Sometimes you work for months or years on a game and when you release it- it just flops- dead in the water. Sometimes it is because your marketing is off. Sometimes the launch bugs get you. Sometimes it’s just not the right game for the times. It happens. Realistically it happens far more often than getting a hit game. Gamedev is tough and the odds are bad.
Sometimes a game just needs time like Among Us which needed several years to build up a player base. Sometimes you need to rebuild it from scratch and sometimes you just have to accept that you need to move on. So many developers get stuck on one game idea and never actually iterate.
So what has inspired this post? As many of you know I launched #ScaryMermaid last year. It was a fantastic idea for a project and I was so excited about it. The project though was plagued by many problems and while I managed to launch it on time the bugs are terrible. I’ve been working through them slowly but I don’t know at this point if I will ever truly feel like this project came anywhere near the idea that inspired it.
It’s a shame but this project just hasn’t worked out the way I thought it would. Talking to other devs this is way more common than what people realize. Even great devs and studios have games flop sometimes.
What can you do when it happens to you? Get back up and either fix it or move on to the next project. Sometimes it is a case of needing more polish and sometimes it just time to go on to the next project. So which is #ScaryMermaid? I’m honestly not sure yet. After this past year I haven’t been feeling like working on horror games so I haven’t made much progress on fixing the plethora of errors that keep popping up like a hydra.
I’ve gotten distracted by working on Bramblewood-My next game. It’s all happy and while bugs do pop up rarely do they take more than a couple hours to fix. The environment is gorgeous and it’s just easy. It’s an open world game which I have realized I much prefer working on. Non linear plotting is so much simpler for me. I do want to polish and finish #ScaryMermaid but I think I may set it aside for awhile and come back closer to Halloween when I am feeling the spooky vibes again.
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