The cost of innovation
The reason Grant and I started Endgame was that we wanted the freedom to pursue our own game ideas. Working on license-based titles was all about delivering a product on a budget and within a timeline - there wasn’t much scope for trying new things. It’s been an awesome experience to be able to make our own games, but we’ve learnt a lot of lessons along the way.
A big one that we’ve realised is that although innovation is great, it can be costly too. When we made Fractured Soul, we were really excited by its potential. What we thought was really cool about it was that its dual screen nature demanded that players think differently when playing it. It was like “brain training” in a way, a completely new skill that players had to learn in order to master the game.
Although that was great, what we didn’t realise was how difficult it would be to actually design the game. Because we were doing something so unlike anything that had been done before, there was no template to fall back on when coming up with ideas.
The unique dual screen nature of the game posed a lot of challenges for us. For example, designing combat scenarios was difficult because the player could switch screens at any time, allowing him to effectively sidestep any enemy encounter with ease. This meant that a lot of the situations that were really fun in classic games of the genre didn’t really work at all in our game. It required a lot of original thinking to solve the problem, including being careful about how we laid out each combat scenario over both screens to minimise or avoid the issue, and also coming up with a new enemy that would only die once it was destroyed on both screens. There were many other examples like this, and they added up to a lot of time spent in brainstorming and rework.
We’ve been bitten a little by this when developing The Wanderer as well. Although our original intention for the game was to blend FTL and Fallout, as Grant explained in a previous post, we discovered that it was very difficult to make a Fallout style isometric turn based combat system interesting given the constraints of The Wanderer (single player party, realistic world). It was really tough to come to this realisation after having developed a fully playable combat prototype. We looked to previous games for inspiration, but after researching it quite thoroughly we couldn’t find any other game that had fun single player, turn based combat in a realistic setting. We then went back to the drawing board, and invested a lot of time before arriving at an original solution - the current, card-based system. We think we’ve come up with something fun, but it was a long haul to get there.
I think the lesson we’ve learned from these experiences is that innovation is the most costly part of the whole game development process. The cost of experimenting with new ideas, iterating, rework, and cutting things altogether can be extremely high, often adding months onto a project’s development time. It definitely wasn’t something that we realised when we first started out. We still want to make original, unique games, but now we’re much more aware of the hidden costs this can entail!
(Posted by @ndkovac)
