Game Dev Journal: Developing Evertried

"Ever tried, ever failed, no matter.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better"

Back then, when I used Samuel Beckett's quote as inspiration at a sprint meeting, I had no idea that it would also apply to our personal experience creating it. Evertried is one of these projects in which the designed user experience also ends up being our experience as developers. Among other reasons, this is why Evertried is the one project that left the strongest impression on me as a Game Developer. By far.

Humble Beginnings

Well then. Its early 2019, pre-pandemic times. My former team (essentially me and my partner) was going through a creative plateau. As we wrapped up our last project, all that was development and art related was nearly done. We were just waiting for our Sound Designer, which was overloaded with other projects, to finish the project. In other words, while the sound assets were not ready, our game wouldn't get to hit the stores.

In that mindset, there was the idea of getting started with the designs for the next project, of which we had been talking about for the last months or so. A few meetings later, the Game Design base was put in paper and we could start production. With the typical "Garage Indie Developer" work pace in mind, our preview was to have a public Alpha version in 3 months and releasing within 6 months.

But if one thing was taught by this project (and has been taught ever since), it was about the turnabouts of life and how to take the best out of them.

Around the same time, the freelancing agency in which I worked was going through a project hiatus. According to the managers, too many projects wrapped up in similar time-frames and there would be no demand for work hours until new project contracts were signed.

For the developers, it meant that there would be no work to be done for the while. With no hours worked, no work hours would be paid, and no income would come out of it as a consequence. In reality, it was the equivalent of a temporary layoff.

As expected, I was absolutely livid. Maybe more frustrated than mad, but absolutely mad. Ever since I got my first job in this industry, back at college days, I had not been jobless. According to my "bright" plan for post-grad life, if I never stopped working in the first place, I would just get to keep my job after college, instead of having to go look for one.

And finally, the moment had arrived. I had finished my bachelors and could focus exclusively on projects. Except this achievement was followed by having no work to be done, leading me from being an overworked college student to contemplating the void of unemployment. Was this how I would be rewarded by all the barely slept nights, with the sudden abandonment of everything I took as certain? All the effort was for nothing after all?

No, I refused to believe it. The anger stage had arrived, and it came to stay.

In this productive wrath, I realized something. All the Design for the new project was already in hands, and it was the prototyping phase of development. There were no dependencies, I could work as much as I wanted to and get results I desired with nothing else holding me down. The freedom and autonomy made the wrath into production.

For the next 3 weeks, I kept working in the project at a 45 hours per week pace and finished what had then been planned for 3 months. Making use of placeholder assets and a good deal of creativity, we had a functional prototype that fulfilled most of what defined the game's design in hands. We were ready to show our project and get feedbacks.

First feedbacks

With the prototype ready, the next goal was substantially lighter to perform, but equally necessary. Taking the project to its target audience. One of the commodities of living in a large city is that it's not uncommon for developers to gather from time to time, looking forward to expose and test their ongoing projects. One of these is the SPIN event, that takes place on a monthly basis in S?o Paulo.

But still, there were still a few weeks to go before the next SPIN event, giving us time to work on minor polishments to enhance the game experience. That was another one of the great things this project has taught me.

With some handle on Game Feel and coding, its possible to make great improvements to the game experience with very little art assets.

And it came through. Screen shakes, screen fade transitions, velocity interpolation, render opacity and time scale. You can go on and write 3 other articles on Game Feel alone, but these were and keys words that had the most impact for me. None of them requires art assets, and each of them makes it clear that your game is more than a proof of concept.

If you work with a Game Engine, it is likely easy to change the position, color and opacity of the objects in your game. If these objects attain velocity gradually instead of just moving instantly, the game experience becomes much smoother as a result. The same applies to using opacity when making objects appear and disappear, as opposed to making it happen instantly.

Siding that, choosing to make a "fade to black" transition between screens (such as main menu and game) and adding "screen shakes" at impactful moments rarely ever harm the functioning of other game systems and make your experience that much more memorable.

Time passes and our first SPIN takes place. To our surprise, the reception is much better than expected. The first impression is that this project definitely had more potential than the previous. During testing little to no effort was needed to get attention. We simply booted up the computer, invited a person over to play and its reactions alone started drawing other people nearby, that in order took their turns to play the game. This cycle repeated itself throughout the duration of the event.

Sure, there was much to be done, such as the remaining pieces of Game Design that still needed to be implemented. Other than that, the feedback we got from the event brought fourth new demands and ideas to be tested.

During the next month, our professional lives also got differing impacts. New projects were received in the agency in which I worked at the time. In the meanwhile, my partner was called for job interviews that would take place in the following days. With that in mind, our second month of production was less intense than the former, but by the of end of it, we had all we wanted in the game, besides art assets and audio resources.

We took our project to the following SPIN event, receiving great feedback, especially regarding the new polishments. My partner was hired at one of the job interviews and begun working in the same week the event took place. At first, all was good, things were picking up and we would just have to work on visual assets and remove placeholders. Simple, right?

In the end, what is good for one does not always benefit the other. And at times, in order to change, it is necessary to end what was before.

Working a full time job and developing a personal project at once is not something easy to handle, especially regarding the workload.

In the time that followed, week by week, nothing new was presented in our meetings and discussions became more and more tense. The sentence "if you not satisfied with my pace, just say so and we wrap this up" was said with a frighteningly banal and trivial tone. A certain discomfort was on the rise.

Looking back, I see that that was a suppressed instinct seeking to tell an unpleasant truth. "In this pace, the project may be done in 30 years, which by then, will be worse than not finishing it in the first place". Then, in one of these discussions, I followed said impulse and broke up the partnership that lasted for the last 3 years. At the time it seemed mad, but today I see it as one of the best things I had ever done.

Time passes, and another SPIN event takes place. I attend to keep up the fair networking, keeping the project in my computer, with no particular reason in mind. It is a moment of grief. I spend my time, among other things, relaying to the frequent testers that the project would be held up until second notice. Its a grim moment, but it ends. Now I would have to decide between finding a new Designer to continue the project or log it in the portfolio and keep it as a memory.

Not long after, the Sound Designer from the first project suggests that I partake in the BIG Business Rounds in order to find a publisher for it. BIG, or Brazil Indie Games, is the largest Game Dev festival in all of Latin America, featuring playtesting, dev talks and of course, business rounds. If there was a single place within reach to liftoff that project, this was it.

Seeking a publisher for the first project was something we had decided on doing through email at the moment, but I was not opposed to investing and doing it personally, as it could be a good way to cut through the masses. That, added to the suggestion of a veteran friend of "investing savings in great events to reach new heights" sealed the deal. The agency had a decent flow of work hours and payment, and there was no reasonable "why not" in sight.

I invested some and bought the Business Rounds ticket for BIG Festival 2019.

BIG Festival 2019

It was moving. It was chilling. It was absolutely incredible. Upon registering for BIG, I got access to the business rounds panel. All registered companies were there, and all it took was finding a company of interest and sending an invite for a 20 minute meeting. If the contacted company were to accept, the meeting was scheduled, simple like that.

After setting up my profile, I started sending invites over. My intention was finding Game Publishers for my first project, so I filtered my search by companies tagged as "publishing" and "games". What that ended up doing was restricting my search to publishers that had tagged themselves as acting in the games section (as opposed to just publishing), and letting through game companies that had already published their own games.

My second goal was finding a new partner for co-developing Evertried, that was named Tile Tower at the time. Due to the search filters previously mentioned, I ended up with 3 meetings with publishers and 27 with development studios.

Meeting after meeting, I could see that I had been fortunate in my misfortune. My initial idea was showing my games running at the moment, a terrible practice in 20 minute meetings, as was quickly noted. Luckily, I had also prepared a power point presentation for each project, which I began using from there on.

And just like that, meeting after meeting, adapting my presentation strategy at each one to better showcase my projects strong points in the best way possible, I made it through the event. It wasn't always a pleasant learning experience, but it surely taught me how to best present an upcoming project.

I ended up seeing that, most of times, signing in one of these events can just as well be the best thing to be done. Its the kind of indirect benefit that you begin to value when seeing how much better things become in its presence. If nothing else, I can say I left each business round much more prepared to the next one. And the cycle repeats itself until the meeting that changes it all.

They are not college professors, they are qualified people active in the industry teaching you what is wrong about your product

Right, but what about the publisher for the other project? Well, this part pretty much defines the "unkind learning" concept. Out of the 3 publishers, one was focused in simulation games, causing an immediate rejection. The other two worked with diverse games, and with them there was a shot.

Both featured foreign representatives and were scheduled for the second day of meetings. At the night of the first day, I set up an English version of my pitch and rehearsed rigorously. In my mind, I was convinced that I had what it takes to land a publishing deal.

"Its too simple, you should just self-publish"

The first representative told me that the product did not align with the ones that typically raise interest in its company. The next said that he could not picture any business partner that would be interested in publishing something so small.

In both cases, I got interrupted before finishing my presentation. To occupy the remaining time and avoiding the discomfort of rejection, I've switched projects and showed a bit of my Tile Tower presentation, asking if it raised any interest. The first answered with a vibrant "Yes" and asked for a playable version. The second was impressed with the progress between games to the point of asking to keep touch to track the project moving forward.

The industry veterans lesson was clear. My first project was too small for publishing deals and Tile Tower was too promising to be held up indefinitely the way I had pictured.

Rebirth

Within the co-development meetings, one stood out. It was the one with Lunic Games. Their representative, Pedro, had worked at Level Up Games for a few years and got interested by the game design's potential and production value shown by the prototype. This was a big deal. When someone that worked in the marketing department of a publisher of that size thinks your game has something that makes it stand out, you better believe he got examples to spare to compare it to.

Besides that, the match was way too right to be ignored. Lunic was focused in artwork and was looking for new partners and projects and I was working for someone to take care of the visual parts of my project, which had all the code already developed. As every meeting of this kind, I wrapped up asking for a mock-up of how the possible partner studio envisions the game once finished. Nothing requiring high fidelity, just a test to measure the production capacity and product understanding relating to my project.

Within a week, the mock-up had arrived, featuring a quality level much beyond the expected. Even when comparing to other potential partners, it was clear that they were the right choice to be made. Within a month everything was set and we started production.

Our projects usually have a great deal more or less potential than we take them for. What matters is being in a situation that allows for knowing which is which.

Ever since, the game has been getting its own look and feel. Now named Evertried, it is in its open Alpha stage and has been well received by the community. In november of 2019, we were selected to showcase at Firmeza Fest, a Game Dev and Workshops festival in S?o Paulo, ending Tile Tower's life cycle and giving life to Evertried.

Takeaways

Looking back, it is easy to remember a year by its hardships. As for me, I like to thing about these as moments of transformation. If I had to pick one thing that Evertried taught me, it was about having the resilience to take the best from an adverse situation and finding fortune in misfortune.

Evertried is being co-developed with Lunic Games since August, 2019. Since then, it received a 360% funding on Kickstarter and is estimated to hit the stores in 2021.

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Dan Domingues is a Game Developer by degree, Team Producer in personal projects and AI enthusiast in the spare time.