Our New Game "Didn't Meet Expectations"

We're making a new game, but spoiler, we also made some old mistakes. After making so many games, we really should have known better. So, we're also canceling our new game. Oh my god, I'm so excited to announce announce that we're making and canceling our game.
This is the game we've been working on for half a year now.
And it's gone.
This is not the first time this happened either. I've been documenting my entire game dev journey here on YouTube ever since 2018. That's 8 years ago.
this game in game school with two of my friends in 2019. Did quite well.
First game I showed myself work on online was Over Snover, which I eventually canceled.
There's Willy Snails, which was a solo venture of mine. Did okay.
And a similar thing happened when we spent several months thinking that Thronefall was meant to be a card game. It was definitely not. That's several months we're never getting back.
of course, Paul and I teamed up again to make Thronefall, which came out recently, 2024. Wait, that's not that recently, actually.
I'm in the fortunate position that I'm full-time in the game dev, and I'm creating a new Unity project.

About to repeat an unfortunate mistake that we've already made at least once in the past. Wait. Do I even remember how to make a game at this point? Also, I got some expectations. We we got to make something good.
[music]
And so, I got to work with Brackeys to tell
[music]
So, we're making games on a team of two again. I'm once again teaming up with Paul. And one thing we really like doing is starting with a strong fantasy.
Gladiators in an arena.
Battle bots.
One thing that we're also doing this time, I guess to raise the stakes a bit, is we're going online multiplayer.
It's notoriously difficult making a lot of developers shy away from it for good

reason, of course. We had some game ideas in mind and all of them required a character controller of some sort, so I got to work on making a multiplayer character controller. Game ideas we had were very fantasy first, so as mentioned the gladiators or maybe some vehicular combat stuff. It wasn't really fully fleshed out yet because for online multiplayer games you really got to put in some upfront tech work before you can even really get to prototyping. For the online multiplayer framework we decided to go with Photon Quantum, which I'm happy to talk about in a more nerdy video another time. So while working on the movement controller we very quickly realized that this was already quite fun by itself. Just jumping around on the little test boxes we had together, even without exploding cars racing around. So we kind of saw an opportunity to maybe make a little bit of a smaller game cuz this is our first multiplayer game and making a very big beefy chunky multiplayer game as the first multiplayer game that

all of a sudden not appear such a smart idea after second thought. So what if we remember our big game ideas for later and just try to make like a small stepping stone project to get into things. I mean [music] we're totally going to keep this small. It's not going to bloat in the slightest. We tried an obstacle course which was like the most obvious thing to try. That was okay but also pretty boring. Our breakthrough occurred when I made the climbing prototype, basically just spawning a bunch of random moving blocks, partially moving blocks, and you have to climb as far as possible in 3 minutes and whoever is the furthest up after the 3-minute timer ends wins.
Yeah, sometimes you have to like backtrack. But these levels worked surprisingly well.
Yeah.
Considering considering they're just freaking random cubes.
No, I missed my jump.
[gasps]
I fell all the way to the bottom.

[laughter]
I was too greedy.
It was a bit stressful to play, so as an experiment we tried turning it into a co-op game with some abilities. So, you could place checkpoints and platforms that your teammates could also use, and you have to run away from the the constantly rising water level behind you, and you have to collaborate to not die and survive as long as possible. So, very similar game loop, but it's cooperative and there's a little more depth with all of the different abilities you have at your disposal. This was actually surprisingly fun. It felt strategic. It felt like everybody could contribute something to the team, but it also wasn't too stressful because the checkpoints meant that you could respawn anytime that you failed if as long as somebody's still in the game and can place a checkpoint for you, you can basically just keep going. So, it was very relaxing and very collaborative tactical at the same time. I also tested a versus variant of this with a couple of friends where basically you have two teams of players going up against each other. So,

each team's playing in co-op mode, but against the other team trying to go higher and survive longer. This was also extremely fun, but probably not feasible for our first time online multiplayer game project because if you do anything competitive, it needs to be super duper cheat proof, and I was not confident in my ability to pull that off. Yeah, not being of our great mistake yet, we just kept going. Paul put some new art in the game. We tested a new forwards type of map. Map, so in this map you just got to go forwards, not upwards. You have to go forwards. I added some collectibles to the game to replace the cool down based abilities. I didn't really like the cool downs on the abilities because it meant that often times you had to just wait around for the cool down to wear off. That wasn't very fun. So, now in order to afford your abilities, you have to collect these collectibles and then the resources you get from those collectibles are always shared across the team. So, it doesn't matter who in your team collects the collectibles, everybody gets the same amount from it. This also means that you don't

necessarily have to be a frontrunner, you don't have to climb at the tippy top, you can also be a little further behind and just collect stuff for your team, which was like another play style this added to the game. Another mistake that I think we made during this phase is that very often we played it with the exactly same group. It was just Paul, our community manager Sasha, and I. And the three of us, we had a blast playing the game in this phase. Like, we really dug it. What we didn't realize is that it was a bit more tricky for other players because the game's not actually that intuitive. The The rules need some explaining. And also the skill gap is actually a problem if players with different skill amounts play the game, then some players can tend to feel a little useless. So, there were problems that we didn't notice uh during that phase. Or I even kind of think we knew about those problems, but decided to strategically ignore them kind of we will fix it later kind of thing. But all of that is not the big glaring problem that I talked about earlier. That one will come to in a little bit. In the meantime, we just kept making the game more beautiful.

Like, all of the blocks have like a rounded shader to them now, and there's like a better player character. There are different characters that all have different sets of abilities. We made a bunch of new block types like brittle blocks, bouncy blocks, lava blocks. Did a bunch of level generator work. Like, the level generator spitting out some really interesting stuff now. Obviously, there has to be a grappling hook. A mother freaking custom leaderboard that allows multiple players per entry. So, there's like a three-player leaderboard, a two-player leaderboard, and so on. Not to speak of our level select, which renders preview images for every level that you play. Levels are organized into cups, and cups can either be eternal or seasonal, allowing us to do stuff like seasonal events and so on. We were kind of even thinking this could become the co-op version of Trackmania. So, you're using your collaborative effort as a team to race to the top as quickly as possible using your shared abilities. So, we switched to a time-based high score table and made it so that collectibles also reduce your time. So, that makes for some pretty interesting

pathfinding. Paul was also busy on the art side of things. He built this massive arena for the entire game to take place and to hopefully enhance the fantasy a little bit. Fantasy, fan fantasy
Mom, I don't want to be an astronaut. I want to be a dodo on blocks in an arena above water.
No worries, Timmy. I got just the game for you.
So, when somebody dies, I think I should at least give you the courtesy of telling you their name. We lost Dodo Derby on this wonderful sunny day. It's really too soon. It's just way too soon. You've only been here for half a year. We nurtured you. We took care of you. We saw you grow. We saw you develop some real personality.

And now we stabbed you in here. back.
[laughter]
Sorry, that was That was uncalled for. That That was uncalled for. Dodo Derby
I'm starting to wonder if maybe the most difficult thing about making games or any creative discipline is just simply sticking to your own advice. One thing we really like doing is starting with a strong fantasy. It's so hard to do. Everybody has pretty good advice on how to make good stuff, but sticking to your own advice once you're in the weeds it's surprisingly difficult. When Paul and I made our last big indie game Thronefall, we spent way too much time prototyping random game ideas that weren't backed by a proper fantasy. That was our biggest learning from the Thronefall prototyping phase was to always start with a fantasy because the results you get are so much more interesting and appealing. The moment we decided we were going to make a minimalist kingdom management game, everything started clicking into place so so much better. And I think the difference is with a fantasy, you know

which feeling you're chasing. You know how it's supposed to feel like. And even more so, the player also knows how it's supposed to feel like, so it's easier to market and sell later on. In Thronefall, we made another fantasy-related mistake, namely that we decided to make it a deck-building card game. Would you like to be the ruler of an epic kingdom? Well, here you go, buddy. So, if you have a cool fantasy and you know how it's supposed to feel like, but you're not delivering on that, then that is a also a problem. My game Overlords from 8 years ago, I had to cancel for a very similar reason. It was also fantasy-related. There was no fantasy. You were just like an alien gobbledy goop. It's a little bit of a hard sell to say, "Would you like to be an alien gobbledy goop? I have the game for you." And then on top of that, the same as with Dodo Derby, the rules were too confusing. Confusing rules plus bad or non-existent fantasy is a bad combination. So, we knew all of that, and yet we decided

to make a game about dodos on blocks, on flying blocks. The story we were telling ourselves was that for the first time in Grizzly Games history, we were making a gameplay-first game. Like, the gameplay is so solid, it's going to carry this game, and we're just going to slap some cute skin, like with the dodos essentially, on top of it. Now, slowly but surely, the realization hit us that the gameplay had problems that were not trivial to resolve. For example, the game is not very self-explanatory at all. It's the rules feel kind of arbitrary. You need somebody to explain the rules to you very specifically. The reason why the rules got so complicated is because we're trying to patch over problems in the gameplay. But it just got more and more confusing every time we did that. Let's forget all of that. Let's have a look at this from a completely different angle. When we started making this game, I thought this is going to be so chill.

Like we're in such a good spot at the moment. We don't have any financial pressure. We can take as much time as we want. We don't even need this game to succeed at all. Like we are fine. So, in theory this should have been the most chill development process ever. And it has been quite chill. But now I think what Paul and I are all of a sudden realizing is there is a lot of pressure. Th- There is like our own expectations for what we can do there. They're up there. Th- We are We don't want to make some mediocre game. Like Dota Derby would have been fine. It would have been some cool mediocre game. It would probably would have done okay. We're not content with that.
[laughter]
Not every game we make needs to be a viral super hit, you know, you win some, you lose some. But we want to know

during development. We want to feel like that there is a chance. There's a small glimmer of hope that the game's going to do really, really well. That glimmer of hope, it just wasn't there anymore. Long story short, we scrapped everything. We went back to the drawing board determined to just pick a great fantasy and to build a great game around that fantasy following our own freaking advice. If I don't want to get yelled at in the comments, then And have to say this is not the only way to make successful indie games. There are a lot of different approaches. You can also make very gameplay-oriented games and have them be very successful. This is just what works for us. But every time we don't do this exact workflow, we regret it afterwards. Looking at our old scratchboard, what was staring us right right into our faces and into our souls was this, the gladiator fantasy. I mean, we already have an arena in our game, so

[music]
The Thronefall flashbacks are definitely real, cuz once again, we got a bunch of beans fighting against each other. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It just means we got experience with this kind of crap already. So, this, by the way, is a very quick prototype. This took like one or two days to make with the systems we already had. And Poland I pretty much agreed that the magic was back. We scoured Steam for gladiator games, and what we found definitely shocked {slash} surprised us. Cuz we kind of found nothing. Nothing that was really serving the fantasy properly and doing it justice. They're like a bunch of 2D indie games. They're also a bunch of physics simulation combat games, which is also not what we want to do. We who are about to die gets

close in terms of fantasy, but in terms of gameplay, we want to do some things quite differently. And also doesn't seem to have multiplayer. So, we found some freaking free real estate. There's always a chance we could be wrong. Let's hope we're not wrong, but this looks very very promising. Now, here's maybe the harshest thing about all of this. You will never know. We will never know what could have been with Dodo Derby. Every decision for something is also a decision against something. Um It's sad about all of like I'm sad for all of the games that are not made, but like a different game is now being made instead that would not have been made otherwise. Um We don't know what could have happened. We don't know, we will never find out. But we will find out about another thing that we would not have found out about if we had gone for that other thing. Um still

it's it's sort of a hard pill to swallow. We will We will never know what could have been. We're making a freaking gladiator game. Let's go. The 6 to 9 months that we spent [music] on Dodo Derby, they're not really lost. We developed a lot of new skills during that time. Paul is starting to become a genuinely good 3D artist, single-handedly doing 3D models, animation, texturing. At the same time, I learned how to make online multiplayer games in a way that doesn't even really feel like it's slowing me down during development. It was a bit difficult to wrap my head around. Sometimes we get criticized for making it appear as if everything was super simple. No, it's not. It's actually difficult to learn these things. It requires time and [music] effort, but I feel very well prepared now for whatever multiplayer game we'll want to make in the future. But I think this is where we say goodbye to this specific Unity project.
[music]
I will close it. I will

open my new one. And we will start from scratch. [music]
[music]
We're making a new game.