#development process

[askagamedev]

Some Thoughts on Cancelled Games that were in Preproduction for 5+ years...

You may have seen a lot of video game news recently about projects that have been in development for a long time while still in preproduction getting cancelled. This is normal behavior for the current economic climate - things are cooling off and the big publishers are essentially cutting all projects that aren't on track to ship within the next two years because they don't have the money to keep paying for such long term bets. Many of these projects are said to be "doing well" or "coming along", so why do these projects get killed if they're so promising? As somebody who's been on a couple of these projects (including recently), the view from the inside is often very different.

My studio was in a somewhat similar boat to many of these - we had one major money-making franchise at our studio that paid all of our bills and a small incubation [blue-ocean] project in preproduction (for several years) that studio execs hoped would be a new franchise we could start. All of the demos and video we saw looked absolutely amazing - the studio devs were super excited about it and most of the devs I spoke to wanted to join the team because of how awesome it looked.

This project was looking so promising that it got green lit for a [vertical slice] - the next step in the development process, where all of the separate demo and preproduction game systems get integrated into a single cohesive gameplay experience that's representative of the whole. As such, the small team that was working on this project got additional resources (developers) to build that vertical slice. I was one of the developers tapped to join this team to help build things out. I wasn't actually super enthused about this - the greater economic situation in the industry had already started to sour and I really would have preferred staying on the money making franchise for safety. I was also bit leery of the experimental project with its grand ambitions - the scope seemed like way too much for the number of people we had and the time we had to build it out.

Once I joined, it became clear to me that my concerns were validated. The project absolutely needed to switch gears from "make cool ideas" to "bring everything together and work towards this major goal", but the team's leadership was still very much in blue ocean mode. We chased down many cool new ideas, but the integration of everything lagged behind. For the kind of game we were building, we absolutely needed a well-established workflow and tool base to build enough content for players to engage with... and very little of that was even on the horizon - a large part of it was me personally pushing for it directly and personally because I had worked on the kind of game we were building in production and I knew that we needed those battle-tested tools and workflow.

Instead, we spent the first few months building another awesome set piece and cool one-off scenario that would look amazing in a demo. The set piece scenario was held together by shoe string and bubblegum but it mostly worked, was mostly playable, and it looked fantastic when it didn't break. I did my part and built the stuff I was tasked with, but the kind of hacks and shortcuts we were forced to use made it very clear that we needed a reliable and systemic method of creating much more content much more quickly if we really wanted to build a real game out of it.

This is the curse of these kind of projects - most games that have been in preproduction for years are stuck in this "cool amazing demo" mode and have a really really hard time switching gears to "making the damn game" mode. They show great in demos and videos, igniting the imagination on what the game could be if/when everything comes together, but the actual coming together portion is one of the hardest parts of game development.

Almost a year after I joined the experimental project, I was reassigned back to the mothership game because the main franchise needed more people to get it to a shippable state and the overall industry economic situation had continued to turn sour. Internally, I was actually extremely relieved for myself, but I felt very sorry for the team I was leaving behind. A few months later, the experimental project was cancelled and the remaining team was let go in a situation very much like what happened to Perfect Dark, Everwild, the Zenimax MMOG, and all the other preproduction games that met their demise during the recent Microsoft culling.

This isn't my first time (or even second time) on a promising project that failed trying to go from preproduction to production - the core problems have been very similar on multiple projects I've worked on. Dialing in the core gameplay, recognizing the need to shift gears, and then actually executing on that major change in team direction is one of the most difficult problems in game production. It's difficult to do and there are innumerable buried and cancelled projects over the years that were unable to do it. I mourn for what could have been but I also understand that many of these dream projects just weren't meant to be.

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[words-pics-flicks]

[T]he development process is the most fun part of writing for me. Sitting in a room by myself, creating the whole thing, is lonely. I like talking. I like getting notes.

Antwone Fisher (in 'Tales from the 'Script')

[indizombie]

In many parts, the development process has hurt poor people. For instance, the coming of borewells some years ago meant that the small farmers of the Muthuraja colony of Kovilpatti lost most of their lands. The borewell owners were richer and higher caste farmers of the next hamlet. And they used their new weapon to deadly effect. As Dr Nagraj of the Madras Institute of Development Studies puts it: 'The man controlling groundwater becomes extremely important. He sinks the borewells. He has the resources and the bank contacts.'

P Sainath, 'Everybody Loves a Good Drought'

[keeperofthedead]

hi! just wondered where you are from and how you got the idea? great work!!!!

Hello (and thank you)! I’m from the United States, on the east coast.

It isn’t one idea so much as a bunch of ideas that coalesced together. The world originated as a roleplay setting that some friends and I created together (though in its current state, the game’s world is unrecognizable from its first incarnation—it’s gone through a lot of changes, both while we roleplayed in it and after). I became really attached to some of the characters we had created, so I kept fiddling with the setting and its cast long after we stopped using them, and eventually I had the thought that I’d like to create something with it all.

[leighlew3]

(x)

My lead character in the film that’s currently in early development is sexually fluid and all of the producers involved thus far are thankfully champions of such inclusivity.

But it’s going to be really freaking interesting to see how that’s received at the sales, financing and distribution stage.

[echoeternally]

Echo, I have a writing question. Do you still feel “in control” of your stories? I mean there’s no way you had chapter forty-freakin’-six planned when you posted chapter one, right? There must have been some stuff you made up as you went along, right? How do you do that without feeling like your story is drifting aimlessly or that you’ve lost control of it?

Honestly, both of my strongest ongoing stories started out as aimless spitballs to the wall, and somehow they stuck on not only in concept, but in grabbing attention from readers. I actually created and established control after expanding on them both.

ENY was originally a one-shot for Bowser pining over Mario in a “eat this, I can reshape canon on all your brains” kind of way. One person was like, “hey, how would Mario respond?” I shrugged, gave that a shot for a write-up, and then readers wanted more. So, I was like, “ha, how about I turn this into a story?” And then by Chapter 5, I realized, “oh. oh this is a story, huh? ok, let’s really go for this then.”

From there, I created structure for it, because I asked myself, “Well, what’s going to happen from here? Do Bowser and Mario just get together and church bells just ring out? Or should we play this how could actually unfold?” Guess which thought won out.

(Probably going to be long, so let’s add a cut here.)

After I had a good amount of story arc planned out, probably after I had Luigi and Peach join forces, I started planning out the rest of the fanfic from there. Peach and Luigi were going to reclaim the territories that Bowser conquered, while Bowser and Mario would clash over their romance and work out a relationship and happy ending between them and Mario’s friends. The seven kingdoms getting reclaimed was simple, since it was just following how the games usually go. Mario and Bowser have enough material to go at one another for ages. 

Originally, I was going to keep it isolated to just these four and those immediately involved with their affairs (Toads, Koopalings, Yoshi, Junior, etc.) for all that happened. But, I thought of characters that people would want to see included, Daisy being the number one option to hit my mind, and wound up tying them to Peach’s adventure. And my Paper Mario stuffed brain was like, “Ooh, what if Bowser had companions like Mario usually gets?” Hence the original clods that journeyed with him to Star Hill by the late 20s to mid 30s chapters.

Star Hill was always going to be a location that they’d visit, though that got expanded upon as I continued writing. I was like, “Hey, what if people were living out there? How is it that no one really ever builds a fortress here, why don’t these locations appear outside of RPGs?” So, I added that in, and I’ve gotten used to checking in on Mario canon for things.

I especially love using old school material, because it’s stuff that most people probably never touch. Prior to her return, I had literally requested the creation of the Pauline tag on the Mario archive for fanfiction.net, which hadn’t existed prior to 2014. So, adding her, elements from old RPGs, and some bits of Mario history along the way, with some shout-outs to other Nintendo games as well, just worked out.

Tone was something that I was originally concerned with keeping as a very Mario-like story, trying to keep the characters as in-character as I could while putting them in a very unlikely situation. As I continued, I figured it wasn’t going to work out like the usual Mario stuff, so I gradually introduced some darker elements as I went forward: played up the fact that Bowser and Peach are at war, killed a snowman, made a bunch of flirts across the board, toyed with betrayal & conspiracies as plot devices, gave Mario horrific/gruesome nightmares, Peach is a bit unhinged, and Bowser having family drama in the past and present, etc.

The more that I’ve worked on it, the more control I feel that I’ve gained. I feel like, if I had the time to keep the everything in my life at bay and could write without interruption, I’d probably have finished this story by 60 to 75 chapters and would’ve worked on a 10 to 20 chapter sequel, given my pace for it back in 2015. However, I probably would’ve missed out on small stuff, such as Pauline’s comeback being addressed before the 40th chapter and her establishment as mayor, so maybe it’s good that I’ve slogged down.

There are still so many ideas that I’m waiting to get to, and now it’s stuff that I’ve had planned for years. I’m tired of sitting on them, but I also can’t wait to finally build up to them and have them finally happen.

Ha, this turned out a lot longer than I meant it to be, my apologies. I was originally going to talk about my Pokemon fanfic too, but I’ll save that for another post, if you or anyone else is interested. But yeah, that’s some ENY dev process for everybody.

Thank you for asking!

[bigskycastle]

ik this isn’t the first thing like this to exist but i wanted to make @lesbian-squid‘s octoling life cycle headcanon/explanation into this cuz its so good and u should read it if u like good speculative biology things!!!