CINCINNATI -- Never heard of Nectar Game Studios? Spawned right here in Cincinnati, it was going to be the next Nintendo or Electronic Arts or whatever other big video game developer you care to name.
University of Cincinnati graduate Rob Buchheit and partner Ben Cassell created the company to develop Resurgence, the old-school, role-playing video game they began as a hobby in December 2012. But in July of this year, with the game only partly finished, they were compelled to throw in the towel.
Buchheit talked about the experience at the August meeting of the Cincinnati Chapter of the International Game Developers Association. The nonprofit is a global network of collaborative projects and communities for people who want to build video games.
The local chapter has about 300 members, said Branden Middendorf, who helps organize the meetings along with Buchheit. He kicked off the August meeting by asking the 17 in attendance to introduce themselves, explain what game they're trying to develop and what game they're playing.
Then Buchheit dove into the post-mortem of Nectar.
He explained that Resurgence was Nectar's attempt to re-create some of the classic role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons for video gamers. It was set in the mythical land Lumen, a world being rebuilt after a great disaster. To discover its secrets, players had first to uncover their own past.
Buchheit initially worked part time on the game. Through postings on gaming forums, he built interest and recruited about 100 volunteers to help him with it.
He describes himself as an introvert and a reluctant leader who had to leave his comfort zone to rally a team around him. But in doing so, he said, "I found I was a better leader than I thought."
Through social media, the company created a lot of buzz for the game, Buchheit said. "I spent a lot of time responding to messages personally," he said.
That helped create a community of ambassadors for the game, which helped market it. The ambassadors also served as an informal focus group for the company.
"We knew they would give us straight feedback, because they wanted the game to be good," he said.
In April 2015, Buchheit quit his day job and spent the next year planning a Kickstarter campaign to raise initial funds. When it closed in February 2016, the campaign had exceeded its goals, a total of $185,000, with funds from more than 3,000 backers. Using that money, the company in December 2016 completed demos that it used to shop the game to publishers.
The demos got great feedback from gamers, Buchheit said, and led to repeated interviews with publishers. But he watched with growing dread as one after another, publishers turned the game down.
"We were counting on a publisher to be our first big source of money," he said. "We needed a strong lead investor to get it started."
In June, it became evident that the company couldn't make payroll for another month, he said, and in July he dissolved the company. It felt like a death in the family, he added.
What went wrong
The major problem was that the company didn't have enough money to include all the features it wanted into its game. "We were trying to make a $500,000 game on less than half that budget," Buchheit said.
But it was hard to scale back on the game's features, he said, because the company had promised so many of them in its Kickstarter campaign. "We didn't want to have a lackluster game," he said.
The company also had too few employees for the game it wanted to build. It could afford only one programmer and one modeler, Buchheit said, when it needed multiple programmers and modelers.
Because of the short staff, Buchheit found himself taking on more roles that he had time to handle, he said, which took him away from his core function of being the creative director for the game.
"My dream job morphed into something I didn't want to go to," he said.
The work process really improved, he said, when the company hired a producer, whose role it was to stay focused on the schedule and the progress of the project.
He advised game developers to start by making the smallest game they can. It's crucial to estimate as accurately as possible the time needed to complete a project, he said, because "once money is on the table, time is your enemy."
The Nectar experience was equally stressful and rewarding, he said, but he'd do it again. He's also determined to make Resurgence happen in some form, he said, but for now, he needs to find a new job and a new paycheck.
After spending more than five years on the project, he said, "I felt like I had to grieve it for a while."
