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A post-mortem article on Dear Esther by Robert Briscoe of thechineseroom

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An emotional draining story of hard work, money problems, a call from Valve with a proposal that no one would turn away, Jonathan Blow and Indie Fund to the rescue. Profit.

Great, great read. I would recommend this to any gaffer involved or nurturing the notion of being involved in independent game creation as this should be an inspiring read.

Enjoy!
 
Amazing and inspirational read. Thank you for posting this.

Its just a same that this will get buried on here and not enough people will read it.
 
GHG said:
Amazing and inspirational read. Thank you for posting this.

Its just a same that this will get buried on here and not enough people will read it.
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I was thinking for a few minutes of ways to spice up the thread title to bring more people to enter the thread and read Robert article, but I finally decided that a simple informative title should suffice. Whoever knows and loves Dear Esther will read it. I just felt so good after reading the story that I had to share it with someone else.
 
Robert Briscoe is dead?
 
I read it and it was an amazing piece. The release day and the first week's numbers must have been one of the most amazing weeks of the creator's decade.

You should at least quote some sections of the article. It is pretty damn huge.
 
SMT said:
Robert Briscoe is dead?
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You have to read the article to know! ;) I won't spoil it.

SolarPowered said:
I read it and it was an amazing piece. The release day and the first week's numbers must have been one of the most amazing weeks of the creator's decade.

You should at least quote some sections of the article. It is pretty damn huge.
Click to expand...

That was also something that I struggled for a while before posting. I finally decided to not post any quotes from the article as that should incentivize people to read the whole piece. And that is what I intended in the first place posting it here.
 
Great short piece, strangely enough steam downloaded a 90MB update for Dear Esther while I was reading. Anyone else get that? There's no patch notes up.
 
Just read this. Damn good read. I got chills at the part where he sees the sales figures come in. :)

And Dear Esther is fantastic. I like to boot it up just to stroll up and down the virtual beaches and decompress when I'm feeling stressed. :)
 
Neiteio said:
Just read this. Damn good read. I got chills at the part where he sees the sales figures come in. :)

And Dear Esther is fantastic. I like to boot it up just to stroll up and down the virtual beaches and decompress when I'm feeling stressed. :)
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I also like to enable noclip through the console just to fly around the island. So cool!
 
That was a great read, it seems you need a very strong will to stick by a project. One of my favorite games of 2012, not since Braid or Alan Wake have I worked my head over the mysteries of a game's story and the random elements added great replayability.

At the same time we were talking release dates, and although it looked like weÂ’d hit our December deadline, Indie Fund and our contacts at Steam, strongly advised against releasing around Christmas due to decreased press activity and also the risk of being buried under an avalanche of Christmas sales. So we had to delay again, but after nearly three years of development, a couple of extra months didnÂ’t seem like a big deal any more, so we eventually settled on February the 14th, ValentineÂ’s Day.
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Finally, some sense! I wish more publishers and higher-ups had the sense of how important release dates are.

“Hey Valve, we have a super awesome mod that we want to make into a real game but we don’t have any money, can you give us a free license? Love you Xxx”

The first response we had back was: “come back when you have a demo and a community that proves its popularity, then we’ll talk”.
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Might sound cold, but it's appropriate. I guess this is what the reasoning for Steam Greenlight was, especially with the "a community that proves its popularity" part.

All this talk about betting your whole life on an indie game, which came up in Indie Game the Movie too shows they weren't exaggerating or being drama queens like some people thought.
 
Interesting read. Never realized just how much pressure they were under. I'm glad that everything worked out the way it did. I can't believe Briscoe was willing to sacrifice so much, and live in those kinds of conditions and on that kind of budget. This actually reminded me of Indie Game The Movie. The difference here is that with someone like Team Meat, their game was completely their own creation. Briscoe was doing a remake. I feel like the remake had enough of its own identity with all of Briscoe's touches in the end. He definitely invested enough into the project to have it be just as much of his own creation as Pinchbeck. It's actually quite amazing how this started as a simple side project.

By the way, I noticed there was an update to Dear Esther today. There's no news update on Steam and I can't find a changelog anywhere. I wonder what was changed/added?
 
I remember reading those production blog entries during development, had no idea all this drama was happening behind the scenes. Say what you want about Dear Esther, but the art was magnificent. I also liked the subtle jab at the indie fund for their console audience remarks.
 
Hey, thanks for posting this. Pretty inspirational stuff and I love to hear development stories. This is something I needed at the moment for sure.
 
Very awesome read. I am glad that these guys saw success. The game is awesome and I still love playing it even though for a while I thought I wanted to strangle them while I was helping with the Japanese localization. ^^
 
One of the only story "games" I've played recently that I truly enjoyed. The music was lovely, the view was gorgeous and I loved the creepy ghosts littered around the game. That article is great, I can't believe they turned down the initial Valve job offer though.
 
Should be a good read, always love to read inspirational stories of indie devs... even if I thought Dear Esther was one of the worst "games" I've ever had the displeasure of experiencing. At least some of the graphics looked really nice.
 
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