Blade Symphony
MAKE — BLADE SYMPHONY
A crowdfunded competitive swordfighting game — the studio's first commercial title and the engagement that turned a mod team into a company.
Partner studio: Puny Human
Concept
A 3D competitive dueling game built on directional swordplay, stance systems and reading an opponent's commitment, with distinct fighters and a deliberately high mechanical ceiling.
Requirement
The team came out of the Half-Life 2 modding scene and needed to become a commercial studio: to fund a commercial Source engine license, take a mod-scale project through Early Access to full release, and support it across Windows, macOS and Linux.
Approach
A crowdfunding campaign funded the commercial engine license, and a distributed team of up to twenty-eight developers across North America, Europe and Asia carried the title through Steam Early Access to full release and beyond.
Production, QA, marketing and community engagement were all run in-house. The title was later transitioned to free-to-play.
Delivery scope
- Game design and combat systems
- Gameplay and systems programming
- Performance optimization
- 3D modeling, animation and level design
- Hardware porting (macOS, Linux)
- Build engineering and DevOps
- Production and QA
- Community management and live operations
Results
- Crowdfunding campaign funded at $19,058 against a $15,000 goal, mid-2011
- Steam Early Access April 2013; full release 7 May 2014; macOS and Linux 27 September 2018
- Metacritic 72, with particular praise for mechanical depth and community health
- Distributed team of up to 28 across three continents
- Servers and community remained supported after the studio wound down
Engine: Source Engine.
Crowdfunding campaign funded at $19,058 against a $15,000 goal, mid-2011
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