1.1, 1.2, and what happened next
Patches and bad news
For the Glory 1.0 was officially released on November 10/11, 2009. Since we had delivered the gold release candidate in mid-October, we had already had some time to work on improvements and bugfixes. We had not yet completely finished the settings menu, nor had we finished updating icons or map sprites. All of these were included in 1.1, which we released in December after vetting by Paradox’s QA.
We continued working on a potential 1.2 patch in December and January. I worked on improving the AI and YodaMaster worked on fixing bugs and exporting more #defines to defines.txt, but then we received bad news: sales were not good. That is, sales were about as good as (in retrospect) we had any right to expect, but we had been very optimistic and hoped we could form a “real” game studio working full time. This was not to be.
YodaMaster was in a bad place, since he had in fact been working full time on FTG. In February 2010 he notified me that he would need to step back from FTG activities, and also asked me for information so he could send me my share of the money. I had no idea how to get money from Europe to the US, so I asked him how he had sent money to Garbon, the other American member of the team. I never received a reply.
I emailed him again in March to see if he was in a better space, and again in May to inform him that I’d gone ahead and bought crystalempiregames.com and fortheglorygame.com (since lapsed) as part of our marketing. Again I received no answer. I was getting worried for YodaMaster’s health by this point and I asked one of the team members who happened to live in the same city if he could call YodaMaster on the phone and check if he was all right. Happily, he was alive; sadly, he was not very “all right”. Any further details are not mine to share publicly.
Without YodaMaster, I wasn’t sure at first how (or whether) to proceed. Eventually I decided to continue work on version 1.2 as solo engine programmer. We still had a semi-intact team otherwise - graphics and interface work continued (slowly) and we still had a few dozen beta testers to work with. I completed engine work in July and we were able to get QA done and publish version in early August 2010.
Around the same time, I tried emailing YodaMaster again, and this time he replied. He passed along the publishing contract that he had signed on behalf of our consortium (which seemed reasonable) and also the sales/revenue numbers that Paradox had reported to him for Q4 2009 and Q1 2010. We had sold around 3500 copies of the game, which was great. But we needed to sell another thousand copies at full price to recoup the full $25000 that Paradox had advanced us, and the ratio of sales from Q4 ‘09 to Q1 ‘10 indicated that we might never reach that milestone. Already the game was being offered at 50% off on some platforms.
That was the last I ever heard from YodaMaster.
Now what?
I considered dropping the project entirely. With no money and a disappearing team (why would they keep working if they had already gotten all the money they could ever expect to see?), there was little incentive. I had made some small efforts at marketing the game, but was young and (let’s face it) cowardly, and never pursued any angle nearly hard enough. That would have required me to try to understand people - my worst nightmare!
But… working on a project like For the Glory is EXTREMELY addictive. I compare it to sim-type games: I make a modification, simulate a world for 400 years, and see how I’ve affected it. Fixing bugs is also a dopamine hit, as is adding a fun new feature or UI improvement that I know the players will appreciate. I found that I couldn’t stay away.
I emailed Paradox in November 2010 to ask whether a patch 1.3 was possible, since they had the final say. They replied that they did not see the value in it unless we did our own leg work to drum up more sales.
At this point my memory is a little hazy. My emails don’t show any further correspondence with team members for some time, and I didn’t post new threads on the FTG forum for all of 2011 except to announce a 50% off sale. I think most of my FTG communication was on the FTG beta forum on the now-defunct forums-free.com, so I don’t know how active I was. I do know that I put quite a bit of effort into making tools for EU3 during that time, so perhaps I didn’t work much on FTG.
In September 2011, “mandead” - one of the original beta testers and a major contributor towards patch 1.2 - managed to obtain my email address. If it were not for that fact, I believe that FTG 1.3 would likely never have happened.
OH WAIT I JUST REMEMBERED ANOTHER THING THAT HAPPENED
A month or two before mandead emailed me, Ubik and Zeitgeist (respectively the overall lead and engineering lead of the Magna Mundi project) contacted me to see if I was interested in part-time work on their team. Since FTG was more or less going nowhere, and Magna Mundi offered actual real money, I accepted.
That’s why mandead’s email mattered.