ludonarrator

Unlike publisher backed studios, indie ones like Stoic usually find themselves using the proceeds of their current game to fund the next. With such pressure on getting it right the first time, what proportion of The Banner Saga was in your heads, and manifested (more or less) as is? And what proportion could you afford the luxury of spending precious resources and time on iterative discovery / pre-production for?

Dan, with the increasing dominance of multiplayer arenas, how would you recommend we ensure SP campaigns (essentially gameplay with narrative) don't die out?

Chiming in; apart from the main game, I'd also suggest continually designing and working on short-length projects - anywhere between a day to a couple of months. That will not only give you an idea of how to work with hard deadlines (ie, how to best balance between "perfection" and "due dates"), but also give you recurring opportunities to use knowledge gained on previous sprints to improve the next one. This will be difficult to do in the main game without constant refactoring of the underlying code base.

Thank you for the detailed response! The key (as always) seems to be in fleshing out macro vs micro design.

1. What's your take on the outrage about EA, as a game dev?

There was a tweet by Jonathan blow that's very apt and sums up the situation rather succinctly:

I think if you want to prevent a Loot Crate Apocalypse, the real solution is not to get mad at publishers, but to educate players in some way, so that they see crate systems as tacky and bad. Publishers have to do what will keep them alive.

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/930179966100295680