In 2014, a rather unusual game was released from the Canadian studio Interdimensional Games called Consortium. This game is an action game with a lot of conversations with answer options and forks in the plot, where the ending may vary slightly, which motivates you to play the game again. In addition, the game has a rather interesting backstory based on “breaking the fourth wall” and interdimensional travel.

Even taking into account the translation of the game into Russian, the game, unfortunately, did not attract much attention from players, although at the moment there is even early access to the second part of Consortium: The Tower (which positions itself as the “Immersive Sim” that everyone is missing), the mobile text game “Whispers from the Rift” with a choice of answer options. There are also plans for the release of some secret project, about which there is no information yet, and a Consortium remaster on the Unreal Engine 4 (the original was made on Source).

I see a lot of articles about Immersive Sim all the time, but almost none of them are about the Consortium series, since the game came from indie developers and was not a large project like System Shock or Deus Ex. However, Consortium and its sequel, Consortium: The Tower, take certain elements from these ideas and develop the narrative aspects and character interaction further.

The first part of CONSORTIUM was not ideal, some journalists scolded it for a bunch of bugs and errors on release, which is why the game did not receive very high ratings, although they noted a rather unusual plot, which was interesting to follow. Nevertheless, she gained some fame, after which she was almost forgotten. Nevertheless, I would like to remind you of a rather ambitious project (and an equally ambitious sequel) with information about the history of the development of the first CONSORTIUM game. It is possible that this story will interest someone to play the game or pay attention to aspects of video game development 🙂

Consortium: official debriefing

(original article)
My name is Gregory McMartin (Gregory McMartin – approx. auto.), here will be the story of a headstrong, determined, and creatively insane game designer who left traditional AAA development to bring something unique to the video game market. I’m going to cover all the pitfalls and lessons learned along this seven-year journey, from what was just a dream, to the challenges of practical development, and finally to the release of the game.

Consortium is a game that attempts to combine the FPS/RPG genres in the broadest sense that is usually found in AAA games with multi-million dollar budgets, but this project was developed by a small team of six people who used design skills and creativity to develop a game for the mass market with almost no money. The game’s roots and inspiration come from single-player first-person narrative games such as System Shock, Ultima Underworld, Deus Ex, Half-Life, as well as the NPC interaction aspects of RPGs and adventure games.

Violence in games has always been a concern for me, especially since the birth of my daughter – this was the main urge that led me to Consortium. I was just tired of working on games that only boasted hours of repetition and mindless violence. My turning point was the completion of work on the game Scarface: The World is Yours for Radical Entertainment (a game based on the film “Scarface” – approx. auto). It was obvious that during the development of this game I heard more F-words and killed more virtual “bad guys” than in my entire life – professionally and personally – up to this point. I just couldn’t do it anymore.

With this in mind and knowing exactly what kind of video game development company I wanted to create, I wrote the following setup for iDGi and have never looked back:
“Advance the art form of interactive storytelling through the creation of emotionally compelling and immersive first-person experiences with moral choices.”

The path from “idea” to “finished game” in this case (and in most cases) was very stressful. There was laughter, there were tears, there was creative insight for everyone involved, and then there was a lot of wasted creative effort. Not everyone who started the Consortium development adventure made it to the end. In an era dominated by cut-throat competition seeking to capture as much of the consumer market as possible, we have worked relentlessly in relative obscurity to create a progressive experience inspired by old-school single-player games.

Positive points

1. Pre-production, game world/universe building, and A.R.G (alternate reality game – approx. auto.)

We’ve worked hard to develop as deep a backstory as possible for the Consortium universe. We felt that creating a game with a lot of realistic characters meant it was important to put effort into world building. The world had to be huge, believable, interesting, and, most importantly, consistent, otherwise no amount of text, even perfectly written text, could endow the characters of this world with the necessary properties.

First prototype
Even before the game’s worldbuilding began, armed only with a general idea of ​​what I would like to do with this game, early development of the game officially began in 2008 with a modification for Half-Life 2 – the Consortium prototype. I had an idea for a game that took place entirely on a fairly small plane, but was fairly realistic, with a cast of authentic and diverse characters that you could interact with. The modification consisted only of the interior of Zenlil (Zenlil is a large three-story aircraft, built entirely using CSG) and crudely converted models from Half-Life, reminiscent of robots (. ). I rendered the dialogue system and it was so accurate that it carried over almost unchanged into the final version.

Even though I had a script written by that point, the story itself was poorly developed. I realized that the project needed a full-time writer/screenwriter.

The video reveals the progress of the game’s development from the initial prototype to the fully completed version.

World creation
From that moment on, I invited my younger brother Steve (Steve McMartin – approx. auto.) to begin realizing the universe I’ve been imagining for years. He never wrote anything professionally, but I knew that he had been writing and developing stories just for fun all his life. To be honest, I was eager to curb what could be called a real growing passion for the art of writing. The ultimate success or failure of the game I envisioned would depend on many things, but I knew that the writing and character voice acting would definitely help the game, or make it evil.

One of the main goals of creating the Consortium was to create an experience that would depend on the interactive scenario in the same way that it was derived from the many Game Design Documents we created. auto.) – including a 200-page “Story Bible,” “Character Bible,” “Universe Bible,” and a core game design document detailing all the mechanics. Steve was absolutely delighted with the process of creating an interactive storytelling system (which eventually became our iDGi-1 interactive storytelling technology) with me, and at the same time became deeply involved in the process of creating the universe. Our creative compatibility is a powerful tool, since we complement each other perfectly, given the constant disputes – I’m an optimist, and he’s a pessimist. We are both very picky, detail-oriented and extreme perfectionists.

Alternate reality game iDGi-1.
Then an alternate reality game came out (A.R.G.). We launched it back in January 2010. It is impossible not to recognize the creative genius of Nathalie Lawhead (Nathalie Lawhead – approx. auto.), as she was entirely responsible for the Flash magic that forms the basis of much of A.R.G. It was an incredible collaboration that we will never forget and we are proud to say that she subsequently received an IGF award for creative work!

We issued our first press release A.R.G. – a kind of prequel to Consortium, after which it was almost immediately picked up by the largest ARG community (for games in alternative reality – approx. auto.). As the game progressed and progressed, our project was able to attract a decent number of players, many of whom became deeply immersed in the system we were able to create, which eventually became part of the Consortium universe, just like the characters in the game world. Even though A.R.G. didn’t break out of its niche, it helped us create a deep and stable basis for everything that happens during the first Consortium and in the two planned sequels (the second part is already in early access – approx. auto.).
Steve would undoubtedly say that the best part of the experience of working on A.R.G. was a “breaking the fourth wall” format, where much of our early story work came from in-game choices made by the players themselves. In many cases we simply took their answers and worked with them to develop the narrative.

Since development was in full swing, we began work on what would become the Information Console. Just imagine an in-game Google that can be accessed from multiple locations on Zenlil. This concept resulted in over 150,000 words of text representing in-game news articles, quest reports, and other informational “secrets” intended for those wishing to expand their knowledge of the game world. This can be called the Consortium “code”. To get it right (and Steve was running out of time to complete the script), we brought in a great guy: Bob Edwards, our official lore and infoconsole writer. Technically Bob helped us with writing the text for the last stage A.R.G., but his real contribution came during his time with the infoconsole – if it weren’t for his hard work, the console wouldn’t be so broad and deep.

2. Core team

“Main cell”. From left to right, clockwise. Ben Bernard, Gregory McMartin, Jason Zeyes, Ryan Schaeffer, Stephen McMartin and Travis Wilson. In fact, other people contributed to the development of the Consortium, but these guys turned out to be the real “tough nuts” who saw the game through to completion and did everything necessary to release the game.

We deliberately abandoned all genre conventions when developing Consortium and instead focused on the concrete implementation of our concept of breaking the fourth wall. I can say with all honesty that it was only because of the unwavering dedication and incredible passion of the iDGi core team that Consortium, with all its idiosyncrasies, was able to reach the finish line.

Ryan Sheffer – approx. auto.) deserves special mention. Essentially the game’s sole C++ gameplay programmer for most of its development, he single-handedly wrote most of the code for the Consortium and was instrumental in solving most of the complex technical problems the project encountered—and there were as many of them as dandelions in the spring. Our close working relationship has produced results that I have not previously seen in my years in the industry. We all worked very hard and helped each other when things didn’t go to plan. And sometimes things really didn’t go according to plan. I personally found that game designers and programmers can speak a completely different language, which often leads to disagreements and ultimately half-hearted compromises, so I was extremely happy to find a programmer with whom Steve and I were on the same page.

Being largely a team where members worked at a distance from each other meant that burnout was, in fact, the biggest threat to our core team, and perhaps my biggest concern throughout development. Maintaining work schedule and maintaining life outside of it was the most important aspect. Of course, our organization as a company allowed team members to work from home at their own pace. Normally you would think that this would be an opportunity to relax and do nothing, but our experience was completely the opposite: people did not stop working! In fact, we lost several strong team members due to this incredibly frustrating trap.

Despite the policy that weekends were “sacred” days in which no one worked, it was still difficult to determine how much time team members were working from home. We fought every day on Skype conferences that everyone had to attend, yes, but I didn’t want to limit the team to what time they had to work their 8 hours on weekdays. Some team members (like Steve) worked better at night and fell asleep at noon.

At the time, I felt that if a team member became more creatively involved in the project, then that was completely fine with me. Saying: “Don’t think that just because you can work on your days off, you have to.”!” quickly became my important motto.

Thus, the team changed and took shape during the three main years of development, from May 2011 to May 2014. Although this was challenging, we ended up being more focused and productive. Each team member ended up taking a large section of the game that they "owned" in some sense, and then continued to dig into it and fully realize their piece of the puzzle. In some ways, the producing aspect of my job has become a challenge of “sitting back” and letting a well-tuned team work on its own.

It all starts with a clear overall vision, but in the end it is the vision and passion of each individual doing their job that ultimately decides what the final product will be.

Some of the team members at Pax Prime 2014. From left to right: Bob Edwards, Ryan Schaeffer, Hansina Whitford, Gregory McMartin

3. Art style and art https://luckukcasino.co.uk/bonus/ direction

We wanted to create the most “immersive” video game possible (with maximum immersion – approx. auto.) using our fourth wall idea to further enhance player immersion. We received a lot of feedback from people saying that the game had a very high immersion factor, which came as a surprise considering that “immersion” is often associated with photorealistic graphics in the modern gaming industry. However, we were able to achieve this with an art style that is as far away from photorealism as possible.

We recognized that we had limited tools at our disposal when working on the project, and therefore we needed to focus on every other way to achieve immersion: narrative pacing and context, sound effects, music, lighting and environmental effects, voice acting, script elements, etc. We just had to come up with a logical art style that was feasible within our budget and also worked for the benefit of the story.

Prior to this, we developed the iDGi-1 satellite concept for our A.R.G. The idea was that a satellite in “our world/real world” could give a person first-person control of another real person in an alternate universe, in the future. Based on this thought, our original idea for Consortium was to give the game a “stripped-down” realistic look—lots of unnecessary aesthetic details would be filtered out by the satellite to make better use of the limited “quantum bandwidth.”. This way, realistic shapes and sizes are maintained according to real world proportions, but they are still not overly detailed. The result of this approach at the end of 2011 was a chaotic mixture of unrelated things.

Then Jason Zayas came. auto.) and took on the heroic task of creating a fresh and cohesive look for the game that:
A) looked completely original (you will never confuse consortium with any other game);
B) subsequently coincided with the concept of the iDGi-1 satellite;
C) would not require millions of dollars and a team of hundreds of artists to achieve this task. Thanks to Jason’s collaboration with Ben Bernard, our prolific and amazing environment artist, all three goals were achieved.

Interesting fact, all 3D graphics in Consortium are limited to a palette of 16 colors. There are no traditional texture maps here, only colored polygons. This approach retained the essence of the original idea that we had in mind before Jason took over art direction. The ideas he brought to the project were essential to give us the relevant and holistic view we were looking for.

This was a turning point for the project, and although not everyone appreciates our art style, many people feel (and indeed did) that it was the best decision for us, given our team of 2 3D artists.

4. Script, audition, sound recording.

From left: Caryn Ingammar (voice of Alanna Boyle/Rook 25) and Brian Dobson (voice of Wade Harris/Rook 9)

Also check out the Consortium in the Behind The Voice Actors database. Our game includes 23 fully voiced characters. Most of them have deep dialogue trees.

This aspect overall was a resounding success. All the time spent building the world and backstory before writing the game’s story meant that there was a certain level of depth in all aspects of the game.

This depth and attention to detail was also appreciated by the more than 20 voice actors (most of them based in the Vancouver area) who joined us to bring Consortium to life. We are incredibly lucky to attract such talent given our lack of experience in this area. I still remember how Steve almost burst into tears when he first saw Michelle Livingstone (Horse 15) (Michelle Livingstone – approx. auto.) doing his work in the studio. I suspect they liked the lyrics Steve wrote, or at least I like to think so. I know he’s looking back, remembering the lines he wrote for the game. He just can’t help but worry about it (he’s learned tons of text over the past few years!). But his incredibly fresh approach to the way the storytelling elements were so fluid and woven into the gaming experience was truly inspiring for all of us. And even more than that, I think his characters felt so real, so believable and so human that our cast really enjoyed the process.

During recording (Steve and I supervised each voice recording session), we gave our actors the player’s lines and responses to make the players’ dialogue sound as convincing as possible. Everyone seemed to appreciate it and it also helped to see the bright side of everything. In short, we loved working with the cast of our game and have big plans for their character development.

Paul Ruskay (approx. auto.) from Studio X and his team, Rob Plotnikoff – approx. auto.) and Greg Sabitz (Greg Sabitz – approx. auto.) turned out to be very useful in our work. In their studio we recorded over 4000 lines of dialogue with over 20 actors and it was a truly rewarding and interesting experience. We got through this easily, and now we would like to return to the studio again to record dialogue for The Tower (the second part of the series – approx. auto.)

5. Creation of interactive narrative technology iDGi-1

I’m very proud that we’ve successfully come up with an original way to combine storytelling and interactivity.

This is a diagram showing exactly the structure of the Consortium story (major spoilers removed!)

iDGi-1 interactive storytelling technology was a system that began with the invention of our script template by Colin Fox. auto.) – an incredibly talented person. He worked his magic by writing a system that allowed open source OpenOffice software to work directly with the Source engine. Steve took this technology and ran with it, creating over a hundred “streaming” dialogues that form the basis of our game.

We wanted something that made the dialogue in Consortium unique from other games, to make it feel as realistic as possible – this means that you will never see repeated dialogue options, conversations always move forward. Several individual dialogues have 30-50 lines of possible options, and each of them can be “skipped” by choosing the “keep silent” option or simply walk away from the dialogue at any time. A lot of the dialogue involves very long and deep interactions with characters that can be significantly different each time you go through them.

Then our lead animator, Travis Wilson. auto.), used a very special part of the Source engine, the magical powers of Face Poser, to harness the animation needed for every dialogue in the game. Normally such a task would require a large team of people working as a team, but Travis managed it almost single-handedly.

So overall we were able to create/validate/polish a completely new technology and still use it for an extremely complex narrative spanning over 500 pages of interactive script. It was an incredibly difficult test, but since it was at the core of our game, it was one we were more than prepared for.

6.Kickstarter

We’ll admit that some things went wrong with Kickstarter, but things got better in the end.
In December 2012. Almost two years after we started development, we launched our first Kickstarter campaign, putting a ton of effort into it. An elaborate video was created that gave just a hint of the game in the hope that the intrigue and original idea would attract the right people. Well… we realized that this is NOT the way to do things on Kickstarter. To succeed in a crowdfunding campaign that lacks celebrity game designers or the nostalgia factor, you must fully and clearly explain what the game is being offered to potential backers. No hints, no lies, no vagueness.

So this first campaign failed to succeed and we canceled it after two weeks (with a month long campaign) after realizing our mistake. We had a complete PR disaster, not to mention a financial one, because we spent so much money on the campaign. It was a really big blow to the team’s morale.

However, after rising from the ashes, we found out what we had done wrong and returned to Kickstarter in early 2013 asking for much smaller funds – and this time it worked! The amount we asked for this time was really the minimum we would need to bring the game to the finish line. The Kickstarter income was only about 11% of our total budget, but what mattered most was that the success of KS was the only reason we were able to complete the game without becoming homeless.

Thanks to our Kickstarter campaign, about 40 people contributed new data to the game’s information console. Several of our backer rewards allowed people to create their own ideas for characters (they could add them to the game world), corporations, news articles, and even changes to historical events. Steve and Bob interacted with these sponsors one-on-one to develop suitable news articles or assignment reports. Some of the ideas were completely crazy, but this only added a new challenge to adding them to the game world. I know our two-person writing team absolutely loved it, and Steve considers it the most rewarding part of the Kickstarter campaign.
At the end of this successful campaign in 2013, we wrote an article for the Vancouver Film School website that some of you may find helpful.

Negative points

1. Marketing, promotion and launch of the game

We ran into a PR problem after having to cancel our first attempt at launching a Kickstarter campaign. However, even after a successful follow-up campaign, we still didn’t have any PR or marketing people to help sell the game to interested people, etc.d. It’s just Steve and I doing what we can do ourselves, in addition to working hard during game development. This, of course, word of mouth, reviews after launch and a good game page on Steam are tools that will contribute to our success.

Tight but realistic budget: THE OBJECTIVE IS TO FINISH THE GAME
Fast forward to the very last month before the official release of consortium. Most of the team spent over 15 hours a day playing the game, playing it over and over again, testing it to the best of our ability. And if any bugs were found, then all of them were sent to me, the only person who could fix about 70% of them, I myself looked for and fixed about 50 big and not so big bugs every day, 6-7 days a week for 2-3 months before the launch. I have to mention the amazing work of Steve “Duke” Cohen. In the beginning becoming our player A.R.G., Duke became our best and most thorough tester, which we still have to this day.

In the last week or so, we’ve gotten to the point where our bugs are starting to disappear! There was a lot of positive feedback from testers. Hooray! We had the right to believe that since our team found no more problems, the game was finally fixed and ready to launch. But the simple fact was that this was a stupid assumption resulting from employee fatigue – at Consortium, there were probably over a hundred choices and variables that would have to be tested by a hundred people on a hundred different computers, where everyone would play about a hundred times (that would be ideal). We had five people playing on five different computer configurations.

Lack of our testing capabilities
The release of Consortium took place a little later than the “early access boom” of games that players now constantly see in the store. We had doubts about using Steam’s Early Access system. Having the misconception that Consortium was supposedly “ready enough”, we didn’t want to give the wrong impression, we were very afraid that we might anger our Kickstarter backers, who we had told many times that the game was almost ready. Therefore, we decided to abandon early access. Looking back, I think this was indeed an extremely crazy idea because our backers only wanted a finished product, and even a seriously delayed product would have been much better than a broken one.

Overall, we significantly underestimated the amount of time we had to spend testing different game types (i.e.e. style that we haven’t tried before), with a much larger base of testers who would refine and fix the project before releasing the game to gamers and professional critics.

You just had to use early access
Within hours of our official launch on January 8, 2014, we were in the top 3 best selling products on Steam and our eyes lit up. Sales were much higher than we expected and Steam was really successful in promoting us on their home page. It was around this time that things started to go awry when messages started pouring in on the Steam forums and inboxes from angry and confused players wondering what the hell was going on.

To them, the game was a stunning broken piece of code.
In panic mode, Steve and I held an emergency meeting, without an early access option (because we released the game as finished). We decided that the only way was to go out in public and honestly explain the situation. That’s when Steve came up with this Steam update and we placed a link to it right in the description on the main page in the store.

Almost immediately our sales dropped like a rock. Steam immediately stopped displaying the game on the main page, from which we never recovered. While the response to the Steam update has been overwhelmingly positive, our slightly overreaction (to the events that transpired) and extreme honesty may have given people the idea that we won’t be able to fully fix the game, or that it’s fundamentally broken. None of these ideas were true. There were really a lot of bugs in the game, yes, and among them there were some serious ones, but all of them could be fixed. But our serious review of this game created the perception that “this game is too broken” to jeopardize the game’s chance of gaining traction in the store, an effect we struggle with to this day.

In any case, we’re back in bug fixing mode again. We started collecting every bug report from many new players who sent us messages on the Steam forums and email. I spent about 15-20 days getting the game back into shape as the messages kept coming and coming and we were trying to sort out major bugs as quickly as possible.

The irony of the whole situation was that we wouldn’t have realized how broken the game was until we released it to thousands of players. No amount of testing from five people could achieve such results. I would also like to say that we were very pleased to see that many people wanted to help us. I mean, it was incredible – suddenly we had dozens of people submitting bug reports, and I’d say 99% did so with a general desire to help us fix the game. We will never forget this.

Honesty at any cost
One thing we were very proud of was our A.R.G. At this stage we were completely open and honest with the players, no matter what. This is how we continue to communicate with our fans to this day, we are still active on the Steam forums and answer every email that is sent to us. I believe this direct approach has saved us several times when a less transparent company would have fallen apart – people appreciate a little honesty from us, and from our point of view there is no reason to hide what is really going on behind the scenes. Our players, our fans, are the only reason our company still exists.

Lesson learned the hard way
In general, we still realized how important it is to allocate more resources and budget to have a large team of testers who would be closely involved in finding and eliminating all bugs and problems before releasing the game to the general public. While we didn’t have the resources to do so at the time of Consortium’s creation, early access could give us similar results, leveraging the power of those players who want to dive into the game to help us iron out a bad situation and find those pesky but hard-to-find bugs.

2. Budget control

From the very beginning, we knew we wanted to create a gaming experience that would push the boundaries of mixing interactivity and storytelling in ways that hadn’t been done before. How are you going to make a realistic schedule and budget allocation for such a pilot project?? As it turns out, this is an almost impossible task.

Initial hunt for funds for game development
In addition to launching and helping prepare our alternate reality game, I personally spent a lot of time in 2010 looking for investors. I reached out to local angel investor groups in Vancouver as well as publishers at the 2010 and 2011 GDC. My idea didn’t focus on why our game would become a huge commercial success, or how we sought to combine different elements from the most successful games to ensure that funds would flow in. My idea was to create an innovative experience that had never been done before; experience with moral principles, where there will be certain consequences from the player’s actions, and also that the action took place in a positive and bright future. In a way, my idea was related to altruism, so I was looking for altruists who would like to support us. But in the financial world, especially in Western countries, altruism is indeed a very rare phenomenon. People want the guarantee that they will get something in return, and video games are a very risky business. Nobody was interested in our experimental and obviously risky project.

Visit to the Canadian Media Fund CMF (Canada Media Fund)
When we started development in May 2011, all components were ready. We knew all the characters and style of setting we thought we needed. We already had all the Zenlil that grew out of my prototype, and the general template of that original prototype remained almost unchanged. In order to ultimately receive funds from the Canada Media Foundation, we had to have a detailed development schedule and we needed to complete it in time to present to the fund in 2010. It turned out that our project is ideal for a completely new CMF project, “Experimental Flow”. 12 months after submitting the application, we received the first tranche of $500 thousand and we were ready to fully develop the game. Then we were responsible for the remaining $160 thousand. our planned budget.

Is the budget big enough to develop the game you imagined??
It didn’t take us long to realize that budget would be an issue during the game’s development, and cash flow was also an ongoing issue that needed to be addressed to prevent development from stalling or losing vital staff. We have been steadily moving towards completion of development, but various problems have prevented us from accurately planning the work as part of this progress.

Our Kickstarter predictions for when the game will be completed are quite far from reality, but at the time we talked about these timelines, we actually thought it was quite realistic. There was absolutely no filter between what was actually happening internally and what we were communicating to our sponsors. They knew what it took to develop such a unique and original game; overcoming extremely difficult challenges and solving complex problems every day.

It’s hard for me to put into words, but when you’re inventing something truly new, it’s impossible to have an accurate schedule and budget. All that can really be done is to have a large amount of “free funds” in the budget to solve the problems of developing a “black box”. These are problems that are experimental and will require an unknown number of iterations. You continue to aggressively plan to keep everyone focused on the given goals and use available funds where absolutely necessary for the benefit of the final game.

Redefining the term “limited budget”
We had no available funds at all, so you can imagine the difficulties we had to face. However, our CFO, Stewart Marshall, was brilliant and with his help, connections and guidance, we were able to overcome the challenges with some pretty inventive solutions. Technically, the game was made on the original budget, but in reality, everyone on the team worked much harder and longer than the schedule and budget dictated.

3. Extremely ambitious game design
It’s especially difficult for me to admit this, since the entire game design of Consortium depended entirely on me. The main problem is that we worked very hard on the original combat, inventory, ammo, healing and repair systems, but the story and scope of the game simply didn’t make adequate use of all of those systems.

Original and reusable mechanics are extremely difficult to develop!
The roots of this problem stem from the original desire to turn Consortium into a completely episodic series, with 8 episodes or so per season. The world’s first “interactive TV series” was the original goal back in 2007/2008. To this end, we actually developed game mechanics that could be used in a large number of game locations and situations.

So in some ways it was good that we were moving forward because we had solid mechanics that would be fully exploited in the sequels, but it was a real hurdle for us in building Consortium. The combat system could be radically simplified, allowing us to spend significantly less time fixing combat and the mechanics associated with it.

The iDGi-1’s interactive storytelling technology was EXTREMELY experimental
Also, the true scale and challenges we faced in translating over 500 pages of interactive script into a functioning game script were not fully realized. The system on which the script was written was experimental and invented by us. The engine we were working on was quite famous and was developed by Valve to develop a completely different game. The result of combining these two systems is an incredible number of scripts that are basically incomprehensible to anyone other than myself, and therefore can only be maintained and corrected by me. And therefore most of the mistakes can be made by me and only me. You will never encounter this kind of situation in any other professional project.

The upside to this is that the way I implemented the script has a logical system and it will run much better on Unreal Engine 4 (our engine of choice for the sequel is The Tower). Now that we have a clear example of how our iDGi-1 interactive storytelling technology works, creating a second game becomes working within that pre-set template for the first game, but at a higher level.

IN CONCLUSION

Obviously, overall there were more positives than negatives in the project, but the mistakes we made were quite serious and almost killed us as a company. The journey to create this game was fraught with risks and we had to fight monsters and demons along the way. In a way, we almost felt like we were defying the laws of nature by doing this. A game about a positive future where you play as someone who is a member of a peacekeeping organization, purposefully avoiding unnecessary violence? Just crazy.

Representing a better future for us all
Someone wrote in the comments that Consortium is “a completely unrealistic future predicted by Canadians, but the game is quite cool.“But is it really unrealistic?? We want to believe that such a positive future is in our hands, and we have gone to great lengths to envision near-future technologies that could be implemented very soon to achieve this goal. Is it really so difficult to believe in a better future for our children and grandchildren??
This is what Consortium represents to me: it is a belief embodied in the form of an interactive narrative. It’s for this reason that I’m really glad we were able to finish this at all. When I think about all the events that led up to Consortium, I truly admire the incredible moments we have experienced.

Path to the Tower!
To date, Consortium has not recovered its development costs. At the time of writing (in 2016. – approx. auto.) the game returned about half of its development budget (excluding royalties). When we created the Consortium from the very beginning, it had a clear artistic goal, now we see the end result with some “uncut” parts. But as a commercial project, Consortium is still at an uncertain stage. Our dream is to create Consortium games for a long time and at the same time support our families and at the same time live a normal life.

With Consortium: The Tower, we strive to combine all the components and ideas that we invented in the first Consortium along with the traditional structure and content format of action FPS/adventure games (which has evolved into the idea of ​​immersive sim – approx. auto.). This is by far the coolest game I dared to imagine that I could work on making, as it is the game I have dreamed of developing AND playing my entire life.

At this point, we know one thing for sure: CONSORTIUM has fans, and it is gaining new fans, and they all want more! Well, we’re working hard to give everyone more content!

CONSORTIUM
Release date v1.0: January 9, 2014
Current version: v1.26.1: February 9, 2019.
Initially announced platforms: Windows Vista/7/8
Project development budget: $677,356
Development duration: 8 years (5 years pre-production, 3 years development(
Team size: 6 full-time developers, 5-10 freelance developers