The Story of Frontier, Told by Producer Maria Korotkova

Frontier: Path of Shadows is out, which means this feels like a good time to look back. We've talked a lot here about the game, its world, characters, and mechanics, but we haven't said nearly as much about how the project itself came to be — or what it went through over the course of two years of development.

So today, Maria Korotkova, the game's producer, is here to tell the story of Frontier. And honestly, it has enough twists for a small indie-development action movie. So make yourselves comfortable and follow along — this all started almost two years ago...

Part 1: Startup or Employment — That Is the Question

Not everyone knows that before Oduvan Games, my business partner Alexey and I had another startup: a small game studio backed by a much larger investor. A classic setup, really.

We got our hands on it while we were still very inexperienced developers, made plenty of mistakes, and slowly learned some important lessons about how the games business actually works. Unfortunately, by the time we had started figuring things out, our investor had understandably run out of patience. For some mysterious reason, they weren't thrilled by the idea of funding us for another couple of years before we might start making money. Can't blame them — I wouldn't have been either. The funding was running out, and we were faced with a fairly simple question: do we shut everything down and start looking for jobs, or do we have another idea?

We really didn't want to shut down. We'd spent two years carefully building the team, and we'd finally learned enough to have something resembling an actual strategy. It would have been nice to test it. The problem was that we didn't exactly have investors lining up outside the door. Around that time, I was talking to my old friend Nikita Yevtushenko about Frontier, the tabletop RPG universe we'd been creating together for years. At some point, we asked ourselves a dangerous question: how much would it cost to make a video game demo set in Frontier?

This was The Dream. Capital letters very much intended. In the same way a child dreams of growing up, our little tabletop RPG had always dreamed of growing up into a video game. Nikita and I had always wanted — and still want — people all over the world to discover the Frontier universe.

The budget wasn't particularly large by video game standards, but for us it was very large indeed. While looking for ways to finance it, we found a government-backed startup support program. The basic idea was that eligible investors could later recover part of what they invested in a qualifying university-linked startup. By sheer luck, we met the requirements, so in theory the program could solve half of our problem. We still had to find the other half. Can you smell the adventure already? We certainly could. But we still wanted to close the studio even less.

We put in some of our own money, but it wasn't enough. Then, like the magical helper in a fairy tale, Nikita's mother offered to lend us the missing money, on the condition that we'd pay it back within a year. Spoiler: we did. A few friends and long-time Frontier fans joined in as well, and piece by piece, we scraped together what we needed. Now we only had to defeat the next boss: the grant application.

Part 2: A Very Unlikely Christmas Present

I had never written a startup funding application before. I had, however, written several university dissertations for money after graduating, and you'd be surprised how transferable the skill set is. So I armed myself with bureaucratic language, market research, spreadsheets, and several technical specialists — this was an innovation-focused program, after all — and started preparing the documents.

There was one problem: we had discovered the program less than a month before the deadline. During that month, we had to prepare the entire application, satisfy all the requirements, and somehow create a new company specifically for the project along the way. Naturally, the company registration failed the first time because of a stupid technical mistake, so I ended up submitting the application almost at the absolute last possible moment. We exhaled, waited for the evaluation — and we failed.

The program allowed applicants to fix their documents and resubmit several times, which is wonderful when you have time. We had almost none. Still, we were allowed to try again and were given roughly two days to make corrections. We submitted a new version, and the following morning our coordinator from the foundation called me.

I answered expecting bad news, but instead she called with instructions. She was genuinely worried about our application because this was our final chance to get through. She asked me to leave my phone number so her boss could call and explain exactly what needed to be fixed to make the application as bulletproof as possible. Two hours later, he called. An hour after that, I had a plan. Then the people at the foundation essentially waved away the formal deadline and told me, fine, you have until Monday morning. This was on Friday evening.

We submitted again — and this time, we passed with the highest possible score. It was already December, and for quite a while it genuinely felt as though someone had given us a Christmas present. Not just because we'd been given a chance to make the project, but because somewhere inside a large institution, several people had unexpectedly decided that they actually cared whether one tiny game startup survived. So we had enough money for the demo, plenty of enthusiasm, and development began.

Part 3: How a Demo Turned Into a Game

Development started well, and Frontier slowly began to look like an actual video game. Then, three or four months in, we realized just how ambitious we'd been. I can now confidently say that even if you love turn-based tactics, making a turn-based tactical game as your first serious PC project is a challenge with an extra difficulty modifier attached. Even if you're nowhere near the scale of XCOM. If possible, I recommend making different life choices.

At one point, we essentially had to rebuild a large part of the project from scratch because the technical challenge had turned out to be too much for our first programmer. Still, eventually we had a playable build and took it out to the market. Players who tried it generally liked it. Publishers generally... didn't.

Turn-based tactics is a difficult niche. Not every publisher knows how to work with it, and Frontier was never going to promise anyone mountains of gold. It soon became clear that we probably weren't going to find much additional development funding. We were sad for a while, and then management happened: we decided that a smaller game that actually ships is better than a larger game that never exists.

There were plenty of arguments, the budget was reworked, and more than a few nerves were sacrificed. We put in some more of our own money, reshaped the scope into something we could realistically finish, and kept going. Eventually, after enough conferences, pitches, meetings, and persistence, Frontier found a publisher.

We were thrilled because release suddenly felt much closer, and we focused on finishing the demo. We managed to complete it right around the reporting deadline for our original funding program, in November of last year. The demo existed, development of the full game continued, and everything seemed to be going according to plan. What could possibly go wrong?

Part 4: How Marketing Did Not Go According to Plan

Working with our publisher turned out to be complicated. Frontier was rapidly growing from a demo into a full game, so development never really stopped, while marketing often needed finished parts of the project earlier than we could reasonably provide them. Had we known that in advance, we probably would have structured production differently, but at the time there wasn't a clear marketing roadmap with fixed milestones.

From the publisher's perspective, delays weren't catastrophic. Miss one event? There will be another. A month later? Fine. But Frontier was our main project, and we couldn't afford to keep waiting indefinitely. The biggest blow was moving our participation in Steam Next Fest from February to June. The demo was almost ready for the February event, but marketing had barely begun, so when the choice came down to entering Next Fest with almost no wishlists or skipping it, we chose the latter.

The publisher increased its marketing efforts, but our target audience mostly ignored them. I've seen this happen with niche products before: when your audience is small and specific, you often need to be “one of them,” or at least really understand how they talk, what they care about, and why they love the genre. Generic outreach, generic copy, and generic marketing tools tend to disappear into the void. In our case, they did.

A couple of months later, the publisher suggested that returning the project to us might be easier than continuing to figure out how to make the marketing work. We weren't exactly shocked, but unfortunately, being unsurprised does not magically create wishlists. And the next Steam Next Fest was now looming just a month and a half away.

So I sighed, remembered the ancient wisdom of “if you want something done right, do it yourself,” and started assembling a tiny but proud in-house marketing team. At least I wasn't starting completely from zero: I'd already run three crowdfunding campaigns to self-publish books set in the Frontier universe. Surely I could invent something this time too.

Part 5: From 1,000 Wishlists to 10,000

The main trick behind “free marketing” is that it isn't actually free. Someone still has to spend time on it, create the materials, contact creators, write posts, test ads, and do all the other little things that promotion requires. And the more people you want to reach, the less free it becomes. Naturally, we hadn't budgeted much for marketing — because we had a publisher.

While I was once again staring sadly at the rain, smoking a hookah, and thinking about him... I mean, about how long all this could possibly continue and what we were supposed to do next, a mutual friend of Nikita and me — and a long-time fan of the setting — came along and simply gave us some money, with one instruction: use it for something useful for the game.

It didn't solve all my problems, but it gave me a surprising amount of energy to solve the rest. A bit of money here, a bit more there, and suddenly we had a small promotional budget. Our lives filled with Reddit posts, ad experiments, creator outreach, Steam page optimization, and every other method we could think of for locating our target audience somewhere in the enormous population of Planet Earth.

We talked to creators and explained who we were and why Frontier might be interesting. On Reddit, we talked about the world and posted spaceship art from the tabletop RPG. For XCOM fans, we drew parallels with XCOM. For tabletop players, we joked about evil dice. For the hard-sci-fi crowd, we brought up things like the Mohs scale. And slowly, the right people started finding us. The demo launched. Steam Next Fest happened.

This is not the part where I tell you that we started doing our own marketing and suddenly got millions of wishlists. I wish. But we always knew we weren't making a game for everyone. Frontier is a niche project for a fairly specific audience, so we set ourselves a much more pragmatic goal: 10,000 wishlists before release, the minimum threshold we felt the game needed to survive. Slowly, we got closer. And, as it turned out, the most interesting part was still ahead.

Part 6: Never Give Up

After Next Fest, we kept preparing for release. We knew the game wasn't perfect, and we knew we had far less marketing money than we would have liked even for our minimum plan. But retreat wasn't really an option anymore. Besides, who gives up a couple of months before launch?

I spent a great deal of time complaining to friends that I could really use just one more chunk of money — preferably a fairly large one — so we could do things properly instead of simply doing the best we could. Sadly, the world is imperfect. Still, preparations continued.

Then, right in the middle of all this, Alexey came to me and said he'd met an interesting publishing team from the Far East, Volk & Walk, who were looking for projects for their partners in Asia. And they knew Frontier. Not the video game — the tabletop RPG.

That genuinely surprised me. Russian tabletop RPG projects are a fairly small world, of course, but learning that people thousands of kilometers away already knew Frontier was still a wonderful moment. Because they knew the setting, Alexey explained, they were willing to try to find us a modest amount of additional funding in Asia. There was just one condition: we had to clearly explain what our plan was, how we would spend the money, and when the game would release. Their partners didn't know much about our particular niche, but they were willing to trust us — or, more precisely, to trust Volk & Walk.

Luckily, we had a plan. Actually, we had three, for different levels of disaster.

The publishing partner looked at the project, decided that it seemed promising, and agreed to fund the final stretch: a smaller amount for development and a larger one for marketing. And that is how the road unexpectedly took me all the way to the Far East.

The agreement was signed successfully, and the final month before release disappeared almost instantly. In true game-development tradition, we finished the last major changes about a day and a half before launch, but we managed to get almost everything important in. Marketing finally had enough fuel to run at full power as well, and by release our wishlist count had climbed to 34,000.

Almost two years ago, all of this started with a fairly reckless question: “What if we tried to make a video game demo set in Frontier?” Now Frontier: Path of Shadows is out, and we can finally look back at the entire road that brought us here.

There were several points over those two years when the project could quite realistically have ended before reaching release. We changed plans, rewrote budgets, rebuilt parts of the game, searched for funding, found and lost partners, learned marketing as we went, and repeatedly had to figure out how to keep moving forward. But somehow, we made it.

And perhaps the strangest feeling after release is seeing a project that existed inside the team for so long finally begin to live independently of us. Now you're playing it, debating your choices, finding favorite characters, noticing things we ourselves stopped thinking about long ago, and telling us about your experiences. After two years of development, that's what all of this was for.

Thank you to everyone who has been part of Frontier's journey — from the early tabletop games and the demo all the way to release. And a separate thank you to everyone who's only joining us now. We hope you'll stick around to see where this road takes us next.