🛀🏽 😘 ☂️ How I abandoned the game after four years of development 💃 👋🏻 👩🏿‍🔧

Sometimes it’s not easy to force yourself to invest strength and personal time in the development of the game, when the release is not even visible, and the only engine is enthusiasm. Here, not everyone reaches the end.

Under the cut, expectations, reality and burnout indie development. And in the end - a link to the demo, you can feel how close the author was to success.

My name is Adrian Novell, I am a game designer from Argentina. In 2014, I started work on SkyRider & the Journey to the AirCitadel for PC and consoles. The cooperative project for two immediately combined action, puzzle and platformer.

Most likely you have not heard of him. Despite four years of development, SkyRider never came out. This happens in the industry. And much more often than it might seem. Almost complete devastation, but I learned a lot. Here is my story.

First, a few concept art:

Pitch

In 2014, I worked for a French company that was engaged in mobile games. Then the SkyRider prototype appeared on the free Construct 2 engine. Initially, it was planned to create a game for two, in which the characters must constantly contact. At the same time, management would be simple so that one person could play for both characters at once.

I am a game designer, so project management, programming and prototyping were completely new areas for me. It's great that you can share your ideas with others from the very beginning of development. As a result, I persuaded my colleagues to join my project. Some of them are still in the SkyRider team (Damian Fernandez Gomez and Roberto Andriuolo). We decided to develop the game in our free time after work. I wanted to do something really new.

In SkyRider, you control a scavenger: jump, fight and collect energy for the drone. The partner, in turn, plays for the drone: creates platforms, puts energy shields and shoots. Together you must go to AirCitadel and defeat the boss.

We wanted to make an interesting story. The Sci-Fi world was built by analogy with the real one: the rich live in flying cities, while the rest have to extract minerals from the ground to keep the Citadel in the air. Our hero and his companion robot rebel against the corrupt authorities, all game mechanics pushed off from this.

Players must help each other in order to survive. They constantly interact, protect each other and work together.

We put together a team and started development on Unity, visiting all the local gamedev exhibitions that we could find and where you could connect the laptop to a power outlet. The response from the audience was overwhelming - people liked our game. When you first realize that your strange idea is actually worthwhile and others like it, you have incredible feelings.

As you remember, we started making the game in 2014 - then the high-profile indie projects Spelunky and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime came out . SkyRider was our chance to quit hiring and become independent developers.

I decided to quit my job and take the demo to the GDC in San Francisco to get funding, find a publisher, and prepare for the Kickstarter campaign for next year.

Yeah.

GDC 2015

GDC 2015 was incredible, despite the money spent. Moreover, the conference was a real failure, mainly due to a lack of preparation. I had no idea how to conduct business meetings, and I arrived at the GDC (in the hope of making a deal for a million, just a minute) with a laptop, two joysticks, the so-called “business plan” and a presentation in PowerPoint. The week was long.

A lot of events happen at the GDC at the same time. Those who have been there a couple of times know that business deals usually take place in less noisy places. I was carried away by shining lights and noisy events - the atmosphere was almost festive. In such a situation, it’s easy to forget why you came.

Probably, I did not approach the matter seriously enough, but in the end I still adapted. At first I wanted people to run the game on my laptop, but I realized that such an opportunity is too rare. Plus everything came out very awkward, because I had to spend time launching the game.

Fortunately, we had a great teaser, and by the end of the week I just showed it on my smartphone. A 55-second video is much better than a sweating guy who has been trying to set up a demo on a laptop for ten minutes. Perhaps it would be even better to show a 30-second demo and conduct a brief presentation. Unfortunately, the first GDC did not bear much fruit, although we stepped on a couple of publishers.

A few months after the conference, life was like a roller coaster. We continued to work on SkyRider and waited for news from publishers. Some called, but it didn’t lead to anything. Each failure was experienced hard. It doesn’t matter how much we believed in ourselves, how much the local community of developers believed in us - all this depreciated when it came to business matters.

Working with a publisher comes down to business. Everything will work out if you have a clear vision of the product (we did not have it) and if you can accurately describe your needs (we could not). At that moment, the publisher was a source of funding for us. Of course, we were also ready to make certain sacrifices and cut our budget a bit.

GDC 2015 has become an alarming bell. 20 thousand developers from around the world in one city - this picture allows you to soberly assess the situation. I was an ordinary developer in the whole sea of similar specialists. Yes, the community is great, but we needed to break out of the trap of our illusions. This was a real shock.

Then there was the Kickstarter campaign.

Kickstarter

In search of financial independence, we decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign , since everyone around it was doing it. They wanted to attract the attention of the press and money in order to complete the game. Moreover, unlike the release through the publisher, we would not have to give a percentage of earnings to third parties.

So we thought.

Everything turned out differently. To launch the Kickstarter campaign in 2015, we needed a US bank account and social security number. But we were in Argentina. So, it was necessary to cooperate with one of the developers with GDC and give some share.

As I said, we were going to meet a small budget and were ready to sacrifice a little personal finances to finish the game and get at least some kind of income. We dreamed that we would be able to work on SkyRider nine hours a day, and we would not care about thoughts about the main work. It seemed that Kickstarter would provide such an opportunity.

To raise funds, you first had to find fans. Although the GDC has shown that there are not enough people around us, the lesson has not been learned. Communicating with the press from outside the United States was not easy, in particular because of the language barrier.

Given all the wake-up calls, we abandoned the Kickstarter campaign. We decided that it was enough to be distracted and completely switched to developing the game itself.

Flat

The following months were the most fun for the whole time of working on the project (at the same time, they were the least effective). I returned to my old job and invited a new programmer to the team. We decided to rent an office, or rather, a small apartment. There the three of us worked in the evenings after the main work, four days a week.

It was not easy, they almost did not sleep, but they felt energy in the air as soon as they arrived at their office. We were consumed by the desire to breathe life into SkyRider. The clouds were gathering, rejections from publishers continued to come, but we did not lose hope.

One of the first things we did in this office was to download the demo version on GameJolt, Newgrounds and Itch.io. The response was excellent. The youtubs picked up our title, they liked it, the necessary moral support came.

And a lot of beta testers appeared. People played for hours in SkyRider, and we watched their videos, analyzing what worked and what didn't. It became clear what needs to be completed.

Exhibition dates have become our development milestones, we tried to release a new version of the game for each event. This circuit worked perfectly. There was a clear goal that helped not to get lost in the development process. Although this approach had its drawbacks.

Being attached to the dates of the exhibitions, you are not working on the game, but rather collecting a demo version so that there is something to show. In this case, you have to redo the tutorial: dozens of people will launch your game in a day, the session lasts about ten minutes (and usually it is the same first ten minutes), and you want them to get the maximum fun. We have been developing learning levels for ages, remodeling them a week later, and then refining them again after a couple of days.

Approaching the deadline, you start to whip up everything. The game will work at the moment, but not in the long run. By the end of 2015, SkyRider did not look very good. No, outwardly the game made a good impression, but everything was bad in the backend. The code looked confusing because we were constantly making corrections on the go. It was like plastering a broken leg over and over. And all these patches eventually began to interfere with each other, all leg animations were sent, so it was easier to take a new leg.

We had a responsible programmer. Usually it was he who noted that hard-coded solutions were the wrong way out. But there was no time to do everything right if we wanted to show something at local exhibitions. It happened because of decisions made by the producer. As a result, the season of events ended, and we realized that it would be easier to start all over from scratch. So we did at the beginning of 2016.

Only cooperative mode for two

It was decided that SkyRider will be sharpened exclusively for two players, there will be no single player. In terms of game design, we made interesting changes for both heroes - now they are more dependent on each other. But the question remained: will the game be available only from one device or are we implementing online multiplayer?

In terms of project scope and sequence, there was only one correct answer. If you don’t like the way another player placed the platform, you should be able to slap him on the head in real life. It was decided not to depart from this strategy.

We asked Matt Hammill, the creator of Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, for advice. He understood what we were going through, because our games have a similar philosophy. Matt said we need an online mode. His team decided not to do this, and that was a mistake.

After listening to him, we thought that since our games are so similar from the design side, even if their fates are the same. Gamers well received Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, which means that we should only do a “couch” cooperative mode.

Stupid decision.

Burnout has begun. Developing a video game four nights a week after an exhausting day at the office is bad practice. We moved on for three evenings, and then for two. But there was still no strength. We were out of breath because we had been working on a game that hadn’t progressed so much.

Another financing problem was a hard hit: at the last moment, the publisher decided not to sign a contract with us, because the game did not have an online mode. Failure is difficult to survive even in the best of days, but when there is no strength anyway, it simply devastates.

By July 2016, we stopped renting an apartment and abandoned SkyRider & the Journey to the AirCitadel.

They didn’t talk to each other for seven months. There was no anger, no offense. We just reminded each other of the defeat, and each decided to go his own way.

In 2017, Nintendo announced the release of a new console.

Go to Switch

The hybrid console, which can be played everywhere, was supposed to shelter a lot of indie projects. And joysticks are disconnected for playing together. Switch as if created for SkyRider. In general, we decided to try again, but do not rush so as not to burn out in the process. We took another programmer and in mid-2017 began to think about GDC 2018.

We gathered on the weekend, re-learning the joy of game development. For a while, everything went well. Everything was in place, the team was full of strength, especially thanks to the new developer. But our gentle schedule meant that we would take the unfinished game to the GDC. As a result, we returned from the conference without any particular results. Only a couple of useless letters.

We applied to Nintendo. We were told that you need to register your company in the system. And here we faced the last problem: we did not have a company. And there wasn’t even a working game. And most importantly - finally there was no strength for a trip to the GDC. We are exhausted.

The irony is that the world was finally ready for SkyRider, and we were not. During all the trials, victims of free time, fundraising, hoping to switch to full-time development, everyone found a good job and did not want to sacrifice it for the project.

We always had problems with time management. And there were no tools to do what we wanted - Nintendo Switch and Steam Remote Play left too late.

This project has become a part of me. Relatives know how hard I was worried that the release did not take place, that I lost.

I do not deny that I received many important lessons and was happy working on the project. Our tiny office was filled with laughter every night. We never fulfilled our dream, although there were many pleasant minutes in pursuit of it. And I owe him all the opportunities that appeared after him.

It’s hard to teach production and management, people get it in practice. That is why many video game development projects suddenly break off. While working on SkyRider, I realized what solutions to promote, when to step back and when everything becomes uncontrollable.

Not only a good idea is needed, and not only a great game. We need to find a middle ground between creativity and business, so that the project is successful. In addition, before starting development, you need to understand the market you are trying to break into. Making games is hard, but the reward can be very high. Do not give up and turn on your head.

That's the whole story of the never-released SkyRider. Perhaps someday the release will take place. In the meantime, you can test the first five levels of the game .