It’s been a while since my last email. I’m breaking the silence today, not to sell you anything, just to share where we actually are.
I think people rather underestimate the level of craft and technical care that needs to be taken when creating a game, particularly an action game. People have this idea that you can create a game by getting an engine like Unity or Unreal and building stuff in it. But you’re not building a game; you’ve just built random assets. A game is essentially an “engine” that allows people to engage with it so they can walk away with a certain experience.
There’s this burning desire in me to get this game over the finish line, to really share it with the world. Something that isn’t doing the whole indie Metroidvania thing with pixelated art and chiptune music and “hey, let’s all profit off your nostalgia,” but something truly (almost obsessively) based in craft. What we’re building is a “chaosvania”, a genre that doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s closer to the classic Ghosts & Goblins arcade game from the 1980s than Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or Hollow Knight.
So there are 2 wolves in me. One wants to sprint and get this into people’s hands. The other says go fast by being slow. Because we won’t be doing our fans any service by rushing a defective or derivative product to them. The 16-hour timebox we just ran for this round of prototyping had me in my feelings, honestly.
In an action game, it’s not enough to just do action well. The action inherently needs to feel good, before anything else. Before art (and you know we can do art by looking at our graphic novels), before complex level design, and before enemy design. So we’re looking at our basic movements and asking: how does this not just function as a mechanic, but actually feel cool in and of itself?
Right now that means jump mechanics. We found that VFX needs to either flip direction or billboard depending on which way the character’s facing, plus render order issues so effects don’t vanish behind enemies. These are things you won’t know until you actually do it. And you can’t catch them early unless you have very experienced, seasoned people on the team (which we do).
We have a mini United Nations on our team, scattered across different countries, running almost entirely on Discord because the tool serves the “philosophy” (yes, I’m pretentious), not the other way around.
From my corporate experience, I’m always about pinging people, forcing status updates, getting commitments to a due date. But not here. Interrupting people while they’re working is a waste of time, frankly. I’ve had to build the discipline to not overshare and overcommunicate the way I usually have. That’s probably why I’m not emailing or posting as much these days.
Talk soon,
Wes
P.S. If you want to see what the current prototype looks like in motion (ugly graybox and all) there’s a clip here.