Hey everyone!
This has been one hell of a year, and we wanted to take some time to reflect on this past year and see where the game has progressed, what challenges we’ve faced, and where the game will go from here!
We started off the year with a plan. We had a good idea of what we wanted the demo to encompass and at this point we had just started on our Kickstarter goals and plans. At this point, we had some nice architecture, fully modeled and animated SCPs, detailed concept art, and a player character, as well as a great library of sound assets provided to us by Nathan Moody, who created the ENTIRE soundscape for the demo!
It was from these parts we put our heads together and refined all these pieces into something that utilizes as many of them as possible while also being a cohesive experience, which was admittedly very difficult. However, as we began blocking out the map and testing the new mechanics that were showcased in the demo, it became much clearer where the direction of this demo was going, and what we could show off with the set timeline that was created for it.
There were many iterations of the map we went through, as well as challenges with the AI and player mechanics that caused a lot of changes to be made to different elements of the demo. However, the overall idea and experience we were trying to provide to players began to shine through, and after many hours of playtesting and refining the smaller details of the map, sequencing, and interactions with both the SCPs and AI, we were able to confidently start the process for the public launch!
During this time, we started trying to make sure the Kickstarter was going to be known about by enough people that it would be a success, and this was an incredibly daunting challenge that was always in the back of our minds. However, this helped us get creative with the way we decided and wanted to show off content, which eventually lead to the well-loved petting animations for the SCPs! This was a turning point for us since it was originally a simple joke, but we are so happy it was a fun thing you guys as a community loved and wanted us to keep and even expand upon for the full release.
As the actual announced date for the Kickstarter slowly came upon us, it was absolutely all hands-on deck since we wanted to ensure what was released was as stable and bug-free as possible. This led to many hours of us together as a team testing and iterating things and was a fantastic learning experience for all of us in finding small issues and deploying quick solutions, as well as just having all of us together messing around in the game was quite an entertaining time and strengthened the team as a whole.
Right up until the actual day of the Kickstarter launch, we were incredibly nervous about what the public reception to the demo will be as well as the first numbers that would come up with the Kickstarter since it’s historically very clear where your campaign will end up after the first 48 hours.
Ten minutes before the Kickstarter was slated to launch, we were all together staring at the launch page with a million different ideas about what will happen after we clicked that button…
The moment after we clicked it though, we were nothing short of blown away with the reception to the demo and the Kickstarter as a whole, with over 25% of the goal being reached in less than 24 hours. This was an incredible thing for us all to see and gave us a lot of hope that the campaign would end successfully, and that we would be able to continue this project with the help of an amazing community!
During the campaign, we worked with some awesome communities and incredible creators like IGP, SCP Illustrated, Volgun, TheeSherm, and SCP Explained to help spread the project to the outer regions of the SCP world and we are insanely grateful for their support. We also used this period during Kickstarter to start experimenting with drivable vehicles, character interaction and of course, doing more fun animations.
As the campaign came to a close, we were humbled and honored to have become the #1 highest-funded SCP game on Kickstarter EVER! It’s an incredible thing to have such a devoted and awesome community behind us, and we are just getting started with what we will be showing off.
After the Kickstarter campaign ended, we began showing off bits and pieces of new mechanics and SCP additions as well as parts of the new map while we started building the entirety of Level One.
There’s still a ton for us to polish and get ready to show off publicly, and of course, we are holding off on showing certain aspects of new mechanics and parts of the new map until they are more polished and presentable.
A lot of the feedback we have gotten from the demo is being incorporated into the new map design we have planned, and we are taking a much larger focus on ensuring AI is solid as well as incorporating more horror elements into the environments and interactions to give a nice balance between scary and action, and we have some cool plans for character interactions and SCP interactions that will massively improve upon the overall experience.
This coming year is going to be the defining year for SCP: Fragmented Minds, and we cannot thank each and every single one of you enough for your support through the Kickstarter as well as your support for us on our various social media channels, it’s an incredible privilege to be able to create content for you all that you enjoy and feel comfortable giving us honest feedback on.
From the absolute bottom of our hearts, thank you for supporting our dream of making SCP: Fragmented Minds a reality and we hope you have an incredible 2023! PS for PledgeManager and Kickstarter:
Kickstarter is going to remain open to new backers for another couple of weeks in 2022, so if you have recently backed or want to back you can here:
https://hst-studios.pledgemanager.com/projects/scp-fragmented-minds/participate/ Your roles will be applied next week as we get the most recent data uploads from the tool. Happy 2023!