Be gay // do giant robot crimes. A mecha tactics game adapted from the Lancer TTRPG (under its third-party license).
The game is NOW AVAILABLE on itch.io!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Modkit & Bugfixing
9 days ago
– Wed, Aug 26, 2026 at 06:06:31 PM
Hello! Another new build over on itch, earlier than normal 'cause I didn't want to wait to get these two things live: a public Modkit for hacking the game & a programmer job posting for bugfixing support.
Modkit
The release two months ago added official mod support. Since then, 36 mods have been uploaded, adding many of the 1st party supplemental frames and talents, totally new homebrew mechs, new assets, and rules tweaks. I’ve been astonished at how fast modders have been getting these out.
Until now, to get the modkit you had to ask for access to a locked channel on the Discord. I wanted to get it into folks’ hands as fast as possible but also protect ourselves, so that was the easiest way to do both. Now that we’ve had some time to batten down our hatches with a lawyer-approved EULA and do some light source & asset watermarking, we’re now able to offer the full source of Lancer Tactics in a modkit alongside the game on itch.io.
Bugfixing Programming role
At time of writing, Trello backlog for Lancer Tactics is currently sitting at 207 bug tickets and 202 UI improvement tickets. That’s a lot! Most of the last two updates have been almost entirely consisted of bugfixes!
As such, we’re looking for a GDscript programmer to join the team as a part-time contractor to help stay on top of these and work through the backlog. If you or someone you know is fluent in Godot, comfortable wading into an in-progress project, and experienced with QA processes we want to hear from you!
Zooming out a bit: I think the reason that we’re seeing this many bugs is because we opened up such a huge surface area by offering in-game editors, and it’s only expanded with the addition of modding. The number of straight Lancer-mechanics bugs we’re seeing is a relatively small porportion overall. There are SO many edge cases that we’d never hit if we were only authoring content ourselves through Godot. Additionally, I have hella automated tests that simulate and run through a lot of in-game mechanical situations to make sure they continue working, but it’s a lot harder to write these sorts of tests for user UI like the editor.
Having a map editor is a core part of LT’s appeal so it’s here to stay, but there’s a lesson to be learned here about how deceptively much that is to bite off to chew. I’m not sure what I would change if I was starting over… perhaps spend even more time standardizing my UI toolbox and establishing a shared pipeline that all data changes went through using that toolbox.
Editor features for dayyys
about 1 month ago
– Wed, Aug 05, 2026 at 03:37:00 PM
Hey! Quick note that v1.2.2 is now live on itch.io. There wasn't a lot to talk about this update since it's a lot of editor quality-of-life fixes and features, so it's mostly just a laundry list of changes.
I also just somewhat belatedly marked this campaign as "fulfillment complete" so I stop getting obnoxious notifications from Kickstarter to write updates (I do so of my own immense will). As a reminder, you can get your download key for the early access version of the game via backerkit's digital downloads. Let me know if you have any trouble accessing it.
So, uh, hope you're doing well. What a world cup final, right? Wild how large a difference there was between the number of times the ball went in Argentina's goal and Spain's final score. Anyway, three paragraphs is probably long enough to justify sending this now byeeee — Olive
Mod suppport!!
2 months ago
– Mon, Jun 29, 2026 at 06:09:30 PM
Lancer Tactics now has official mod support & a source-available modkit! For players, mods can now be downloaded through the Omninet browser alongside maps and modules, and then managed in a new Omninet tab:
There's a lot to talk about here so it seems like a natural focus of this month's update.
Background — how do Godot mods work?
Godot projects have an internal filesystem much like the one on your computer; a series of folders and files. The root is referred to as "res://"
However, to run the game Godot needs assets (images, music, etc) to be in a different format than you'd find with them sitting in your filesystem. It compiles these files into a big pile of files that look like this, all jumbled together in one folder:
To keep knowing where things are, it maintains a skeleton of the original filesystem with all the orignal files swapped out with ".remap" placeholders that just point to where in that big pile the asset they represent went. Furthermore, whenever the game attempts to load a specific asset at a location (e.g. "res://assets/icons/mech.svg"), it caches whatever it loaded into memory. Whenever we ask it to load that asset again, it doesn't have to go ask the .remap file where the original one went and load it up — it just returns whatever it ended up loading from there last time. This cache is like a ghost sitting on top of a skeleton.
For modding, this gives us an opportunity. Instead of needing to actually copy in modded files and override the originals, we can manipulate this ghost-filesystem-cache by lying about what files are at what locations. Here's what a mod looks like for Lancer Tactics (using a modified system from Godot Mod Loader):
We have a special folder where we put the actual mod files: "unpacked", then another folder with the specific mod's identifier "Wickworks-Sawhorse". Within *that*, we have a "res" folder, and that's where the lying starts. When loading up the mod, we can grab everything inside of the mod's "res" and tell the ghost-cache that the mod's files are the ones that are actually at that location. In this example, by the end of it when we ask Godot to load "res://assets/frames/horus/mf_sawhorse.png", it will return the file that's actually over in "res://unpacked/Wickworks-Sawhorse/res/assets/frames/horus/mf_sawhorse.png".
Now that we have the power to insert files as we'd like, Godot Mod Loader additionally has some functions that through dark magic allows multiple mods to all alter the same script instead of overriding it. I'm a little fuzzy on these details, but the shape of it is that while loading each successive script that extends the same file actually extends the *previous* one that also extended that script so all the changes end up getting applied.
(though there is a bug in the Godot engine that's currently preventing doing this dark magic to any file that has a class_name; a pretty friggin major restriction!! If a Godot engine dev is reading this, a fix would be much appreciated thank you!)
In order to change what mods are active, the out-of-the-box Godot Mod Loader addon expects you to restart the game so it can start work with a clean slate each time. For Lancer Tactics, I modified this so it tracks all files inserted so we can go and undo all of our lies and reset the ghost-cache to files' original locations. This was important because I'm expecting people to want to be able to make maps and modules with bundled-in mods that substantially alter the content of the game, and requiring a restart whenever you load one up would be a terrible experience.
Speaking of bundling mods with other content...
Security Concerns
Mods are code that some rando wrote that the game downloads and then runs on your machine. Godot does not have built-in sandboxing for gdscript, so this code has just as much access as the game does, ie, can read or write any file on your computer and talk to the internet. Uh oh!
To be fair, this is a issue with most mods for most games. It's a very trust-based at-your-own-risk sort of country. This is fine if mods aren't tightly integrated, but as soon as you as a developer start removing barriers and letting people accidentally stumble into downloading harmful code by just pressing buttons in-game, you start taking on the responsibility in the case of something bad happening.
Slay The Spire 2, another game made in Godot, handles this by putting a big warning screen that it forces you to click through before you can start installing mods. We've done something similar:
Additionally, LT's system distinguishes between three different types of mods:
Asset Pack: There's no security concern if there's no scripts. Mods that consist of only inert files (images, sound, json) will be allowed to be bundled with maps and modules and loaded without requiring a confirmation from the user. Assets are placed entirely implicitly by their location in the mod's "res" subfolder. Good for things like additional portrait options or alternate mech tokens.
Content Pack: These can have scripts, and will likely only swap in files implicitly like asset packs, but do have the power to control where their files go if they have special needs, but are responsible for unspooling any nonstandard changes they make on being deactivated.
Substantial Mod: as above, but the changes are not cleanly reversible so require a game restart to turn off or on. Mods are in charge of telling LT if they're a content pack or substantial; the security concern is equivalent.
Given an extra four months, I could probably add the option to script game content in a nice sandboxed environment by setting up an internal .lua API for new abilities to use. This would allow new mechs and whatnot to count as asset packs, but the time-benefit tradeoff isn't favorable given our time and labor constraints. I have it filed away as possible avenue to explore after we make a million dollars on Steam and the security concerns become less theoretical.
Mod Tooling
So! That's a lot of preamble. How does one actually make a mod?
First, you need to get your hands on the source of the game. It's possible to decompile any game made in Godot which is what bootleg (affectionate) modders have been doing up til now, but we're making the source available through official channels for convenience. Lancer's TTRPG creator ecosystem is based on a belief that it should be hackable & extensible, and we want to carry that culture forward.
We're talking to a lawyer to make sure we have all our hatches buttoned down legally to make sure we maintain ownership of the game code itself (and maybe like watermark some assets?), but once we get that squared away we'll add the modkit alongside the rest of the downloads on itch. Until then, you can request early access to it on LT's Discord server.
Once you get the modkit, there's a modding_guide.txt that should give you the information you need to start making stuff:
And make the mods in the godot editor itself; the same view I have when making the game:
I'd love to establish way to start accumulating community knowledge about modding the game that's not controlled by google/discord. Getting a wiki spun up seems like the obvious choice — it's on my to-do list.
I'm a bit nervous opening the floodgates for modding because it's a significant increase in "surface area" that I'll have to maintain. Mods can cause crashes I don't have control over, changes I make will break mods that modders don't have control over, the tooling is another editor to make sure correctly syncs with data, and runtime juggling of all these files is delicate and impossible to set up automated testing for.
But we gotta pull the trigger sometime, so might as well be now to give us a long runway before Steam release to work out the kinks with the whole thing.
The rest of the changelog
To reduce copy+paste work that I have to do, I'm going to start leaving the nitty-gritty changelog out of these Kickstarter updates; you can see em over on itch.
Points still worth keeping here:
I've bumped up the version number of the game from 0.7.x to 1.0.x. This doesn't mean the game is out of early access or anything; popping this cherry is purely a matter of not breaking semantic compatibility with mods in the future. Read this for more about semantic versioning, but the short of it is that the first number bumping up indicates a major breaking change that requires mods to be updated. Up til now I've been definitely operating on pride versioning instead lol
Fixed downloading combats with empty names from mod.io; a few versions back there was a bug that meant all uploaded maps were named ".json" with no filename. This build should now be able to handle it when it downloads a combat with no name like that.
Marko noted that we've hit the 2000th bug card card on Trello! That so many 🪲😵💫🪲
I think I've finally fixed the issue where the game crashes on exit. I'm pretty sure the culprit was FMOD, gasp.
I set up a better export-build pipeline so I only have to run a script on the command line to get PC/Mac/Linux + modkit builds that takes like four minutes. It doesn't sound like a lot but will save me a half hour of manually running around switching computers and deleting folders every time we make an update.
We also showcased at PIGCON, the first games convention the Portland Indie Game squad has done! I went to some of the first meetups the organizers put on back in 2012 & have been in-and-out since then, but it was so cool to see what a force of indie game community it's become.
I always come away with pages of playtest notes & it was very cool to see some of my indie dev inspirations speak in-person. :)
— Olive
Organizational silos & superheroing
3 months ago
– Thu, May 28, 2026 at 04:00:07 PM
In last month's report card I mentioned that we got a C grade in organization for the project, and would follow up with a more in-depth discussion. So here we are!Since this section is about our organizational structure, it more than the rest of these posts is co-written by my co-leads Josh Boykin and Mark Carpenter.
To give you an overview, here's an org chart with our current job roles and the lines of regular communication:
Three salient points here:
As a near-fully remote team, communication between members doesn't come for free & had to be explicitly planned. Mark, as Art Lead, ended up acting as an "axle" whose near entire job, at times, became having individual calls to make sure everyone was moving in the right direction and speeds.
Josh started working with us at the end of year 2 as a writing editor, but as it dawned on us how much we needed help on the non-Lancer-mechanics side of the game, he shifted to taking on a full Narrative Lead role. However, we never took the time to hash out the clear responsibilities of that role, a pipeline for how exactly to add narrative to the game, nor what resources were required for doing the work.
I have solid personal relationships with both Mark and Josh. Mark and I were housemates through Covid so have battle-weathered communication & trust from the quarantine years. Josh and I are now housemates in Portland so get a lot of in-person time. However, neither of them had ever met IRL pre-Lancer Tactics so didn't have existing lines of communication they could use to communicate, and as an organization we didn't invest in establishing one.
As part of the Kickstarter wrap-up, we flew Mark up to Portland and spent the week talking through the emotions and narratives that had built up. These post-mortem discussions were larger than just these, but I can share the aspects of the talks that are relevant here in terms of our organization. We kept touching on two concepts in particular: siloing and superheroing.
Siloing
I've described the experience of making Lancer Tactics as feeling "siloed", where I talk with the people I'm directly working with but only rarely interact with people more than one step away. As Programming/Creative Lead, I'd get looped in whenever there were bugs/features/designs that required code changes but there are still some contractors I've never spoken to. I think that's natural as teams get larger, but when we're still as small as we are the only reason we're not interconnected is because we didn't invest in doing so.
On the other hand, this siloing was somewhat necessary for budgetary reasons. Even with the Kickstarter, we were never close to being able to hire full-time game artists, so contractors were the only way to get the breadth of work we needed done. A natural consequence of working with someone who's only available for a short time, or a few hours each week over years, was that they never have a chance to pick up the full context of the game. Mark was left filling those context gaps for everyone, and that took up a lot of time.
For tasks that required cross-discipline collaboration (specifically, implementing the campaign modules) we especially didn't have a pipeline with clear responsibilities & appropriate resources. Writing, map designs, and implementation notes were scattered across half a dozen different google docs in various directories with no clear way to tell what was the most up-to-date versions — when "USE THIS ONE" starts showing up in your document titles, you know something has gone wrong.
A particularly rough point on this siloing front was Josh's transition from editing-contractor to Narrative-Lead-core-team-member. Mark and I worked well in the siloed structure, but it left Josh feeling on the outside when trying to pick up the narrative without much context for prior decisions or others to directly work with. We ended up with a lot of crossed wires and unspoken expectations, and those impacts rippled through the project in a number of ways.
How we're improving:
It's not actually clear to us what the ideal alternative to contractor siloing is, given our constraints. A few possibilities:
Possibly some way of more efficiently bringing & keeping everyone up to speed?
Hiring fewer people with more general skillsets for greater numbers of hours?
It would also be helpful to invest more time in making sure everyone can validate/implement their pieces in the game itself, which would allow Mark to spend more time to do vision-work and think at a higher-level instead of implementation details and making manual formatting fixes.
Additionally, we're making some changes to how the core team operates:
Plan to fly Mark up from SF to PDX at least once a quarter so the core team can work in the same physical space. Having him visit for the half-week for the Kickstarter wrapup has gotten a lot of things moving that would have stagnated if we left it digital.
We've designed an interdisciplinary pipeline for making modules with clear steps, deliverables, and timelines. I'm looking at processes like the one Mark Rosewater has described for Magic: the Gathering.
We've made some slight but structural tweaks: Josh now runs our meetings to put him in a more active administrative role, and we have checkpoints at the beginning and end of each meeting to talk about how we’re feeling as people in addition to how we’re feeling about the work.
The studio is currently operating under Wickworks, a single-owner LLC that I launched the Kickstarter with because I had it on-hand and needed to move fast. We have a separate operating agreement for the project that's more equitable, but legally I still own the business. We're looking into transforming it into a legal co-op under a new studio name (which won't include my deadname lol). We're moving a bit slow on it because it's not urgent, but the hope is that will structurally reflect the values we hold. And also because I want to join a game worker union but currently can't because I'm an biz owner. :(
We've also discussed find an experienced studio consultant to be able to come in and make recommendations. So much of what we're doing is improvised; we collectively have very little mainstream game dev experience and would likely benefit from some guidance.
Superheroing & Crunch
Many years ago, my father once said that he attended a performance review where someone on the team was hailed as a "superhero" for their work. He was the only one in the room to be taken aback by this; his perspective was that, for a company, needing to have superheroes was a failure. It's one of the few pieces of advice that he's given me that I think has really panned out (compared to misses like "to smooth things over, always apologize, even if it's not your fault"). With this framing, there was a lot of superheroing required to get us to where we are.
For myself, I really am at my happiest when I'm working on a project ("I'm not burning out!", I oft proclaim, undercut by my wrist braces), but it’s easy for big'uns like LT to consume my life. I often feel the full weight of making the completion line go up, and have adopted adaptive habits that genuinely allow me to work hard without hurting myself emotionally & physically. However, I've also been recently describing myself to friends as "a hollowed-out implement of a person, honed to output Lancer Tactics the Video Game." That's maybe not great!!
Mark's version of superheroing was spending a lot of his time filling the context gaps for contractors e.g. manually adjusting palettes so they could be recolored by the shader as we changed the requirements, because doing it himself was faster than communication and training. As described above, this might have been necessary+true given our structure, but ideally we'd find a setup where it didn't have to be as much.
Josh’s superheroing has come in filling gaps in the project around marketing and business development (connecting with other developers, making connections at conventions, etc). He’s been working in games for over a decade and has been able to make a lot of great connections for Lancer Tactics, plus help organize some of the game’s larger strategy beyond the Kickstarter. But trying to carry those things alongside the challenges with figuring out Lancer Tactics’ narrative side has been overwhelming for him at times, especially when combined with some family emergencies and working other jobs.
How we're improving:
We generally saw success when we found ways to pry Olive's fingers off of jobs — bringing Marko on to process reports & help reproduce bugs has worked fantastically and freed her up to focus more on fixing confirmed bugs and adding content+features. We'll try to keep finding more places where we can do that.
Ideally there would be more core team processes as a whole: clearer communication and support for all team members, as well as structured social interactions and process-scaffolding to keep the team cared for as well as the project.
We don't have a solution to Crunch in Video Games (TM). Games take an absurd amount of effort to make & the economic constraints are a pressure cooker. The angle that I think we have to improve matters for ourselves is to try and be less alone about the work; better integration and ability to ask each other for help and organizational structures (like the pipeline for campaigns I mentioned in the previous section).
----------------
With all that said, I'm so proud of and thankful to everyone who contributed to this project. Despite not always being set up for success, through talent and grace and toil we have ended up making a fun game & faithful adaptation of the Lancer TTRPG. Making organizational mistakes is very common for new teams & especially in the wake of an unexpectedly successful Kickstarter. You just don't know what you need until you get there.
"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." <== // ==> "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast."
Year 3 Kickstarter report card
5 months ago
– Wed, Apr 15, 2026 at 09:01:02 AM
Note before we get into it: we'll be doing a livestream celebration & AMAtoday at 3-5pm on Youtube; submit any questions you have here about the game / development / Lancer.
We're done with the Kickstarter!
"You're done with the Kickstarter? What does that mean? Is the game officially out? Aren't y'all still working on it?"
What I mean is this: it's been three years since the campaign funded. Our final stretch goal was for three years of work. From here til Steam release in a year or so, development is gonna be powered by ongoing early access sales. It seems appropriate to mark the milestone & do a wrap-up to see if we did everything we said we'd do.
That's right — it's time for a (non-judgemental, just transparent) report card!
Report Card
Apparently I love being graded, and if nobody else is going to do it I'll do it myself. Let's get into each subject:
Backer rewards: A
Download keys have been available via Backerkit throughout development. All the enemy pilot and credit names were gathered through a Backerkit survey and have been put in-game. We took care of shipping physical rewards (stickers + coins) pretty early on. I had video calls with everyone who signed up to create Instant Action encounters at the end of last year.
For the custom pilot portraits, we ended up taking each one's individual designs and breaking them down into components that can be re-used in other portraits as well; because one backer wanted a cool anthro robo-helmet, now everybody can use it. You can find them in-game in the "stock pilot" roster for Instant Action:
Finally, there's not too much I can say publicly about the Xiaoli homebrew mech. Through unforeseen circumstances we weren't able to get the final designs from the backer, and then we were not able to muster the design energy to bring it over the line ourselves (ironically, the existence of the Zheng's Tiger-Hunter Sheathe sank the design that came the furthest). I'd very much like to come back and fulfill this in future development (maybe as the masthead for when we add mod support?) but it's a miss for now.
10/11 == 91%, so that's an A for backer rewards!
Project completion: B
Looking back at the project page, these were the baseline & stretch goals, point by point:
Out of 17 goals, we finished 13, totally missed 2, and got most of the way there for the last 2. Notes for the ones we didn't complete:
Mech art: we still have a handful of NPCs that are missing new tokens, and all drones are using the same default sprite. We're still working on them & they'll will be done in followups (in this metaphor, that's summer school I guess?). Partial credit.
Content-complete: as described from the outset, this was always supposed to be a "give it our best shot" kind of goal. We ended up getting everything except about half of the NPC templates; I think that's pretty good!! But less than a ✅ still isn't a ✅ so I'm not marking it as such. Here's the breakdown:
Campaign modules #1 and #2: Oof. I'll talk about this more down in the Organization section, but we just weren't able to pull these together on time. Dia, Trey, and Eld all got their writing & design work in just fine, but we didn't have a team pipeline to turn that work into something playable by this milestone. Can't win em all.
I've said a number of times over the last few years that if I could take one thing back about the campaign, it'd be adding the second campaign stretch goal. As it became clear that this was a wayy bigger swing than I'd anticipated, we shifted our focus into making the module editor the best it could be for this release with the expectation that that would pay dividends into the future as we and you, fellow reader, make stuff. Getting these done is still essential for the eventual Steam release so we'll get to them over the next year, but it's a miss for now.
As a side-note, the "adapt TTRPG rules to digital" point sounds innocuous but as you may remember, it led to our biggest community outcry/debate/conversation when we decided that Kai's NPC Rebake would make for a better experience for LT than the vanilla statblocks. I'm very happy with where we ended up as a result of the conversation, and I think the game is stronger for it, but expect to be hearing about the feathers it ruffled for years.
On the whole, we were able to stay extremely close to the TTRPG rules. You can directly import characters you made in COMP/CON and expect them to function as they would in tabletop. Flying as a status, 2 action "points" instead of quick+quick/full, and limiting the brace triggers are the only other significant rules adaptations we had to make (that I can remember right now).
If we count the partials as 1/2, that's an arbitrarily-defined final score of 14/17 == 82%. Solid B.
Extra credit: +3 points
Module Editor: Even though we didn't manage to pull together the campaign modules themselves, we do have the tooling to do so up and running. Much like the combat map editor, we've kept our content-creation tools player-facing so we now essentially have a miniature visual-novel maker built into Lancer Tactics.
3D world: About a year into the project, a quick art test revealed to us that Lancer Tactics really, really wanted to be in 3D. With a fixed 2D camera angle, we couldn't have more than one or two elevation layers before it would start obscuring everything behind it. Since line-of-sight blockers are keystones in Lancer map design, this meant we'd be forced to have all these giant robots not be able to see past cliffs/buildings that were clearly shorter than themselves.
Moving to 3D unlocked the ability to have maps that were, well, more tactically three-dimensional. Think of how strange it would have looked to take this fall damage getting pushed off one of the 2D cliffs.
Looking back, there's a certain theatre-of-the-mind charm that I think we could have made work if 3D wasn't an option for some reason... I hope the alternate reality versions of us that went down that path instead are having a good time.
Not many games would have been able to swap out their renderer like this a third of the way through development and still come out on schedule (sans for the 3-month extension we gave ourselves for the change). My confidence that this wasn't a project-ending cascade of scope creep was ultimately born out. Good job keeping logic separate from display, me.
Mod.io support: What good is making stuff if you can't share it? We didn't promise it up front, but I got integration with mod.io working for both Instant Action combats and modules.
That's +3 extra credit points, in total. What kind of points? How do they relate to the rest of the grades? These are questions I'm not interested in answering. They're points. Next!
Financials: A
Here's the $50,000 budget we presented on the campaign page, not including the final stretch goal.
Here's where our spending is today, with a lifetime income of about $240,000 including both the final stretch goal and ongoing sales on itch.
Looking at the numbers as a whole creates a strange disconnect for me. In retrospect, that's a lot of total money that moved through the project, but at this point we've expended the Kickstarter funds so my daily concern is about the balance between ongoing sales vs our post-Kickstarter burn rate + new expenses; for every payout from itch, we find new stuff we need to hire/buy.
We've gone over the initial budgets in a number of areas, but have matched those overrides with more ongoing sales than we expected. There was one point where we technically had more budgeted to spend than we had in the account, but it didn't last long and our buffer has since recovered. Only since the trailer dropped and things have started to ramp up on itch have we started to really breath easier.
Here's the last year of sales on itch, which I feel a little awkward about sharing but also am inspired by Evil Hat Productions who keep their sale numbers public, so I'd like to be able to do the same.
The spikes are the dramatic events (thank u dragonkid11), but it's so weird to me that the baseline sale rate is so steady. The only thing powering it is statistics: "Lancer Tactics ambiently shows up on X number of people's screens via the itch.io storefront & google searches, and Y percent of those people buy it."
Looking at the path from where we are to Steam release, we now have the luxury of attempting to get there powered by these sales alone. We're still going back and forth on whether to seek additional external money from a publisher/fund for some extra muscle, but it makes me feel extremely secure to not require it for our survival.
Survival is victory. We get a simple A here.
Organization: C
Okay, so... my co-leads Josh Boykin and Mark Carpenter have been co-writing this section with me for about a week now. We have a google doc that's about five pages long where we've been trying to come to a narrative about the strengths & weaknesses of how we set up our roles & lines of communication. In the interests of the transparency that we've established in these backer updates, we think it would be extremely valuable to share but would inflate the length of this already-long update.
So here's our org chart & summary, with plans to post the full thing as a part 2 next month:
As a near-fully remote team, communication between members doesn't come for free & had to be explicitly planned. Mark, as Art Lead, ended up acting as an "axle" whose near entire job, at times, became having individual calls to make sure everyone was moving in the right direction.
Josh started working with us at the end of year 2 as a writing editor, but as it dawned on us how much we needed help on the non-Lancer-mechanics side of the game he shifted to taking on a full Narrative Lead role. However, we never took the time to hash out the clear responsibilities of that role, a pipeline for how exactly to add narrative to the game, nor what resources were required for doing the work.
This setup resulted in interdisciplinary tasks — specifically, implementing the campaign modules — slowing to a crawl because none of the Leads had all the context, resources, pipeline, or time they needed stitch all the pieces together.
Josh has pointed out that these kinds of structural issues are common for new organizations, especially in the wake of unexpectedly successful Kickstarter campaigns, so I don't feel bad about this. It's an area for growth, and through coming together and writing this postmortem I'm optimistic that we've identified and are undertaking ways to improve.
We'll discuss it more at a later date. "C" me after class.
Backer communication: A++
Slideshow of random photos like they show at funerals.
(There's a reason they call these types of writeups postmortems)
Here's a montage of all the good times we had getting here, pulled from previous posts. Suggested listening.
What's next?
Game's not done. We've still got at least a year of work ahead for us before Steam release which, for marketing purposes, is the point it'll be "officially" out (although LT is the sort of long-haul game that wants indefinite ongoing support & additional content, so who knows when the work-curse will finally be broken). Until then, we're still in early access.
Even though the Kickstarter is now technically complete & our obligations are discharged, I'm going to keep posting ~monthly updates and changelogs here. Writing these is a compulsion // an essential part of my process so may as well lol (I just did a quick count — I am now just two shy of having written 100 lifetime project updates on Kickstarter).
After our celebration livestream later today (did I mention? 3pm PST! AMA question submissions here!), we're going to be taking a week or two as a break to catch our breath and plan the road to Steam over the next year.
Thank you for coming along with us & reading (some amount of?) these updates for the last three years. All three of my Kickstarter campaigns have been life-changing but the scale of this one has been especially so. Backers are in many ways literally co-creators through playtesting, content submissions (all those pilot names & callsigns are *chef's kiss*), and comments. It's a pleasure to have gone on this journey with you. 🙏🫡✨
