In 2014, a rather unusual game was released from the Canadian studio of International Games called Consortium. This game is an action with a large number of conversations with the options for response and the fork in the plot, where the ending can vary a little, which motivates to pass the game again. In addition, the game has a rather interesting backstory based on the “destruction of the fourth wall” and interpromising displacements.

Even taking into account the translation of the game into Russian, the game, unfortunately, did not attract much attention of the players, although at the moment there is even early access to the second part of Consortium: The Tower (which positions itself as “Immersive Sim”, which everyone is missing), the mobile text game “Whispers from the Rift” with the choice of response options. It is also planned to exit some secret project, about which there is no information and remaster Consortium on the Unreal Engine 4 engine (the original is made on Source).

I constantly see a large number of articles about Immersive SIM, but almost none of them affects the Consortium series, since the game came out of indie developers, and did not represent a large project, like System Shock or Deus Ex. Nevertheless, Consortium and its sequel, Consortium: The Tower take certain elements from these ideas, and develop narrative aspects and interaction with the characters.

The first part of Consortium was not perfect, some journalists scolded her over a heap of bugs and errors on the release, which is why the game received not quite high marks, although they noted a rather unusual plot, which was interesting to follow. Nevertheless, she received some fame, after which she was almost forgotten. Nevertheless, I would like to remind you of a rather ambitious project (and no less ambitious continuation) information about the history of the development of the first game Consortium. It is possible that this story will interest someone to go through the game or pay attention to the aspects of the development of video games 🙂

Consortium: Official Rosting Parsing

(original article)
My name is Gregori McMartin (Gregory McMartin – approx. aut.), the story of a stubborn, decisive and creatively crazy game designer will be presented here, who left the traditional development of AAA level projects to bring something unique to the video game market. I am going to touch all the pitfalls and tell about all the lessons extracted during this seven -year trip: from what was only a dream, to the difficulties of practical development and, finally, before the release of the game.

Consortium is a game in which an attempt is made to combine FPS/RPG genres in the broadest sense, which can usually be found in the AAA level games with multimillion -dollar budgets, but this project was developed by a small team of six people who used designer skills and creativity to develop a game market for almost the last money. The roots of the game and inspiration came from such single-user games with a first-person narrative, such as System Shock, Ultima Underworld, Deus Ex, Half-Life, as well as from aspects of the CO NPC in RPG and Adventure.

Violence in games has always caused anxiety, especially since my daughter’s birth – this was the main motivation that led me to Consortium. I’m just tired of working on games that could only boast of repeating and meaningless violence for hours. My turning point was the completion of work on the SCARFACE game: The World Is Yours for Radical Entertainment. aut). It was obvious that during the development of this game I heard more words with the letter F and killed more virtual “bad guys” than in my whole life – in a professional and personal sense – until now. I just couldn’t do it anymore.

Having this in mind and knowing exactly what kind of company to develop a video game I want to create, I wrote the next installation for IDGI and never bite back:
“To develop an interactive story of an interactive story through the creation of an emotionally convincing and exciting (Immersive) first -person experience with a moral choice."

The path from the “idea” to the “finished game” in this case (and in most cases) was very tense. There was laughter, there were tears, there was a creative insight of all the participants in the development involved, and then there were a lot of prefabricated creative efforts. Not everyone who started the adventure on the development of Consortium reached the end. In the era of dominance of rigid competition, striving to conquer as most of the consumer market as possible, we steadily worked in relative unknown in order to create a progressive experience inspired by the same -sex games of the old school.

Positive points

1. Pre -Drandowment, building peace/universe of the game, and a.R.G (playing in alternative reality -. aut.)

We worked hard to develop the deeper background of the Consortium universe as possible. We felt that creating a game with a large number of realistic characters means the importance of investing efforts in building peace. The world had to be huge, believable, interesting, and, most importantly, consistent, otherwise no amount, even perfectly written text, could endow the characters of this world with the necessary properties.

The first prototype
Even before the moment the game of the game began, armed only with a common idea, what I would like to do with this game, the early development of the game officially started in 2008 with a modification for Half-Life 2-Consortium prototype. I had an idea for a game, which was completely on a rather small aircraft, but which was quite realistic, with a team of authentic and various characters with which you could interact. The modification consisted only of the internal interior of Zenlil (Zenlil-a large three-story aircraft, completely built using CSG) and roughly converted models from Half-Life resembling robots (. ). I visualized the dialogue system, and it turned out to be so accurate that it passed almost unchanged to the final version.

Despite the fact that I had a script by that time, the story itself was poorly worked out. I realized that the project needs a full -fledged writer / screenwriter.

The video reveals the progress of the development of the game from the original prototype to a fully completed version.

Creation of the world
From that moment I invited my younger brother Steve (Steve McMartin -. aut.) in order to begin to realize the universe that I imagined for many years. He never wrote anything professionally, but I knew that he writes and develops different stories just for entertainment all his life. Honestly, I eagerly wanted to curb what can be called a real growing passion for the art of writing. The final success or failure of the game that I imagined will depend on many things, but I knew that the script and voice acting of the characters would definitely help the game, or they would play an evil thing.

One of the main goals of creating Consortium was the creation of an experience that will depend on an interactive script in the same way as it was obtained from the many game design documents (Game Design Documents -. aut.)-including the 200-page “Bible of History”, “Bible of the characters”, “The Bible of the Universe” and a document on the main design of the game, which describes in detail all the mechanics. Steve was simply delighted with the process of creating an interactive narrative system (which ultimately became our interactive technology of the IDGI-1 narrative) with me, and at the same time tightly engaged in the process of creating the universe. Our creative compatibility is a powerful tool, since we perfectly complement each other taking into account constant disputes – I am an optimist, and he is a pessimist. We are both very picky, attentive to details and are extreme perfectionists.

IDGI-1 alternative reality game.
Then the game was released in alternative reality (a.R.G.). We launched it back in January 2010. One cannot help but recognize the creative genius of Natalie Lawhed -. aut.), since she completely was responsible for that magic to Flash, which forms the basis of most.R.G. It was an incredible cooperation that we will never forget, and we can proudly say that after that she received an IGF award for creative work!

We released our first press release a.R.G. – A kind of prequel to Consortium, after which it was almost immediately picked up by the largest ARG community (in games in alternative reality -. aut.). As the game develops and passes, our project was able to attract a decent number of players, many of whom were deeply immersed in the system that we managed to create, which in the end became part of the Consortium universe, like the characters of the game world. Despite the fact that a.R.G. I did not break out of my niche, it helped us create a deep and stable basis for everything that happens during the first Consortium and in two planned sequels (the second part is already in early access -. aut.).
Steve, undoubtedly, would say that the best part of the experience of working on a.R.G. was the format of “destruction of the fourth wall”, where most of our early work on history proceeded from the intra -game choice, which the players themselves made. In many cases, we simply took their answers and worked with them to develop the narrative.

Since the development was in full swing, we started working on what happened in the future information console. Just imagine the in -game Google, to which you can access several places on Zenlil. This concept led to the creation of the text for more than 150 thousand words, which are intra -game news articles, tasks about tasks and other information “secrets”, intended for those who want to expand their knowledge of the game world. This can be called the "Code" Consortium. To do everything right (and Steve had almost no time left to complete the script), we invited a wonderful person – Bob Edwards, our official writer/scriptwriter for the background (Lore) and information. Technically, Bob helped us with writing the text for the last stage a.R.G., But his real contribution came for his period of working with infoconsol – if not for his hard work, then the console would not be so extensive and deep.

2. The main team

"Main cell". From left to right, clockwise. Ben Bernard, Gregory McMartin, Jason Zeyes, Ryan Sheffer, Stephen McMartin and Trevis Wilson. In fact, other people also made a contribution to Consortium, but these guys turned out to be real “strong nuts”, who brought the game to the end and did everything necessary for releasing the game.

We deliberately abandoned all genre conventions in the development of Consortium and instead focused on the specific implementation of our concept of destruction of the fourth wall. I can say with all the honesty that everything turned out only because of the unshakable devotion and incredible enthusiasm of the main IDGI team, that Consortium, with all its features, was able to get to the finish line.

Rayan Sheffer – approx. aut.) hears a separate mention. Being essentially the only C ++ programmer of the game gameplay for almost the entire development, he alone wrote most of the code for Consortium and played an important role in solving most complex technical problems that the project faced – and there were as many of them as dandelions in the spring. Our close working relations gave such results that I had not previously observed my years of stay in the industry. We all worked very hard and helped each other when something was not according to plan. And sometimes things sometimes went on the plan. I personally found that game designers and programmers can speak in a completely different language, which often leads to disagreements and, as a result, to indecisive compromises, and therefore I was extremely happy to find such a programmer with whom I and Steve were “in the same wave”.

Being mostly a team where its members worked at a distance from each other, meant that burnout was, in fact, the greatest threat to our main team, and, possibly, my greatest concern throughout the development. Compliance with the operating mode and maintaining life outside it was the most important aspect. Of course, our organization, as a company, allowed team members to work at home at their own pace. Usually you think that this opens up the opportunity to relax and do nothing, but our experience was fundamentally opposite: people did not stop working! In fact, because of this incredibly disappointing trap, we lost several strong team members.

Despite the policy according to which the weekend was “sacred”, in which no one worked, it was still difficult to determine how much time the team members worked at home. Every day we quarreled at conferences in Skype, which everyone had to visit, yes, but I did not want to limit the team to what time they should work for their 8 hours on weekdays. Some team members (like Steve) worked better at night and fell asleep at noon.

At that time, I felt that if a team member became more creatively involved in the project, then this completely suited me. Statement: “Do not think so that if you can work on your weekend, you must do it!"It quickly became for me my important motto.

Thus, the team has changed and acquired a uniform during the three main years of development, from May 2011 to May 2014. Although this caused various difficulties, in the end, we became more focused and productive. Each member of the team ultimately took a large section of the game, which they “owned” in a sense, and then continued to delve into it and fully realized their part of the puzzle. In some respects, the production aspect of my work began to represent the task of “sitting back” and allowing a well -minded team to work independently.

It all starts with a clear general vision, but in the end it is precisely the vision and enthusiasm of each individual person who does his job that ultimately decides what the final product will be.

Some of the team members on Pax Prime 2014. From left to right: Bob Edwards, Ryan Sheffer, Hansina Whitford, Gregory Makmartin

3. Artistic style and art director

We wanted to create the most “immersive” video game (with maximum immersion – approx. aut.) using our idea of ​​the fourth wall to further increase the level of immersion of players. We received many responses from people who said that the game was a very high dive factor, and this was a surprise, given that “immersion” is often associated with photorealistic graphics in the modern gaming industry. Nevertheless, we managed to achieve this with the help of an artistic style, which is removed from photorealism as much as possible.

We realized that when working on the project in our hands, there are limited means, and therefore we needed to focus on any other way to achieve immersion: narrative pace and context, sound effects, music, lighting effects, voice acting, scenario moments, etc. We had to only come up with a logical artistic style that would be implemented within the framework of our budget, and also worked for the benefit of the plot.

Before that, we have developed the concept of the IDGI-1 satellite for our A.R.G. The idea was that the satellite in the “our world/real world” can transfer to a person first -person management by another real person in an alternative universe, in the future. Based on this thought, our initial idea for Sonsortium was to give the game a “cut” realistic appearance – many unnecessary aesthetic details should be filtered by a satellite for more efficient use of limited “quantum bandwidth”. Thus, realistic forms and sizes are preserved according to the proportions of the real world, but they are still not too detailed. The result of this approach at the end of 2011 was a random mixture of unrelated things.

Then came Jason Zayas -. aut.) and took on the heroic task of creating a fresh and holistic type of game, which:
A) looked completely original (you will never confuse Consortium with any other game);
B) in the future coincided with the concept of the IDGI-1 satellite;
C) I would not demand millions of dollars and a team of hundreds of artists to achieve this task. Thanks to Jason’s cooperation with Ben Bernard, our fruitful and amazing surrounding artist, all three goals were achieved.

An interesting fact, the entire 3D schedule in Consortium is limited by a palette of 16 colors. There are no traditional textures maps, only painted landfills. This approach retained the essence of the original idea that we planned before Jason took over the leadership for art director. The ideas that he brought to the project was necessary in order to give us an appropriate and holistic look that we were looking for.

It was a turning point for the project, and although not everyone appreciates our artistic style, it seems to many people (and it really was) that this was the best solution for us, given our team of 3D artists of 2 people.

4. Script, listening, sound recording.

Left: Karin Ingammar (Voice of Alanna Boyle / Rook 25) and Brian Dobson (Vaid Harris’s Voice / Rook 9)

Also check about Consortium information in the BEHIND THE VOCE Actors database. Our game includes 23 fully voiced character. Most of them have deep dialogs.

This aspect as a whole was a deafening success. All the time spent on building peace and background before writing the history of the game, it meant that all aspects of the game were present a certain level of depth.

More than 20 voice actors appreciated this depth and attention to the details (most of them live in the Vancouver area) who joined us to breathe life at Consortium. We were incredibly lucky to attract such talents, given the lack of experience in this area. I still remember how Steve nearly burst into tears when I first saw how Michelle Livingston (Horse 15) (Michelle Livingstone -. aut.) does his job in the studio. I suspect that they liked the text that Steve wrote, or at least I like to think so. I know that he looks back, remembering the lines that he wrote for the game. He simply cannot help but worry about it (over the past few years, he has learned tons of text!). But his incredibly fresh approach to how the elements of the narrative were so smooth and woven into game experience, was really inspiring for all of us. And even more, I think that his heroes were felt so real, so believable and so human that our cast really enjoyed the process.

During the recording (I and Steve led each voice recording session), we gave our actors the player replicas and answers so that the dialogues of the players sound as convincingly as possible. It seems that all this was appreciated, and it also helped to see the bright side in everything. In short, we liked to work with the cast of our game, we have big plans for the development of their characters.

Paul Ruskay – approx. aut.) from Studio X and his team, Rob Plotnikov (Rob Plotnikoff – approx. aut.) and Greg Sabitz (Greg Sabitz – approx. aut.) turned out to be very useful in our work. In their studio, we recorded more than 4000 lines of dialogs with more than 20 actors, and this was a truly useful and interesting experience. We easily coped with this, and now we would like to return to the studio for recording the dialogues of The Tower (the second part of the series -. aut.)

5. Creation of interactive narrative technology IDGI-1

I am very proud that we successfully managed to invent an original way of combining narrative and interactivity.

This is a diagram exactly showing the structure of the history of Consortium (the main spoilers are deleted!)

The technology of the interactive narrative of the IDGI-1 was a system that began with the invention of our template script Colin Fox (Colin Fox-. aut.) – an incredibly talented person. He created his magic by writing a system that allowed OpenOffice with open source to work directly with the Source engine. Steve took this technology and began to work with it, creating more than a hundred “streaming” dialogs that form the basis of our game.

We wanted dialogs in Consortium unique among other games so that they are felt as realistic as possible – this means that you will never see repeated response options in dialogs, conversations always go ahead. Several separate dialogs have 30-50 lines of possible options, and each of them can be “missed” when choosing an option to “keep silent” or just get away from the dialogue at any time. Many dialogs include very long and deep interactions with characters, which can differ significantly every time you go through them.

Then our chief animator, Travis Wilson (Travis Wilson – approx. aut.), used a very special part of the Source engine, the magic forces of Face Poser to curb the animation necessary for each dialogue of the game. Typically, for such a task, a large team of people working in the team was required, but Trevis coped with this almost alone.

Thus, in general, we managed to create/verify/polish a completely new technology and still use it for an extremely complex narrative covering more than 500 pages of an interactive scenario. This was an incredibly difficult test, but since it was the essence of our game, it was a test for which we were more than ready.

6.Kickstarter

In our general recognition, something with Kickstarter was clearly wrong, but in the end the situation was getting better.
In December 2012. Almost two years after the start of development, we launched our first campaign on Kickstarter, putting a bunch of efforts into it. A carefully thought-out video was created, which gave only some hint of the game in the hope that the intrigue and the original idea would attract the right people. Well … we realized that in Kickstarter you can’t act like that. To succeed in the crowdfunding campaign, where there are no famous gaming designers or nostalgia factor, you must fully and clearly explain what kind of game is offered by potential sponsors. Without hints, without lies, without vague.

Thus, this first campaign could not succeed, and we canceled it in two weeks (with a campaign lasting a month), realizing our mistake. We had a complete PR catastrophe, not to mention financial, because we spent a lot of money on the campaign. It was a really serious blow to the moral spirit of the team.

However, having rebelled from the ashes, we found out that we did wrong and returned to Kickstarter in early 2013 with a request for much smaller means – and this time everything worked out! The amount that we asked this time was really the minimum that we would need to bring the game to the finish line. The income from Kickstarter was only about 11% of our common budget, but most of all the fact that the success of KS was the only reason that we managed to complete the development of the game and not become homeless.

Thanks to our campaign on Kickstarter, about 40 people brought new data to the information console of the game. Several of our awards for sponsors allowed people to create their own ideas for characters (they could add them to the game world), corporations, news articles and even changes in historical events. Steve and Bob talked with these sponsors TET-AT to develop suitable news articles or reports on tasks. Some of the ideas were completely crazy, but this only added a new challenge to add them to the game world. I know that our team of writers of two people was just delighted with this, and Steve considers this the most useful moment in the campaign on Kickstarter.
At the end of this successful campaign in 2013, we wrote an article of the Vancouver Film School, which may be useful for some of you.

Negative moments

1. Marketing, promotion and starting the game

We had a problem with PR after we had to cancel our first attempt to launch the campaign on Kickstarter. Nevertheless, even after a successful subsequent campaign, we still did not have specialists in PR or marketing who would help to sell the game to interested people, etc.D. Just Steve and I did what we can do ourselves, in addition to large loads during the development of the game. This, of course, is sundress radio, reviews after launch and a good page of the Steam game – tools that will contribute to our success.

Hard but real budget: task is to finish the game
We will transfer to the very last month before the official release of Consortium. Most of the team spent more than 15 hours a day at the game, passing it again and again, testing it to the extent of our capabilities. And if some bugs were found, then they were all sent to me, the only person who could fix about 70% of them, I myself searched and corrected about 50 large and not very bugs every day, 6-7 days a week for 2-3 months before the launch. I have to note the amazing work of Steve “Duke” Cohen (Steve “Duke” Cohen). In the beginning, becoming our player a.R.G., Duke has become our best and thorough tester, which we have to this day.

In the last week or so, we reached the moment our bugs began to disappear! Many positive reviews came from testers. Hooray! We had the right to believe that since our team no longer found problems, the game was finally corrected and ready to launch. But the simple fact was that it was a stupid assumption arising due to the fatigue of workers-in Consortium, it was likely more than a hundred choice and variables that a hundred people should be checked for a hundred different computers, where everyone would play about a hundred times (this would be perfect). We had five people who played five different computers configurations.

Lack of our capabilities for testing
The release of Consortium took place a little later than the “papers of early access” of games, which players now constantly see in the store. We had doubts about the use of the Steam early access system. Incorrectly believing that Consortium was supposedly “ready” enough, we did not want to make an wrong impression, we were very afraid that we could angry our Kickstarter sponsors, which we said many times that the game is almost ready. Therefore, we decided to abandon early access. Looking back, I believe that it really was an extremely crazy thought, because our sponsors wanted only a finished product, and even a seriously delayed product would be much better than broken.

In general, we significantly underestimated the amount of time that we had to spend on testing different types of game (t.e. a style that we have not tried earlier), with a much larger database of testers who would modify and correct the project before providing the game to gamers and professional critics.

It was just necessary to use early access
A few hours after our official launch on January 8, 2014, we got into the top 3 of the best-selling Steam products, and our eyes caught fire. Sales were much higher than we expected, and Steam really successfully promoted us on his main page. Around the same time, everything went awry when messages from evil and confused players who were interested in, what the hell were going on to the forums of Steam and mailboxes.

For them, the game was a stunning non -working piece of code.
In panic mode, I and Steve held an emergency meeting, already without an early access option (because we released the game as ready). We decided that the only way to go to the public and honestly explain the situation. It was then that Steve sketched this Steam update and we posted a link to him directly in the description on the main page in the store.

Almost immediately, our sales fell like a stone. Steam immediately stopped displaying the game on the main page, which we could not recover. Although the reaction to the Steam update was extremely positive, our slightly excessive reaction (to the events that occurred) and marginal honesty, perhaps they gave people the idea that we could not correct the game to the end, or that it is fundamentally broken. None of these ideas were the truth. There were really many mistakes in the game, yes, and among them were somewhat serious, but all of them could be fixed. But our serious review of this game created the opinion that “this game is too broken” to question the chance for the game to gain momentum in the store, and we are fighting this day to this day.

In any case, we returned to the bug correction mode again. We began to collect each error message from many new players who sent us messages to the Steam forums and the post office. I spent about 15-20 days to bring the game into a normal form, since everyone came and came, and we tried to deal with serious mistakes as quickly as possible.

The irony of the whole situation was that we would not realize how broken the game was until we released it for thousands of players. No number of tests from five people could achieve such results. I would also like to say that it was very pleasant for us to see that many people wanted to help us. I mean that it was unbelievable – suddenly we had dozens of people who send mistakes about errors, and I would say that 99% did this with a common desire to help us correct the game. We will never forget that.

Honesty at all costs
We had one thing that we were very proud of – this is our a.R.G. At this stage, we were completely open and honest with the players, no matter what. So we continue to communicate with our fans to this day, we are still active on Steam forums and answer every e-mail that send us. I believe that such a direct approach saved us several times when a less transparent company would fall apart – people value a little honesty on our part, and from our point of view there is no reason to hide what is actually happening behind the scenes. Our players, our fans are the only reason that our company still exists.

A lesson learned in a difficult way
In general, we still realized how important it is to allocate more resources and budget for the presence of a large team of testers, which would densely engage in finding and eliminating all mistakes and problems before the release of the game for the general public. Although we did not have resources for this during the creation of Consortium, early access could give us similar results using the capabilities of those players who want to plunge into the game to help us smooth out the unfavorable situation and find these unpleasant, but difficult errors in terms of detecting errors.

2. Budget control

From the very beginning, we knew that we want to create such a game experience that will extend the boundaries of mixing interactivity and narration in methods that have not previously been used. How are you going to make a realistic schedule and budget distribution for such an experimental project? As it turned out, this is an almost impossible task.

Initial hunting for developing a game
In addition to launching and helping in preparing our game in alternative reality, I personally spent a lot of time in 2010 on the search for investors. I turned to the local groups of angels-investors in Vancouver, as well as to publishers on the GDC 2010 and 2011. My idea was not focused on why our game will gain a huge commercial success or how we sought to combine different elements from the most successful games to guarantee the influx of means. My idea was to create an innovative experience that has never been before;experience with moral principles, where there will be certain consequences from the player’s actions, as well as that the action took place in a positive and bright future. In a sense, my idea was connected with altruism, so I was looking for altruists who would like to support us. But in the financial world, especially in Western countries, altruism is really a very rare phenomenon. People want to get a guarantee that they will receive something in return, and video games are a very risky business. No one was interested in our experimental and clearly risky project.

Visiting the Canadian Media Fund CMF (Canada Media Fund)
When we started development in May 2011, all components were ready. We knew all the characters and the style of the environment, which, as we thought, we needed. We already had all Zenlil, which grew out of my prototype, and the overall template of this original prototype almost did not change. In order to ultimately receive funds from the Canadian media fund, we had to have a detailed development schedule, and we needed to complete it on time to submit to the fund in 2010. It turned out that our project is ideal for a completely new CMF project, an “experimental stream”. 12 months after filing the application, we received the first tranche from $ 500 thousand and we were ready for the full development of the game. Then we were responsible for the remaining $ 160 thousand. our planned budget.

Is it a big budget enough to develop a game that you imagined?
We did not take a lot of time to realize that the budget would be a problem during the development of the game, and the flow of cash has also become a constant problem that needed to be solved in order to prevent the development or loss of vital employees. We were constantly advanced to complete the development, but various problems prevented us from planning the work, within the framework of this promotion.

Our forecasts for Kickstarter about when the game is completed is quite far from reality, but at the time when we talked about these terms, we really thought that this was quite realistic. There was absolutely no filter between what really happened inside and that we informed our sponsors. They knew about what the development of such a unique and original game was related to;overcoming extremely complex challenges and solving complex problems every day.

It is difficult for me to convey this in words, but when you invent something really new, it is impossible to accurately draw up a schedule and budget. Everything that can be done is to have a large number of “free funds” in the budget to solve the problems of the development of a “black box”. These are tasks that are experimental and which will require an unknown amount of iterations. You continue to persistently plan so that everyone is focused on the set goals and use free funds where it is absolutely necessary for the benefit of the final version of the game.

Overlooking the term “limited budget”
We did not have any free funds at all, so you can imagine what difficulties we had to encounter. However, our financial director Stewart Marshall was magnificent, and with his help, ties and leadership, we were able to overcome difficulties with some rather inventive decisions. Technically, the game was made with the originally planned by the budget, but in fact all the team members worked much more zealous and longer than the schedule and budget dictated it.

3. Extremely ambitious game design
It is especially difficult for me to admit this, since the whole game design of Consortium depended entirely on me. The main problem is that we worked very hard on the original system of battle, inventory, ammunition, treatment and repair, but the history and scale of the game simply did not adequately use all these systems.

Original and reusable mechanics are extremely difficult to develop!
The roots of this problem come from its original desire to turn sonsortium into a fully episodic series, where there will be 8 episodes in the season or so. The world’s first interactive TV series was the initial goal back in 2007/2008. To this end, we really have developed such game mechanics that could be used in a large number of game locations and situations.

So, in a sense, it was good that we were moving forward, since we had reliable mechanics that would be fully involved in sequels, but for us it became a real obstacle in creating Consortium. The combat system could be radically bended, allowing us to spend much less time to correct the combat part and the mechanic associated with it.

The interactive technology of the narrative IDGI-1 was extremely experimental
Also, the real scale and challenges that we encountered when transferring more than 500 pages of an interactive script into a functioning game scenario were not fully realized. The system on which the script was written was experimental and invented by us. The engine on which we worked, was quite famous and developed by Valve to develop a completely different game. The result of the unification of these two systems was an incredible number of scripts, which, in principle, are incomprehensible for understanding except myself, and, therefore, can be supported and corrected only by me. And therefore, most of the mistakes can be made by me and only me. You will never find a situation of this kind in any other professional project.

The advantage of this is that the principle that I implemented the script has a logical system, and it will work much better on Unreal Engine 4 (our choice for the sequel engine – The Tower). Now that we have a clear example of how our interactive technology of the IDGI-1 narrative technology works, the creation of the second game turns into a work within the framework of this pre-set template for the first game, but at a higher level.

In conclusion

Obviously, in general, the project was more positive than negative points, but the mistakes that we made were quite serious and almost killed us as a company. The path of creating this game was associated with certain risks, and we had to fight monsters and demons throughout the way. In a sense, it almost seemed to us that we were challenging the laws of nature, doing this. A game about a positive future where you play for someone who is a member of a peacekeeping organization, purposefully avoiding unnecessary violence? Just madness.

Presenting the best future for all of us
Someone wrote in the comments that Consortium is a “completely unrealistic future, predicted by Canadians, but the game is quite cool.”But is it really unrealistic? We want to believe what a positive future is in our hands, and we went to a lot to present the technologies of the near future, which can very soon be realized to achieve this goal. Is it really so difficult to believe in the best future for our children and grandchildren?
This is what Consortium represents for me: this is a belief embodied in the form of an interactive narrative. It is for this reason that I really am glad that we were able to finish it at all. When I think about all the events that led to Consortium, I really admire what incredible moments we survived.

The path to the tower!
To date, Consortium has not compensated for its development costs. At the time of writing the article (in 2016. – approx. aut.) the game has returned about half of its budget for development (excluding deductions). When we created a consortium from the very beginning, it had a clear artistic goal, now we see the final result with some “unhoused” parts. But as a commercial project, Consortium is still at an indefinite stage. Our dream is to create games of Consortium for a long time and at the same time support our families and at the same time live an ordinary life.

In Consortium: The Tower, we strive to combine all the components and ideas that we invented in the first Consortium along with the traditional structure and format of the content of the Genre Acts/Advent genre (which developed before the idea of ​​immersive SIM-. aut.). This is certainly the coolest game that I dared to imagine that I could work on its creation, as this is the game that I dreamed of developing and playing my whole life.

At present, we know one thing for sure: Consortium has fans, and it has new fans, and they all want more! Well, we work hard to give everyone more content!

Consortium
Release date V1.0: January 9, 2014
Current version: V1.26.1: 9 February 2019.
Initially declared platforms: Windows Vista/7/8
Project development budget: $ 677,356
Duration of development: 8 years (5 years pre-Podakshna, 3 years of development (
Team size: 6 full-time developers, 5-10 freelance developers