Why there's no Death Knight Love Story release date yet
I get asked about the release date for Death Knight Love Story, naturally. So, I thought it might be worth writing a brief post - inspired by a comment from John Aprigliano on Facebook - to give you some idea of the complexity of estimating that sort of thing!
We're in totally new territory for Strange Company with DKLS. We've never used ANY of the software we're using, with the exception of 3D Studio Max, before. Some of it - in fact, most of it - has never been used on a major production before. Our renderer, Mach Studio Pro 2, was only released in July, and the company that makes it is sadly now out of business. Our tool for exporting from World of Warcraft is in constant development by the brilliant guys at Machinima Dev, and often we're encountering situations that it's probably never been used for before. As a result of all this, we're learning massive amounts every day.
Just yesterday we discovered a feature of the renderer we're using which completely changes how we set up the lighting - given that the renderer is incredibly new, currently discontinued and we're one of the few groups in the world using it, we may be world-first on this. We're still in continuous development on our animation process - we had a total game-changer on that two weeks ago - and even the story and character design are in continuous flux as we iterate (although the basic spine of the story and the key characters are now set).
It's very exciting, but speaking as the guy financing the project, it's not exactly a stable process yet!
And that's before we even start on the standard issues behind predicting the release of any project on the intersection of creativity and technology. There's a reason that 'when it's done' is a standard joke amongst computer gamers when referring to game release dates - the release process is chaotic, in the mathmatical sense of the word. There are too many variables with non-linear, non-predictable effects - we honestly just don't know!
All of this might make the entire thing sound like chaos. And, to a certain extent, it is. But it's supremely exciting chaos, the same sort of chaos that probably surrounded Dreamworks during the production of the first Shrek movie. We're going somewhere no-one has gone before - and every time we suddenly discover a new 'make it pretty button', as it's becoming termed at SC, the quality of what we're creating leaps up. We're now well past the 'Machinima' standard, and progressing into and up through conventional animation standards. It's wonderful to see.
So, when will we release? No idea. What will it look like? I can't tell you precisely. I can just tell you it's going to be the best thing we've ever made, by far.