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We (Sparkplay Media) announced today that we closed on a $4.25 million Series A round from Redpoint Ventures and Prism Ventureworks.
Closing this investment round has been both exciting and, to be frank, a bit scary. There was definitely a bit of giddiness on my part when I first saw the money hit our ban account, supplanted within 12 hours by a sense of crushing responsibility. I’ve certainly never seen that much money in one place before, much less under my control.
I’m not going to talk in detail about the process but three things about raising VC money stuck out to me:
- Everybody warned me that raising a Series A would be a full-time job. They’re dirty liars. It’s two or three full-time jobs, encompassing every single waking moment for months straight. Endless meetings, endless documentation/presentation re-writes. I’m sure it’s easier if you’ve done it before and are a known quantity, or if you have a major league reputation, but I don’t fall into either of those categories.
- Before deciding to raise VC money, my view of them generally was along the “vulture capital” line. I was prepared to really be put through the ringer and find myself getting screwed at every turn. These are guys who control immense amounts of investment money and I was expecting that a lot of VCs would be cynical, dismissive people whom I had to kind of hold my nose to deal with. The reality was literally the opposite. I think out of all the VCs we met, there was only one that I actively didn’t like. Almost all of the ones I met with (which is probably not a representative slice, as we took a fairly targeted approach to fundraising) were very sharp, genuinely interested in what we were doing, and showed no sign of trying to force us into any kind of deal that was untoward or bad for us. I really liked almost every VC I met, which makes sense I suppose: Their job is to attract good entrepreneurs and they’d quickly cease to do so if they acted like the jackasses some people make them out to be.
- Our plans morphed a fair amount between deciding to raise VC money and actually doing so. These guys are really good at forcing you to think through exactly what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Even VCs we didn’t end up taking money from contributed in this way.
It came down to choosing between two deals for us (each with a syndicate of two VC firms), which was a great position to be in, though it was much harder than I had anticipated to turn investors down. By the time you’re offered a term sheet, you’ve probably gotten to know your potential investors a bit and feel a bit of a personal bond with them (at least I did).
We’re extremely happy to have chosen the investors we did (there were no bad choices between the two deals on the table at the end of the process…only a great deal and a slightly greater deal). As a bonus, one of our board members (Fouad ElNaggar from Redpoint) is a Rock Band god. His band, “the Red Stained Lips” is currently ranked in the top 10 worldwide (though has been as high as #2 I believe). Serious gaming cred!
(In case they are reading this, so that they don’t feel left out, I want to thank Scott Raney@Redpoint, and Will Kohler and Bong Koh from Prism as well. You guys rock, just not as literally as Fouad!)
Gamebunny has a Q&A up about Earth Eternal. I am my usual feisty and blunt self.
I have an interesting dilemma. We have 16 player races for Earth Eternal, but the world is not black and white like, say, WoW’s (where either you are on the Horde side or the Alliance side, and what race you pick completely determines that. There is no real possibility within their story/world/game rules for a human (Alliance side) to decide that the Tauren are noble creatures worth allying with and effectively switching sides as a result. This certainly simplifies things in some ways as you’re able to, 100% of the time, easily identify an enemy or a potential friend by just glancing at his/her race.
MPOGD has an interview with me today about Earth Eternal. I talk a bit about the character customization we’re going to allow, address the “furry issue” briefly, and expose my megalomania.
We released the first video for Earth Eternal today! It shows three of our NPCs (Dragon, Treekin, Shroomie) and a Feline (one of our sixteen player races) geared up for battle. It all takes place in a test area and shadows are off so don’t be too harsh on the environment, which isn’t the point in the video. We just hope this gives a sense of the ‘flavor’ that EE’s characters will have.
Yes
, sadly, like everyone else we’re not going to make our original release date. We were aiming for a late summer open beta but instead we’re looking at a late fall open beta I think. It’s never fun to go over budget but my god is it worth it. If you had showed us a year ago what Earth Eternal was going to look like in terms of our tech (which is the main hold-up) we would have told you you’re smoking crack. We were aiming for “one step above Runescape” but have blown way, way past that target.
We told ourselves in the beginning that the #1 rule we would follow would be never to let the quality bar rise (as raising it costs money and we’re on a tight budget) but that is really hard to avoid doing if you’ve got any passion for what you’re creating, and so it’s happened in spades. Thank goodness we let it happen as though it’s costing us extra raising that bar is really looking like it’s going to be worth it.
Stomping down on feature/quality creep is truly difficult I have to say. Every day we find something new we can do with the platform we’re building but at this point we have to just grit our teeth and file the idea away in the “sometime post-release” category.
I can’t wait until I can post screenshots openly. In the meantime if you want you can search the ‘Game Design’ section of the Earth Eternal forums at for some prototype shots.
Brian Green has a post up asking “How Low Can You Go?” talking about the minimum amount it takes to make an MMORPG. He’s commenting on a post on a very new blog that claims a new MMORPG (that isn’t trying to compete with the giants) could be made for $2 million and take 2 years doing it. Brian raises the stakes and claims it would take $3-$3.5 million, though he allows that some savings could be made by trading equity for salary.
Note: Brian has since clarified that he’s not asserting it would take 3-3.5 million to make a moderately successful MMORPG. He was asserting that it would take 3-3.5 million to make an MMORPG with the salary figures that the author of MOGBlog was giving. I’m going to leave the post up anyway though as I have little doubt many out there do think it takes millions to turn out an MMORPG.
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I love being both lead designer and CEO sometimes (other times I wish there were two of me to fill what are really two full-time roles).
As I mentioned a week ago, I decided to hold a contest for Earth Eternal where we take submissions from users out of which we’ll pick the 14th race for Earth Eternal. We got a few hundred submissions and as I went through them realized that there were a lot of requests for reptiles and amphibians. There were also a few submissions for boars, and as any long-time player of Achaea knows, I love boars. There’s an 800 pound big black boar roaming around the Saoghal Valley that is loyal to me, in fact. Even though I’m not really visibly active in Achaea any more (though I’m there a lot invisible to all but the producers), woe be to the player that slays my boar! He’s even item/NPC #17, which is my favorite number. (All items/NPCs have a number unique to themselves in our and many other text MUDs.)
Here at Iron Realms we’re constantly beseiged by fans. I literally cannot go to the grocery store without someone approaching me and telling me how our games have altered their lives in the most fundamental of ways. Groupies are everywhere and prominent world statesmen seek our advice on the most serious of issues!!
None of that is true of course but we do have a small base of fans who are willing to check out whatever we develop. On Earth Eternal we’ve really tried to involve these fans in some of our core decisions. We’ve done things from expose multiple pieces of concept art for the same asset to fans on our forums and let their feedback dictate our choices to polling them for their opinions on how the basic server/shard model should work.
As an example, one of the Beast races I didn’t anticipate any demand for and thus didn’t plan for was Longtails (rat-people). I personally am not a huge fan of rats as animals and as such I lacked the ability to pick which piece of concept art to go with to represent Longtails for the modelers/texture artists. I turned to the fans on our forums and got immediate, quality feedback, and everyone seems excited about the final result.
We announced a contest tonight that, while I’ll admit is mainly a promotional stunt, is still going to be interesting I think. We’re letting fans submit a proposal for our 14th and final (for release) player race. I’ll work with the winner to accomodate as closely as possible his/her vision regarding what animal the race is based on, what the race’s name is, and I’ll incorporate some of the winner’s wishes when working the race into the history of Earth Eternal (can’t let the winner dictate it for obvious reasons).
MMORPG. Massively Multiplayer Roleplaying Game. Is there any point in including the RP? Should we just drop it and refer to them, consistently, as MMOGs? Just to be clear, there’s little doubt that roleplaying matters in text MUDs/MMORPGs. I’m really just referring to the top tier (WoW, Runescape, etc) and mid-tier (Everquest 2, CoH, Eve, etc) MMOs here.
Warcry published an interview with me this morning about Earth Eternal. You can find it here.
I just wanted to add, as well, that I’m deeply grateful to sites like RPG Vault (thanks Richard!) and Warcry (thanks Dana!) for their willingness to help bring attention to a game like Earth Eternal that doesn’t have the backing of a major company.
Although I’ve talked a little about Earth Eternal on the Forge previously, few people outside of Iron Realms have seen much of it. Today, that changes, a little, with the release of EE’s website. Check it out!
It is really nice to finally have something tangible (funny that we’ve gotten far enough into the digital age to consider a website ‘tangible’) to point people at when I mention Earth Eternal. It’s nice to just have something to show off for the immense amount of work we’ve put into this project so far. I have to say, producing an MMO that doesn’t suck on a budget our size (we have a 6 figure budget) is hard. We have only three core team members and an outsourced art team. We’re going to do it though, and I’m cautiously optimistic about our chances of success.
When we began EE’s development, the big questions revolved around, “Can we do this?” An MMO is a huge challenge, and we were not starting with something like Multiverse (which I’d consider using if we were starting development today). A good portion of the early months was spent just running experiments and planning.
As time has gone on, we have become sure that we can do this, if you define ‘this’ as releasing a playable 3d MMORPG. The big question now is how much of a game we’re going to be able to build on the platform we’ve built/are building. I don’t have an answer for that yet, but the beauty of self-publishing on the net is that the need for a big splashy launch is greatly reduced. Iterative growth is our thing.
Anyway, wish us luck (or don’t if you’re a hater). Either way, get ready to suck on the sweet sweet goodness that is Earth Eternal.
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haven’t posted much about Earth Eternal lately because there’s not a whole lot we want to release right now. I just approved the final version of our main theme music tonight though, and as nobody is going to be able to really garner much info about the game from the music, I’ll offer it up for your enjoyment or disdain. I like it, quite a bit. It brings to mind echoes of both classic RPGs like Zelda or Secret of Mana, and the epic RPG environments in the line of WoW or Oblivion, though I want to emphasize that I am in no way comparing Earth Eternal with those hallowed games.
Earth Eternal is indeed going to be using the Ogre 3d engine. We completed our tech evaluation of it yesterday and came to the conclusion that it is cheaper in the long term (if more expensive in the short term), and considerably more flexible than the solution we were using (which is going to remain nameless, as I don’t want to slight it). It also gives us the benefit of owning our technology (Ogre is under the LGPL (Lesser GPL) license). The high quality of the Ogre user community was a major factor in our decision, so props to them.
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nyone used it? We’re considering switching from our current proprietary rendering engine (to remain unnamed) to Ogre3d, an open source engine with quite a robust community. We’ve been evaluating Ogre3d since mid-week last week and are rather pleasantly surprised at the quality of the documentation and organization, both of which speak well for the Ogre community effort. Too many open-source projects are plagued by poor documentation and a lack of organization, but when you find a gem, you sometimes really find a big one. I was also impressed by the responsiveness of the forum members and the high signal-to-noise ratio.
Does anyone have any experience with Ogre3d? We’re reviewing the project pretty fully, but there’s no substitute for significant hands-on experience, and we only have approximately another week to finalize our decision. Any help is appreciated, thanks!
(I’m not really looking for suggestions on other engines, though I appreciate the thought. We’ve evaluated the offerings in light of our specific needs - which are not standard - and Ogre appears to be the only thing that potentially fits the bill, for a number of reasons.)
I’m 
feeling very optimistic these days about Earth Eternal’s chances and just had a moment that has left me feeling a little giddy. I needed to share it.
Chris Kohnert, Martin Best, and I (the three core non-art-team development members on EE) were standing around in the mini area we use to test things. Our technology is coming along, but we’re not to the point of worldbuilding yet, so this is literally just a flat square area surrounded by trees. We run around in it to test things with our player characters, and so on.
I 
was in a vet’s office yesterday, having my dog, Nixon, (pictured at right) looked at for an ear infection. While I was in the examination room and the doctor was dealing with Nixon, I started reading a bunch of posters and informational sheets on the wall. One of them really caught my eye. It was a passage from a book by writer-naturalist, Henry Beston, who wrote his famous book, “The Outermost House” in 1926. Traumatized by his experiences in the first World War, Henry had retreated to a tiny house on the very eastern end of Cape Cod to recuperate and regain his internal equilibrium. The passage from the book that caught my eye, and which seems like it was written for Earth Eternal, is this:
Having never designed a graphical game previous to Earth Eternal, I am finding the experience to be an education. Although there’s no fundamental difference between designing EE and our text MUDs, the restrictions we’re under on EE are incredible. For someone used to a level of design freedom that even the best-funded graphical projects can only envy, moving to a self-funded (read “small budget”) graphical project is quite the difference.
After trying quite a few different ideas and variations on those ideas, we have settled on the final logo for Earth Eternal. I probably spent too much time on this but it was fun.
Consider this an official unofficial announcement that our in-development graphical game is called Earth Eternal. I had to announce the name in order to get the help of some of our players in deciding which logo is most appealing to the broad audience of people who like fantasy RPGs. For the sake of reference, here are the logo ideas we’ve been working with. We’ve had three rounds of revisions so far. I appreciate any feedback people have on the logos, as while I know which ones I like, my tastes may or may not correlate with a wider audience.