Avoiding the Indie Game Developer’s Trap:
Keeping Scope Realistic
Last year we ran our first Kickstarter campaign, and it failed. As always with these things, there can be many reasons behind that unsuccess, but I’ll focus on the main one for now. I believe we fell in the same trap as most of Indie Game Developers – which is – scoping the game too big. Without knowing all the implications of its development cycle at the time, we dreamed big.
We wanted to build an open world game. It doesn’t matter right now what else the game was going to be about. With the team size we had at the time, I’m now sure that the project felt unrealistic to a lot of people.
As a newcomer, when you look at the capabilities of modern game development engines today, you can very easily believe that you can build a video game in no time. Well, let me tell you first hand: it’s one thing to build a game mechanic, a relatively cool-looking small visual area on a map, and something totally different, to ship a finished product out to the world. The thing is however, this wasn’t the first time we had a look at the engine. We had experience with other projects executed in the past that didn’t see the light of day. We obviously worked on the demo for a while to get it to the stage it was at. We had a map, quests, and mechanics. But we still fell for it.
Open world AAA games today, have huge areas with astonishing visuals to showcase. Have you ever stopped and thought about all the props those developers had to place in their game? Forests are usually the least difficult, as there are a lot of procedural techniques to generate them. It’s not that they’re not a lot of work to make them look right, but it’s easier then to build an entire village, or a fort for example. Tables, boxes, cups, ropes, sticks, all the other small bits you can pick-up, inspect with your in-game character, or just those simply used in order to offer a more complete visual experience. Placing them in a world – that takes a lot of time. Did we think this through well enough? Well that part, I still think we did.
But that’s not the real challenge of an open world game in my opinion. Because no matter the genre, you’re still going to need props. If they are not spread across a large map, your product will likely require just as many in smaller areas. In the end, you’ll actually end up having a large number of smaller areas, in order to ensure a decent number of gameplay hours.
The biggest challenge is, I believe, to keep the game dynamic at all times. You don’t know as a developer the choices, and the order of choices a player is going to take throughout the game. Will the player go left? Or right? Maybe go back to check what changed after completing a quest? How are you going to handle all those triggers? This aspect is quite challenging because you don’t want to start adding too many limits. That’s going to defeat the purpose of developing an open world game, right? At the same time, you have a storyline that can be unraveled only in a certain way. To address this problem you need to give yourself a lot of time to plan things ahead. But even then, the execution will take a long time to implement. Not to mention testing all possible scenarios. Bug Fixing is also a big one, as regressions can happen very easily. You can fix one thing, but you might break something else in the process. There are so many dependencies to consider at all times.
Obviously companies see success with such projects. We have amazing titles out there, and the model has been proven time and time again to be working. Is this genre however the best choice for a small team of Indie Game Developers? When we started, we obviously thought it was.
To change our mindset for the better, we had to fail. We had to run that Kickstarter campaign unsuccessfully, and go through the feedback we’ve received from interested parties to understand that our product is not moving in the right direction. Are we happy that we failed? Of course not! But we are grateful for the learnings we had ever since. Did it affect our motivation? Kind of. But after a while it actually fueled it. We went back to the drawing board and thought really well about what went wrong, and what we can realistically achieve with our resources. We still dream just big enough. Because in the end, we want to give our audience a product that’s worth spending their time on. It still has to be interesting and fun. If we reduce the scope too much, it’s going to be anything but that. It’s a fine line we have to walk on. But we’re happy and motivated to do so.