Good news and Bad news!
Ahoy there! It’s been awhile since you’ve heard from us, we’ve been very quiet on here since trouble began.
Thank you for sticking around, we have really lovely fans, I don’t know what we did to deserve you all!
I have good news, and I have bad news, I’ll give you the bad news first. We are putting Upsilon Circuit into the “Cupboard of Lost Games” indefinitely.
The good news is that we aren’t giving up, and have a new game we’ve been working on called Super Tony Land that brings some elements of UC with it. ..But more on that later.
It was incredibly hard to write anything about UC. It’s been nearly a year since we initially halted production, but it still makes my chest tighten up thinking about it all. It took me 6 tries, but I did my best to write this, because I feel like I owe everyone the best explanation I can muster. I tried to really be open, because so often game cancellations offer very little real information.
Since this was a 3 year journey, it’s a long tale, so get comfortable!
The concepts for UC grew from a small idea we had because I really enjoyed watching people livestream our (then) newly released game Legend of Dungeon. It grew into an exploration of mortality in games, and so much more. We loved and still love all the things that UC was supposed to become.
So, if we loved it, then why did it get cancelled?
If passion was all it took, I’m sure many other games would exist. Money, time, and luck seem to be big factors based on what we’ve seen and experienced. And the bigger your project, the more you need of each.
It was an incredibly ambitious project for the two of us. We knew failure was very possible, and I’m proud that we tried anyway.
Why did UC fail?
The oversimplified answer would be that the scope of the game was too ambitious and we underestimated the time and money needed. In reality, for any project, there are many things that can go wrong that influence these things.
As with anything, it’s.. ..complicated. But the big troubles for us were: Scope, pushing beyond our capabilities, jumping into a partnership for funding, and overwhelming stress.
The scope:
UC’s concept had many game elements highly intertwined and reliant on each other, so cutting features without changing the functionality and direction of UC was impossible. It was also difficult to explain fully to people, including our team.
Pushing beyond our capabilities:
We are just two self taught indie game devs. To make UC, we hired people, signed with a partner/incubator near the end, and then managed a large team, all for the first time.
In hindsight, these were things that we not only didn’t know how to do well, but also made the two of us very miserable.
Jumping into a partnership:
Instead of scaling the project back when we realized our money would run out long before release, we pushed ourselves harder and kept going, and eventually signed with a partner to help fund the last leg of UC’s journey.
Signing with a partner or publisher and bringing in a larger team are very normal things to do in the industry. However.. they were entirely new to the both of us. Learning (about setting and meeting Milestones, dealing with various issues, and managing a large team) on such a complex project turned out to be very bad for us and UC. No one really did anything markedly wrong, but nothing seemed to go the way it was supposed to. Which in part led to the next point..
The overwhelming stress:
New to running a team stress. New to having partners stress. Crowdfunding stress. Partners pulling out mid failing crowdfunding stress. Having to tell a team “sorry and goodbye” stress. So much stress.
We felt like we had something that could change the gaming world forever, and we were so passionate about it. When things went belly up in the third year, the emotional hit was debilitating.
Bleh!
We really wanted to find a way to finish Upsilon Circuit anyhow, but the truth is, even if it wasn’t saddled with stress and emotional burden.. we’ve already put too much of our money into it. We can’t even support ourselves for long enough to complete a game this big right now.
Looking back on it all now, it’s hard not to feel like we were making a game that the world didn’t want. We knew that it was an out there idea, but that was why we felt that making UC was so important.
We knew publishers wanted something less experimental and risky.. But it was a bit surprising when the gaming community showed so little interest, since articles about UC had reached millions.
When we lost our partner and shut down our crowdfunding campaign, we made a Patreon, and reached out to the tens of thousands of people on our newsletter. We didn’t get enough pledges to cover the cost of our shared office space, let alone paying even one person.
While there were people who were very generous and amazing, it felt pretty terrible to see something people had seemed so excited about struggling so much to get support when it was truly needed.
When we finally shut everything down, we both thought we might never enjoy making games again. We felt like garbage. We drowned in that for a long time.
You can learn a lot from failure, and we certainly did.
Things we learned from our failure (your own mileage may vary):
Take the project’s timeframe, and triple it. Then triple it again.
A unique idea can add an “I need to get this out before someone else does it” feeling. Let. That. Go. No good choices were made from that feeling.
Don’t bring on full time artists or audio people until the project is really ready for them, use placeholder art and sounds, when you can. Things change, and we redid a lot of our art.
Make sure all contracts clearly state what happens if things get cancelled, or situations drastically change.
Hiring more than one or two people means managing them part time, or full time. We now know that we hate managing people, and are terrible at it.
No matter how smart and awesome your team is, if you can’t get someone 100% behind your idea, your project will suffer.
Having a partner or publisher is a lot like having a boss while also being a boss. Some people like it, but we will likely stay indie or die trying.
Don’t sacrifice your own well being or happiness for a dream. Yes, we’ve sacrificed a lot in the past, we lived in a tree house in the woods so we could keep making games before. But there is a limit, and we found it with Upsilon Circuit, and we stubbornly ignored it and payed the price mentally.
Kittens make things a lot better.
If we had it all to do over again it would have been a very different game, but maybe we could have finished it, or at least avoided some of the worst moments.
So what now?
It’s been a year, and after many conversations, we have found no solutions for bringing back UC. ..But we have healed a little, so we are taking the ideas, story and world, and building them into our future games
We started working on a new game called Super Tony Land this year, and it will be part of UC’s legacy in its own way.
Super Tony Land is a physics platforming adventure game that has many worlds, a story, and easy access to user created levels and entire game worlds. Imagine if Cave story, Mario Maker, and Besiege had a dynamically lit baby.
In Upsilon Circuit the story was something we wanted the players to unfold and influence.. To give creation to the audience, experience it ourselves, and encourage Streamer/audience connectivity. To give real power to the players.
For Super Tony Land we’ve designed an extensive level editor, with visual programming blocks and NPC/Story tools. Anyone can build worlds or challenges in the free editor that we will be releasing alongside the game. We hope that communities and content creators will build and share their own universes, and we are looking forward to playing them!
Here’s the teaser trailer we just released!
If you’ve been with us for the long haul, you might notice that this is actually a sequel to Tiny Plumbers!
This new game won’t be a lot of things that UC was, but it will be the game that the two of us made that helped us remember how important making games is to us.
It will be available on Steam this spring!
That’s about it for news!
Both of us are thankful to our team during UC’s development, and to our community and friends that have been there encouraging and supporting us throughout this journey.
We will keep doing our best to make the games we want to see exist, for as long as we are able to make games.
Here are a few links you might want:
If you want to stay up to date on all things RLK, jump on Twitter!
If you want to chat with us or catch streams we have Discord
If you want to support development we have our RLK Patreon here
Thanks for your continued support and understanding!
Your co-pilot,
Kitty