Demystifying The Video Game Industry (Or the things you don't see.)

It's quite well known that some games end up in what is known as 'development hell' thanks to problems they face. Duke Nukem Forever took fourteen years (from 1997 until 2011) to finally release, and it released to what can only be described as critical and commercial failure. Aliens: Colonial Marines spent over twelve years in development hell, and finally released and was reviled. Games that end up stuck in development hell often either don't release or release to poor reception. However, a lot of games have smaller issues in development and it's highly important to demystify the industry, so that people don't think it's an infallible juggernaut and so they're aware these are actual human projects being developed, flaws and all.

The developers of recent indie game, Blue Fire, explained how the game came to be, and how development didn't go quite as smoothly as it may seem from an outside perspective, and that they had to change things as they went along and realised there were several impracticalities throughout the course of developing the game, and explained how the game came to be.

"Blue Fire was born in 2018, with me and my brother trying to make our own game from our bedroom. We grew up playing Nintendo 64, and kinda felt like we needed a game with the feel of those 90's platformers but that had also grown with us. At the start, the idea was to make a small two-hour game, but two years and nine developers later, it ended up being something much bigger and an incredible journey for all of us."

"At the beginning and up to the mid development of Blue Fire, we were aiming at not having load screens, making different levels and zones on the run, thinking this would make the game a more fluid experience." Game Rosa notes that "It worked at first, as we blocked and sketched the land of Penumbra, but once we started to refine the art style and added more detail to the environments, breakables and NPC's, it started to struggle a bit (Mainly on Nintendo Switch). At that moment we decided to separate the areas in the game with load screens, and that was a great call cause it allowed us to reach an 60 fps performance on PC and a stable 30 fps on the Switch."

This isn't an isolated tale either. Evan Anthony, one of the developers of Genesis Noir, confirmed as much. "We were playtesting, bug hunting, and polishing all the way up to the last minute. When we released to players, we also got reports of rarer bugs we did not encounter in our rounds of quality assurance, so we're continuing to fix them as they pop up."

Smaller games tend to have bigger issues when it comes to development. While 'Triple A' games (such as Call of Duty, Battlefield, and the like) have massive teams that are constantly working on every last facet of the game, games such as Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion have smaller teams that need to work on every single element and factor everything in, increasing the workload put on the developer. Yukon Wainczak of Snoozy Kazoo, the developers of Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion offered an example of one of the big hassles of developing such a game and even gave insight into how the development team went about fixing the problem.

"Our biggest hassle was probably the plant system that's in the game. We created these stationary plants that each can be used to solve puzzles, but they all have a synergy with one another. This synergy was by far the most complicated thing to deal with throughout development, as we had to make sure plants worked well together to be able to build puzzles featuring multiple at once. We overcame this by revising the designs a lot through tons and tons of playtests. We've gone as far as scrapping certain plants and redesigning them from the ground up after receiving player feedback."

Even with all the potential hassles and issues that can arise while trying to create your art, developers from TinyDino Games (creators of The Ambassador: Fractured Timelines) think there's no better time than the present to try and pitch your game to an audience, but warns that it's important to only publish your game when you feel like you're ready to do so.

" When we started The Ambassador our focus was just to make a game that we had fun playing, and I think we did that.  But our original version had a very weak unique selling point, so when it came time to find a publisher we kind of fell flat as the game was very hard to pitch.  The main thing we learned from the process and will take forward with us is to really lock down a unique selling point before even starting on a game.  It’s never been easier that it is now for anyone to make their own game, you need to have something unique that makes your game stand out. 

"Even the Ambassador could have done more with its unique selling point.  Most people who played the game liked it but several critics didn’t rate the game highly because it didn’t “revolutionize” anything and wasn’t “memorable.” It didn’t stand out enough among the crowd of other games. Another big thing was just finishing the game. When we started the Ambassador I had barely done pixel art and I'm now much more skilled at it than I was when we started The Ambassador. But at a certain point I can't keep going back and fixing character designs or polishing animations. We literally could be still working on The Ambassador today, but we had to get to a point we were happy with it and move on and take those skills into the next game. Developing a game is a learning process."

People often think of the video game industry as one that just churns out game after game, and don't often think about the human element of such a monolithic task. And as I hope I've shown, it's not all sunshine and roses on the development side of things, and things do often go wrong. It's proof positive that even those who know what they're doing can get it wrong, and that it is not uncommon for people to make mistakes and have to start again.