Kenshi | The Making of

[Music] [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] kimchi a free roaming squad based rpg sandbox taking place over hundreds of square kilometers factions made up of the holy the greedy and the bloodlust beasts of burden livestock beak things and leviathans monsters that hunt men as prey and ancient machines of war still acting as sentinels for the long since dead damned by the actions of those that came thousands of years ago in a history almost entirely lost there is no savior for this macabre life on the little moon known as kimchi you are not a warrior on a mission you're not the redeemer who sets out to right the wrongs of the past you're simply another insignificant wretch born into this harsh and often short life whether you choose to pick up a weapon a pickaxe a hoe a trade route or your very own shop is up to you in kimchi everything is your choice with over a million copies sold and excellent reviews kimchi is one of the quintessential examples of indie developers success but kenshi's story is much more than just a team pooling money and developing a game they hope will be successful within a time frame in kinchi's case there was no money or team for much of its development the lack of which leaving a massive impact on how kinshi was built and threatened its soul creator's very livelihood even forging through these tumultuous times it would take over 13 years to finish this is the story of kinshi's development and it's adamant developer chris hunt several years before kinshi began development its creator chris hunt would leave his job at a company developing an educational game aimed at schools after being there for only two years in an interview with gamestar.ru chris would admit that he hated his position and that he would never program for another man so long as he lived making good on his promise sometime between 2006 and 2008 wanting a game as deep as xcom apocalypse but without turn-based combat or cooldown based attacks like found in dragon age chris would begin development of kinshi diving directly into the combat by september 30th 2008 chris would already have a tech demo video featuring just that elaborating a bit more on his design philosophy chris would list off the criteria certain aspects of the game need to meet in a dev diary post in 2009 number one characters in games are both too tough and too fragile games need a proper medical system something more realistic that blurs the lines between life and death number two enemy ai characters don't have enough fear of death the enemy has to fear death as much as the player who cannot save number three the player needs to relearn game playing in any situation it should be possible to save 99.9 percent of lives but the player must somehow pay for it in return number four the game needs to be well balanced a character must never die unless it is the player's fault if he dies because the character wouldn't respond to his orders or took a stupidly dangerous path fighting root then it is the game's fault that he died and this cannot be allowed if we have taken away saving only 10 days later chris would disclose the fact that he had no money to put towards the game and was hoping that the early tech demo phase of production would garner enough popularity that artists would volunteer to design and produce models and textures for the game he himself had very limited artistic ability self-described as meager and decided to try and implement as many graphical and environmental effects with programming as he could with varying degrees of success all to try to make the game look more presentable for that needed popularity money would be a progress stalling issue for much of the development of kinchi chris was supporting himself with a part-time job he had as a security guard at an abandoned factory working only two shifts a week and spending much of the rest of his time on kimchi in april 2009 chris would post on his website lofigames.com that he had planned on following mountain blades model and released the game in a beta state so that the sales would allow him to finally afford what the game needed he stated that kinchi would be available by september only five months away leading up to september chris would hit two major milestones in kinshi's development first he created a massive 400 square kilometer sandbox the map that wouldn't be replaced for seven years he also created the seamless world system the code that allows open travel across the massive landmass kenshi takes place on this system breaks the map into chunks that will be loaded and unloaded as needed while allowing the ai and other systems to continue functioning in the unloaded chunks he had several other lesser aspects of the game like the dialogue system completed as well but chris was only a single man working on this massive project and he had severely underestimated the amount of time he needed realizing his mistake in july he would push back the release date to october 1st but even that would prove to be a miscalculation as well come the 21st of august chris would finally have a new video this time to show off the scale of the new map and the current state of combat a month later chris would admit that he was once again not able to make his new release date he wouldn't bother giving a new one but it would be coming a lot sooner than anyone would suspect and much to chris hunt's chagrin november 7 2009 chris would surprise release kinchi's tech demo and he wasn't happy about it with its release chris would post an official announcement on his website that he wouldn't suggest downloading the game citing that it had essentially no gameplay and what little there was was very buggy kinshi's following before this point was very small and this tech demo didn't do much to help that problem indeed in december when chris said he put much more work into the game like finishing the initial pathfinding system and that he would release an updated tech demo in january he was asked by his small community to just keep working on the game and post progress announcements and pictures instead honoring his community's request come january rather than an updated demo he posted a picture of the latest addition to kinchie's world a very rough town it would be three months of silence before chris would return with another update acknowledging the fact that this silence made his sights seem dead and by extension it made kinchi look dead in may 2010 he would assure his followers that his lack of communication was purely due to him working hard on the game he would even go so far as to claim that many developers will harp on and on about their games while they have nothing to show for it he on the other hand have been working to improve kinshi's performance and fix the standing issues as well as beginning work on the rpg aspects of the game enemies and equipment but chris would run into the same issue that would plague so much of kenshi's development he had no money to put towards these assets making it another part of the game that would have to wait chris would continue working as fast as he could not only to finish the game but to get it into a state worth selling it had already been more than two years into kinshi's development and chris was still living in debt even with his part-time job but tumultuous times were far from over his lack of artistic ability would continue to stall or outright block progress for most content in the game programming ai and developing new systems is only tenable if he had the assets to make use of them by december of 2010 chris would completely resign himself from continuing work on kinshi's buildings simply stating that'll do for now until the game makes enough for me to hire a real artist enter 2011 chris continued his work on the technical side for what little content he had in the game losing so much time in his work he wouldn't notice a major problem with his website lofigames.com had been hacked malicious and fishing pages would be added and his provider would notice and suspend his site what little community he had would be completely shut out this would continue until may when he would finally take notice and fix enough of the damage to get the site back online being a solo developer with little artistic ability a buggy and crash prone tech demo and a site that goes down for months certainly wasn't doing kenshi's popularity any favors and this would become painfully apparent very soon a lesser-known fact about kimchi is its true first release date looking it up most sources cite that kenshi was released into early access in 2013 and while true it had been first released onto steam in 2013. it was actually on october 31st 2011 that chris made kinchi available for purchase through a free demo along with a new trailer [Music] [Music] so [Music] chris had put a significant amount of work into the game and thought it was finally ready for people to try once again for the first time in two years kenshi's big debut was a fairly broken mess constant crashing and very bugged gameplay however chris made a very wise decision he packaged kinchie's download with an auto updater this would allow him to push out updates as needed and it was absolutely needed in less than a week after release he would push out six separate updates addressing the issues along with an official announcement read in part i'd like to thank everyone for being so supportive of the game despite it crashing every five minutes i am hoping with this update the game should be a little more stable now and free of anything game breaking i'm going to spend probably this whole month focusing on bugs and crashes and getting the game really solid so nothing will be added for the next month or two but it should become more solid and game like and hopefully more fun chris's income from kinchi's initial release reflected the circumstances leading up to it a small community long periods of silence and a dearth of graphical quality though it was far from a big success it was still enough for chris to quit his part-time job and devote more time to the development of kinshi and a month later he'd have enough to afford an environment artist who would give a much-needed facelift to the game's terrain around that same time chris had created a new foliage system that would add extra detail and variety to kinshi's barren land one other radical change chris would implement would be to completely tear out his original pathfinding system and replace it with a pre-made system this would solve almost every issue can she currently had with the pathfinding including the poor pathing itself along with the collisions and drastically reduced loading times when entering a new cell but the biggest aspect of gameplay this new system would allow was for characters to navigate stairs several years into development kenji could now have buildings with multiple floors chris probably realizing he wasn't going to be able to afford everything ken she needed by relying on its sales alone would start an indiegogo campaign in may of 2012. he was very open with the details of where the money would go and how much he needed for certain aspects of the game first and foremost was the fact that kimchi didn't have sound as he couldn't afford the 5600 license for a sound engine and freelance artists and programmers never mind permanent additions to the team would end up costing an undetermined amount chris set the campaign's requested amount for forty thousand dollars his campaign's mission statement reads as follows i'm setting the bar low just to be cautious there is no fixed amount of money that i need because i do not expect to get the full budget needed to make the whole game it's simply a matter of more money equals faster progress and more features i will still finish this game even if i don't get a penny from this it will just take me a lot longer and the final quality won't be as good without the help from professional artists i can't guarantee that the game will be finished quickly or by a certain deadline but i can guarantee that it will be finished and it will be done well none of the money will go to me personally it will 100 be used to add to the game and i will keep a public budget report that shows exactly what it's being used for early into the campaign chris would receive a huge contribution for two thousand dollars but after that only 85 other people would join in and all of their contributions combined would only add up to another 315 dollars with only 86 backers and 2 315 dollars raised less than six percent of the goal the campaign was a colossal failure hunt addressed the situation a big thanks to everyone who has donated obviously i'm pretty terrible at marketing and it got nowhere near the target amount but it doesn't matter every donation is still going to help the game the target of 40k was a pretty arbitrary amount of money and was not some kind of requirement for success two thousand dollars won't cover the audio engine so i'm going to put the money towards a 3d artist this isn't going to just be to make the game pretty these are art assets that let me expand the game the money will go towards paying an artist to design and model various mini buildings and structures for the upcoming building update around august of 2012 chris would finally acquire an artist that would start producing the assets he needed to continue production on kimchi this marks the point in which kimchi would really start to come together and just one month later in september something would happen that would correct kimchi's failed indiegogo campaign valve had recently launched its steam green light program where their community could vote for games that they wanted valve to offer on their service and their very first vote would end in september of where they had chosen 10 separate games kimchi was one of those 10 picks even though the game had only been green lit not released the runoff sales from steam users going to lofigames.com was a very welcome boost to revenue enough of which to put towards even more content for the game he estimated that kimchi would take another two years to complete he was still just as bad at predictions as kinchie would take three times longer chris ended 2012 with a list of plans showing how he was going to overhaul kimchi with his new found funding he was able to get the art assets that he needed where games would normally have most of the art complete before the game finished and would spend every last moment up until the end completing features kimchi was just the opposite 2013 chris and his ever-growing team would churn out content so quickly that they created a trailer just for the update [Music] soon after chris's audio designer would end up dropping out on him but this would prove to be another benefit for kinshi as well while moving into a new office chris began his search for a replacement a fan of the game would post an audition video showing what he was capable of and chris liked it so much that he decided to bring him on board this new addition cole hicks from coal audio solutions would not only finally bring audio to kinshi he would also go on to create its original soundtrack around the same time kimchi's concept artist sergey musan would begin work on kinshi's new world map a task that would take until just before kenshi's release to complete but in 2014 kenshi would receive two gifts that not only sped up development and saved considerable amounts of money but also one that would directly impact the final quality of the game first with many of the systems already being implemented chris wanted to begin working on kenshi's bestiary he had his artist draw up some designs but to get them modeled skinned and ready for use a professional could charge a few thousand dollars each in 2009 chris had mentioned that he hoped kenshi would garner enough popularity for artists to voluntarily work on the assets he needed to continue production four years later kenshi would finally accumulate that popularity linda mcgill ceo of indie studio bugs in had begun modeling rigging and animating some of kenshi's creatures completely for free her second gift would be one that wouldn't come into use until near the end of kenshi's production a pbr and hdr global lighting system in short pbr stands for physically based rendering which affects how lights react on a material surface an hdr meaning a high dynamic range broadens the range of color and contrast that the graphics can put out though kinshi would receive many content updates and patches over the next year there was a massive reserve of content that wouldn't be released until march 31st 2016. a portion of kinshi's new map along with new races factions new everything would go live this update was almost an entirely new game even chris would remark that he probably should have sold it as kinshi too the next two years would be mostly dedicated to finishing the new map and releasing it in new playable chunks as well as tracking down and fixing the plethora of issues kinchie started as one man's project and stayed that way for years its tiny following wouldn't be able to generate the funds chris needed to continue certain areas of production and a painfully failed indiegogo campaign would unfortunately suffer the same fate living in debt and hoping for volunteers to pick up the slack in areas chris was lacking in even the engine kinchie was built on the ogre engine was free on december 6 2018 after more than a decade chris hunt and his team he acquired along the way would finally release kimchi version 1.0 and it would go on to sell over a million copies [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] this video took a while to make i've never done a video like this before and i had to figure out a lot along the way and i ended up rewriting the script three times so if you thought this was too long this is only six pages my original script was 17 but anyways i really enjoyed making this so i hope you all liked it too and thought it turned out pretty well i just recently hit a thousand subscribers so first off thanks a lot for that that's pretty exciting but with those 1000 subs i can finally access the community tab so i'll be able to do polls and stuff like that so you guys might end up being able to vote on what games get covered next or maybe what style of video like a review an analysis a history or making a video like this one or whatever so if you want to be a part of that or if you just want to see more content like this consider subscribing and if you've made it this far into the video please remember to leave a like this is mitchell godsend have a good one

Channel: Mitchell Godsend

Views: 161,334

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Id: k4xExgudU_g

Length: 27min 14sec (1634 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021