TAKEDOWN: Red Sabre, A Postmortem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkDz7C1d2TA

In July 2012 the original angel investor went dark. Had to find new funding. In Fall 2012 signed a deal. In January 2013 started full development production, aimed for September 2013 release, XBLA concurrent release was part of the deal.

Challenges:
- Hiring solid engineers took longer than anticipated. (Due to being small team they had to be careful in hiring only top people.)
- Were stuck with old version of Unreal engine and could not use newer Steam integration support, or else would have had to redo lots of audio content.
- Originally had American and Indian QA teams, but in July 2013 the American team was dropped due to a dispute. Challenges with working the Indiam team due to language, time difference, and the team was not experienced in testing multiplayer PC+Xbox games.
- Scope of the game. In Spring it was clear that AI was sucking up a lot of time. And budget determines how much time can be used. In hindsight they should have cut away the singleplayer squad-based experience; it would have been better to have no experience than a sub-par experience.
- The small game, small team message got lost. People expected Battlefield. For example had a ton more animations, but had an engineering bottleneck in getting them to the game.
- Made the mistake of handing a community project like a retail product launch. Christian was occupied by too many things (e.g. different PR for the community and the press), too little time for development.
- Added stress due to relatives dying and team members getting in accidents. With a 10 person team, losing 1 for a month is huge deal.
- Mistake: Should have switched to early access model. QA team failed to find bugs and they were released to players, so had to focus on fixing bugs instead of adding features and working on DLC and Xbox. In early access mode the tone and tempo would have been totally different.
- Mistake: Did not recognize Steam as its own community. Expected people to come to forums but they didn't, so people did not get proper answers and became unhappy.
- Were inexperienced with Xbox development and Microsoft did not have proper support for indy developers back then.
- Had challenges in making the game run outside Steam. In hindsight should have done full Steam and worried about the DRM free version later, and offered to return money to those who demanded a DRM free version.
- Post launch, couldn't get press to have a second look at the game.
- In Spring, funding was running low. Started talking with another publisher, but they backed out. In April had to put the company on hold.
- Current situation: They have a prototype of a new game, on Unreal 3. Next steps are deciding what to they want to do in future. There are new platforms. Early access and indy development has had massive changes since Spring 2012.
- Christian will be at the forums.