{"id":13413,"date":"2018-02-22T01:49:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-22T01:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/314856"},"modified":"2018-02-22T01:49:00","modified_gmt":"2018-02-22T01:49:00","slug":"work-hard-save-money-stay-true-to-vision-says-cuphead-dev","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/02\/22\/work-hard-save-money-stay-true-to-vision-says-cuphead-dev\/","title":{"rendered":"Work hard, save money, stay true to vision, says Cuphead dev"},"content":{"rendered":"

At DICE 2018 in Las Vegas today, Maja Moldenhauer, executive producer at Cuphead<\/em> developer StudioMDHR, gave a high-level talk about making a run-and-gun shooter with no experience, barely any budget, and a whole lot of effort.<\/p>\n

In the end, the takeaway was to work hard, maintain and stay focused on a strong vision, and make your money stretch as far as possible.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had very little money,\u201d she said. StudioMDHR didn\u2019t have a physical workspace and all worked remotely across different time zones, which was one way to save money. \u201cOur team is most creative working at different times of the day,\u201d Moldenhauer said.<\/p>\n

The team used free and cheap tools such as Basecamp, Trello, Skype, email, and Slack. One of the more extravagant purchases was a $300 scanner from Best Buy, which was needed for faster scanning of Cuphead<\/em>\u2019s hand-drawn art and animation.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy point here is that we tried to save money anywhere we could,\u201d Moldenhauer said.<\/p>\n

Moldenhauer explained how co-founders Chad and Jared Moldenhauer didn\u2019t have any professional experience making games when Cuphead<\/em> development started, or formal training\u2014they were all self-taught. Maja Moldenhauer already had a college education and was working a well-paid job in finance, but she wasn\u2019t passionate about it.<\/p>\n

She said that while this was the decision they wanted to make, work-life balance suffered. \u201cWe literally slept, ate, and breathed Cuphead<\/em>,\u201d said Moldenhauer. From the time development began in earnest on Cuphead<\/em> until release, Moldenhauer had two children, trying to balance family life with work-from-home life.<\/p>\n

She said a turning point was the partnership with Microsoft\u2019s ID@Xbox, which helped push the game through to launch. \u201cWe remortgaged our homes at this point,\u201d she said, highlighting just how \u201call-in\u201d the team was on one single game.<\/p>\n

Moldenhauer said the game kept on getting pushed back, year after year, but only because the team didn\u2019t want to cut corners on any aspect of the game. \u201cWe never took any shortcuts in the interest of time,\u201d she said. \u201cWe spent a lot of time on art for art\u2019s sake.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a Herculean effort in which intense focus over the course of several years finally paid off. The game has gone double-platinum since launching last year. \u201cThere is no elevator to success, much less in this industry,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At DICE 2018 in Las Vegas today, Maja Moldenhauer, executive producer at Cuphead developer StudioMDHR, gave a high-level talk about making a run-and-gun shooter with no experience, barely any budget, and a whole lot of effort. In the end, the takeaway was to work hard, maintain and stay focused on a strong vision, and make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}