After a week, our mistake started to loom over us. With our announced launch date closing in fast and little feedback from Kickstarter, we halted our plans and pushed our dates out. In hindsight, this was possibly the best thing we could have done for the campaign (more on that later!), but at the time it resulted in sleepless nights and frustrated emails!

USE THE PREVIEW LINK FOR FEEDBACK

When you're setting up your campaign, you can share a preview of the incomplete campaign in order to get feedback. We planned the campaign by looking at other successes and failures, reading post mortems and generally going on our gut about what would work and what wouldn't. Once we had external feedback and opinions on our campaign, we could adjust things accordingly.

Those that are providing feedback are your end users. At the end of the day, you aren't trying to sell your product to yourself – you are trying to sell it to other people, and feedback from YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE is probably one of the most important and valuable things you can do.

DECIDING ON YOUR DATES

We picked November for our Kickstarter launch. The chosen month was due to our personal deadlines and current work schedule. To be honest, it probably wasn't the best month to launch! We had to compete with Call of Duty, the Next Gen console launches AND Thanksgiving holidays. Had we released a month earlier, perhaps the ride would have been much smoother – but having said that, it was a case of November 2013 or February/March 2014.

When choosing your dates, keep two things in mind:

1 – Your audience. Are there any public holidays coming up? Thanks giving, Easter, Christmas, Summer vacation...all of these factor in whether pledgers have access to extra money, and B) have access to a computer and the internet.

2 – Your schedule. Anyone who has run a Kickstarter campaign can attest to the fact that it's almost a full time job. You need to put in an insane amount of time! We had three of us running different aspects of the campaign for the entire 33 day run.

Managing press, managing Kickstarter itself, Steam Greenlight, community management on other forums, YouTube Lets Players, technical support on the Alpha, cataloging feedback and emails, updating press lists, spell checking interviews and releases...all of these take a HUGE amount of time, so ensure that you do it when you have available time!

For Nic, Kristal and I, it was especially difficult because we also have a business to run at the same time.

THE CAMPAIGN PAGE

So you have your game, you have your Kickstater page waiting for info, you have decided on your dates – now what?

The campaign page itself is your gateway to success or failure. When we were setting up the STASIS page, we looked at hundreds of other campaign pages – noting points and aspects we liked from each and interpreting them with regards to STASIS.

Consider the use of animated GIFS. Having that small element of movement can really bring life to your campaign page. We chose to have actual gameplay in the GIFs, which went along with our philosophy of IT'S ALL ABOUT THE GAME. We had an actual game to show, not just a concept and that formed the core of the entire campaign.

You are going to get A LOT of traffic through Kickstarter, so be aware of that when hosting files externally. Even what you perceive as small things, like externally hosted screenshots, can bring your server to a grinding halt and end up costing you a lot of money. We hosted all of our external files on Amazons S3 hosting service, ensuring that we never had crashed servers or stressed out phone calls.

The first thing that page visitors should see is the most important points of your campaign. We started out with our video with the game trailer, showing actual gameplay footage. Another important piece was a link to the STASIS Alpha download (right at the top of the screen), followed by bullet points about the game and then screenshots. Assume that a person visiting your page isn't going to scroll down to find out more. Once you have them scrolling, you can start to add in extra information about the game and more about the campaign.

TIER PRICING AND STRETCH GOALS

There are articles available about choosing the correct tier prices, so my advice would be to look at other campaigns that have been successful and see how their pricing points were set up. I feel it's important not to have too many 'big leaps' in pricing, and initially, I'd avoid mega tiers (in the $1000 and up range); this can easily cripple you at a later date. Having just one mega tier pledger pull out on the last day could kill the success of your campaign.

In the planning of our campaign, we decided that in the long run it was better for us to have a larger pool of backers at smaller pledges than a small amount of backers at larger sums. This was a community driven approach which helped us during the later parts of the campaign – we could have called on a large group of interested backers to increase their pledges by a small amount, if we ran into trouble.

We also chose not to round off the pledge amounts. A hundred years of retail conditioning has informed us that $19 is psychologically less than $20 and we wanted to apply that to our tier amounts.

Stretch Goals are a bit of a touchy subject, but I will say that they are important in a campaign. We were careful in our choice of goals to not include anything that would affect the integrity of the game and its story. In a way, it was a disadvantage coming to Kickstarter with Stasis in the state that it is in because we are very limited by changes we can make to the game – but again, our core philosophy of 'It's all about the game' won out, with our Stretch Goals adding to the world and the experience, but don't alter what we are trying to achieve.

PRE LAUNCH!

Time to hit the green button? Woah there! Not so fast! You want to hit the ground running. Having a prelaunch strategy is as important as having a launch strategy. As I mentioned earlier, our prelaunch dates were thrown out by the delay in Kickstarter approving the campaign. During this delay, we decided to spend some more time polishing up the Alpha demo and doing a soft Alpha launch in exchange for a retweet.

We added a countdown to our web page and contacted a few websites for interviews to be released on Launch Day.

Our Alpha demo was combined with a small prelaunch Twitter campaign, where access to the demo was password protected with the password being released to anyone who either tweeted about Stasis or otherwise put the word out.

All of these pre-launch ideas gave our campaign a strong start, something that is important to any Kickstarter. Having a strong start makes backers more confident about the project, and more willing to put their money down!

THE ACTUAL CAMPAIGN

We launched our Steam Greenlight campaign within a few minutes of the Kickstarter. This helped by using the HUGE amount of traffic that Steam gets to filter through to the Kickstarter campaign, as well as allowing the Kickstarter coverage to lead directly to our Greenlight page.

We hit the top 100 on Greenlight in a week and then the top 4 in 3 weeks; we leveraged the press and internet buzz and pushed traffic to Greelight page and from Greenlight to Kickstarter.

The running of a Kickstarter campaign really is a full time job. We had a few philosophies that we stuck to during the entire campaign run.

1 – Reply to requests for interviews as soon as possible. We tried to get back to journalists within 24 hours of the request. This kept the news about Stasis constant throughout the campaign, with new articles appearing almost daily.

2 – Custom answers all the interviews! This one was important for me, because often I have read interviews where the same 'copy and paste' information from the developers and the same quotes tend to pop up. We wanted to make sure that each interview and article was given the respect it deserves! Online press and journalists are the life-blood of any indie.

3 – Phase your Kickstarter events. We gave away several wallpapers, a new game trailer and even the Stretch Goals until we felt that it was time to get them out there. In the world of indie games, news travels fast, and new news becomes old news quickly.

We had some large announcements during the campaign, along with free giveaways. The idea was that even in the slow days, there would be something interesting on the page – something that people could talk about. You don't want to give away EVERYTHING on launch day – hold some announcements back.

4 – Don't discount social media! Social media (our focus was on Facebook and Twitter) was a driving force behind much of Stasis's success. Social media allows for personal stamps of approval on your game and as many advertisers will tell you, word of mouth is the BEST advertising you can get.

Don't only tweet about your game to other gamers. There are THOUSANDS of people out there who may not be gamers, but will still be interested in your game. I even tweeted Ridley Scott in the hopes of a reply!

We had a page on our website which had easy to access quick links to help promote Stasis. With one click you could post about the game on Facebook or Tweet about it.

Twitter paid advertising is surprisingly effective, but could get very expensive very quickly. We spent $200 and got some fantastic targeted tweets, which lead to a few hundred Alpha downloads (and hopefully a few pledges).

5 – Heavy Focus on "Lets Players". We put a lot of focus on getting the game into the hands of Youtube authors. The Lets Plays are a FANTASTIC resource for people to get excited about the game.

Stasis is a difficult sell in the world of quick, easily accessible games because you have to clear time and sit down to play it. It's not a game that you can quickly experience on a lunch break – so having the videos of people doing exactly that let those people who didn't have the time play the alpha.

When engaging Lets Players, be sure to give them permission to monetize or otherwise use your game on their channels. A simple webpage with all the information and permissions can do this.

6 – Give the press easy access to information. The press is your mouth piece – you want to make it as easy as possible for them to get all the information they need. Having a clear and concise Press Kit is ESSENTIAL. This must not only have all they may need to write a story about your game (logos, names, screenshots), but also links to all previous press releases. The longer that a journalist spends trying to sift through mountains of text to get the relevant information; the less likely they are to promote your game.

The press kit, combined with the 24 hour interview rule got Stasis a massive amount of coverage.

You should also write and format Press Releases correctly – be sure to check out our website or search for examples on how we did this.

A quick note on the press releases – build your own targeted email list.

7 – Cross promotion with other Kickstarters. Something that I had no idea about before we actually started running the campaign was the power of cross promotion with other Kickstarters. Look for other games in your genre and contact the developers running it. I have only had good experiences with other campaign runners.

GENERAL THOUGHTS

The lynch pin in the success of the Stasis Kickstarter lay in our Alpha demo. If you are planning a Kickstarter, I cannot stress enough the importance of a demo. Potential players want to experience what they are backing and the most direct way to do this is through a fully functional demo.

We hosted the Alpha demo on Amazons S3 service ensuring that people had constant access to it throughout the campaign. We also released a torrent of it (hosted for a while by some friends and incredible volunteers) which kept the costs down.

We have had over 40,000 Alpha downloads at 1 gig per download; this would have swamped our webserver. Don't assume you can serve that many downloads off your VPS or shared hosting platform-it will be disastrous – a day of downtime and you may spoil your campaign.

PayPal donations came in thick and fast once our main goal had been met. Nic had the PayPal page set up so that we could go live with it as soon as we were comfortable. Nic had a meeting with Paypal and their crowd funding department reviewed the page and gave us some pointers. Crowd funding has become a legal grey area in many ways so it's better to contact them and just make sure that everything is in order.

IN CLOSING...

After 33 days we managed to hit our $140,000 goal.

For an unknown developer on an unknown license hitting that magic $100,000 mark was an incredible feeling, but an exhausting experience! It was a month of extreme highs and lows, but I wouldn't have changed anything about how we ran our campaign.

I wish anyone looking at going this route a lot of luck! Buy extra coffee...you are going to need it!

You can check out our campaign page here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bischoff/stasis-2d-isometric-scifi-horror-adventure-game

Our post Kickstarter Pledge page is here;

http://stasiscommunity.com/pledge/

Would love to throw my hat in the ring!

STASIS, 2D Isometric SciFi Horror Adventure Game.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bischoff/stasis-2d-isometric-scifi-horror-adventure-game

Currently sitting at $74,391 pledged of $100,000 goal!

There is also a Google Hangout discussion with some of the developers who are currently running Kickstarters!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zShgejAx03E

-C

Congrats on the publishing deal!

And that 3D render of Dropsy is freaking terrifying man....

Sorry for taking so long to get back here!

So why are you doing it this way? Are you running out of time and money?

The game is being done in my spare time, and has been for the past 3 years. It was technically running out of time and money from the moment I started it!

Getting a professional copy editor is one of the reasons for the KS campaign, so the final game should be devoid of (most) grammatical errors!

You guys may be interested in this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zShgejAx03E

It was a really fun round table discussion with the other guys involved in current Adventure Kickstarters! Even Dave Gilbert stopped by.

If you guys have any questions about STASIS, the campaign, or pretty much anything else, just ask!