Last weekend, we quietly launched our Patreon for Gears of Eden and, with it, our very first short story! Internally, this is huge; it is the herald for Phase Two of development… but most people aren’t a part of the internal team. Instead of hoping you catch every little snippet of us talking about what all this means for Gears of Eden and for you, we decided to dedicate this week’s Dev Update to nailing down, really, what all this means.
First off, we have the Patreon. We’ve talked about raising money for the project in the past and we understand that can be a sensitive subject! We get your concerns, and really understand that’s just you being practical. But game Development is expensive and takes a lot longer without a proper budget; Patreon working out for us would take away a heavy load of stress and allow us to do more, and do it better and faster. Our immediate needs for financing are in founding costs, concept art, artists and programming. We also hope to turn these areas of focus into content generating streams. For example, hiring a concept artists is not only important for our internal use and purposes, but also gives us new assets we can pass on to our supporters in the forms of posters, wallpapers, and more!
I mentioned the short stories again above, and you might be wondering what they’re all about. Well, the short stories were initially conceived to help you become familiar with (and ideally, hooked on) the world of Gears of Eden before it is released. These stories take place before Gears of Eden, but they inform the world of it and some will even tie directly into your experience when you play! They’re also intended as self-contained pieces; while you might find some interconnected themes or some characters that show up more than once, it’s important to us that the stories are all their own thing. The benefit of this is two-fold: first, it means that if the protagonist of one short story bothers you, you aren’t stuck with them in the next. Secondly, it allows us to paint a broad picture of Gears of Eden, giving you a taste of different places and characters, without needing to give away too much about the world.
Those previous two paragraphs are the easy parts to explain; you know what Patreon is and the term “short story” is pretty self-explanatory… but do you know what Phase Two means? Probably not. We have a couple of goals for our Phase Two initiative. The first is content focused. We’re now working towards the Alpha Two release. The Alpha One testing period is going to continue at least until the end of the month, but we’re taking your feedback and getting to work on furthering the development of Gears of Eden so that the next time you play, it feels fresh. We’ve already started work on our next sprint, and can safely let you know Alpha Two will bring a lot more crafting options to the game. The second piece we touched on previously: we need to raise capital to help us with some founding costs, and to increase our quality and efficiency in development. We are also aiming to increase organization and communication in this phase, both internally and externally.
It’s amazing how things feel like they’re just now getting started, even though we’ve nearly been at it for two years. The best thing for us to do is to take it week by week, and so we’ll be back next Wednesday with an update on the actual development that’s been going on in our current sprint! Until then, be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for latest news on all things Gears of Eden, and as always, thank you for your support!
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