The Frustration of Bad Level Design in Modern Games

you walk into the room and there's like eight angles that you have to look out for, right? It's like this is bad level design. I'm getting shot from all like why is he up there, you know? So, I I think we're going through a similar phase like you said in the 2013 2019 of uh very good developers, but now I think a lot of game designers are gone. Um, which I don't know what that means um for for future games. Um, but uh I do want to say this. You know, we hit the hour mark and uh at some point I got to get have you guys back on. We touch on a lot of big subjects there, but uh the main subject of this episode is about Project Rail and I wanted you guys to uh kind of I'll shut up, hand over the mic to you guys to promote, give attention to, uh anything that you guys want to talk about and the floor is yours. Yeah, from my side I can say um it's a hell of fun uh creating like all the

videos um all the LinkedIn um teasers actually and we've seen like um yeah uh very positive reactions to that and we are working hard to um get the free demo out of there um yeah somewhere around next year like 2026 um and we currently have plans for adding something special for the players um they have to find it And we want to right now extend our gore system and work on the destruction. So, um yeah, right now we've built like the core combat, the atmosphere, and the demo will follow in 2026. Um, and yeah, it's it's just great to see that people really love the nostalgic feeling and um, yeah, that that they love to see like the weapon centered also in our game that they um, like the art style obviously and a lot of people u want to play that and the next step for us internally um, this year is to get it on

Steam um, so people can wishlist that and we're going to see what will come um, after that. So over to you Roy.
Nothing to add. I think I think you covered it all and uh basically very happy to have been uh doing this and I would like to basically take you know take take the situation the the opportunity to actually tell other people who are there basically doing their project. It's like define your success how it looks like. Try to be consistent. entire to be working on small steps that moves you forward to that success, right? Um, avoid all distractions if you can. It's not an easy one, but avoid distractions,
but it's so cool,
of course, but but that's that's the that's the key, you know, that is what made us basically deliver this in a relatively short time was precisely the moment we said like, okay, we need we need to actually focus, right? So, so of

course you know uh we live in a moment as as we said before that tools are helping a lot of people to do things. Um this is a moment in which you know you may not need a publisher to do the game you want to. So, so I encourage a lot of developers out there um working uh in in their projects to to go ahead and try and try it, you know, make making sure that you don't damage yourself in the process, you know, and you have a good balance, but you know, make small things that will move you to success.
Yeah. And test things early. So, we tried to do that to have
Yeah. performance also like we tried to do that make everything polished and then just throw it away because the system uh wasn't made for that. So test things early as early as you can like in white boxing um and you will get your success. So you can test like even with boxes if like a level is fun or um if the game play is fun um concentrate on that first and then make um things prettier at at the very end and yeah

just just start. I think um one good advice is if you if you have a solid idea, if you have a a really nice idea, don't be shy. Don't be like or don't have the impulser um yeah syndrome. Um I have it as well like as an artist whenever I release something on art station. I think um yeah, it's super cool. I can't wait to release it. Then I release it and I say like ah it's bad. Um maybe better luck next time. So don't do that to yourself. um be convinced like, hey, your game can be cool and get things started. Um I I would say if we can do it as a as a team of two, um you can you can do it as well. Well, uh thank you guys for the encouragement. You guys heard it. I know. Uh it's tough times, but go make something is kind of like the message here. Uh,