Let’s! Gooooo! ??

Last week, BUCK launched our first original game, Let's! Revolution!, out into the world. It's an exciting achievement for BUCK, and the response to the game in the first week, from press and players alike (97% positive reviews on Steam!), has been incredible, far outperforming my hopes for our first published game.?

I'm proud of the team’s vision, resilience, and dedication. It’s a cliche, but my pride is rooted less in last week's destination and more in the years-long journey — how we’ve failed, grown, and persisted in the process of getting here.?

Making any game is hard and shipping a good one is even harder. Let's! Revolution! isn't actually BUCK's first game—it's just the first we've successfully released. So I thought I'd take a moment to talk a bit about the journey, the beliefs that guide us, and a few of the lessons we learned along the way.

Crawl Before You Ball

There's a well-known quote from Massimo Vignelli: "If you can design one thing, you can design everything."?

This attitude has served BUCK well as we’ve expanded our design offerings over the past 20 years—but it can also lead to hubris. For our first three games, we were ambitious, pursuing a scope and strategy that required a publishing deal to co-fund the game's development. Like so many design studios before us, we thought, "We've got some of the greatest talent in the world, why can't we make a beautiful premium mobile game like Monument Valley or Alto's Adventure, or even a next-gen console game?" But when our third game failed to launch, we needed to reset.

With this lesson in mind, our small games team set out with more humble aspirations to develop a game within a year and release it with or without a publishing deal. We wanted to make something “small but memorable.” We weren’t looking to win awards or pursue accolades. We wanted to set a realistic goal of finishing a time-boxed game and shipping it, so we could:

• increase our knowledge of how to ship and market a BUCK game
• increase external legitimacy and awareness
• build sustainably from there

Our core game team of four ( Michael Highland , Marla Anyomi, Ian Sundstrom , and Nick Pettit ) had ample experience making and launching games at other studios, but they hadn’t done it in a multi-disciplinary studio environment like BUCK. And they hadn’t done it together.?

Prior to this release, we found ourselves in a familiar catch-22: We had a few game prototypes and pitches in various forms of development and while publishers liked what they saw, they all passed with a version of the same feedback: “BUCK is great at animation, but can you execute and ship a full game?”?

So we set out to answer that question with the following approach:

Make the gameplay fun first. Prototype. Don’t world-build. Don’t start with concept, story or character. Don’t create any art. Make the core game loop fun, and expand out from there.

The team did just that and one of the prototypes rose to the top: Michael’s idea for a roguelite minesweeper mashup originally dubbed "White Rabbit," with deceptively deep strategy and immersive gameplay. The games team was excited by how fun the prototype already was, but it was hard for some at BUCK to immediately see the promise of this mid-core strategy game without any world-building attached to it.?

“This might not be my kind of game,” I thought, “but is it a BUCK game? And what even is a BUCK game?”

This was scary — isn’t storytelling and design BUCK’s superpower and our differentiator? But empowering the core games team to take the lead, starting with gameplay, and trusting in their process, intuition and expertise, turned out to be my biggest single lesson. It helped reinforce a core belief of ours:

Innovation only happens when we embrace ambiguity and seek the unknown. And by taking and giving ownership, knowing when to lead and when to follow, we align passion to opportunity. That’s when we make the extraordinary possible.

The prototype and production constraints, rather than limiting us, established a clear sandbox for the rest of BUCK to play in and helped answer the question, "What is a BUCK game?"?

Answer: It's the game the team is passionate about making.

World Building

When we opened up world ideation to a diverse group of creative folks at BUCK, we encouraged an intentionally inclusive process while still reinforcing our gameplay-first strategy. We broke into several 5-person "pods" to play the prototypes and begin to imagine what the world of the game could be.

Here’s what we asked the pods to consider:

• What would make this game fun for you??(eg: mechanics, gameplay, approach)
• How might we theme this prototype to flesh out its personality??(eg: story, art direction, world building)

We were looking to develop theming and ideas that complement the mechanics already present in the prototypes rather than introduce ideas that fundamentally change the scope. We asked the pods to present back by describing a player fantasy, incorporating world-building considerations like a call to action, goal conclusion, classes, and abilities.

Emily Suvanvej , one of BUCK's art directors at the time, came back with this unique player fantasy, and we knew immediately its was the weird and wonderful world we all wanted to inhabit:

You’re the lowest of the lowest baseborn — look at you, you have the junkiest bubbleship this side of the astral plane. No coin. No prospects. Only this shitty job cleaning up space-junk left by the Imperial-elite.

The same Imperial-elite who have taken everything for themselves, along with the Usurper Supreme (the King).

We won’t stand for it anymore. They’ve left us nothing. It’s time. LET’S! REVOLUTION!

Emily's clear vision for the world and characters lead to exciting new classes and gameplay, scaffolding on top of the prototype's foundation. We assembled a diverse group of BUCKers (over 75 total, including marketing and cinematic teams), including Thea Glad as animation lead to build out the visual and thematic world in a truly inclusive and collaborative process, delivering on the game team's mission to provide creative opportunity for the larger BUCK team.

Note: If you'd like to read more about the prototyping and game design process for Let's Revolution, check out Michael and Ian's article on Game Developer.

Why Games?

Like our namesake Buckminster Fuller, I see us as a polymaths. We are multidisciplinary students, teachers, thinkers and doers at our core. We love to go deep and wide, to work together, to grow and learn from each other. We are deeply curious and interested in problem seeking, not just problem solving. But what makes this all possible (and fun!) is that we love to play and explore.

ECD Vincent L. breaks down BUCK's universal process into three phases:

1. Think & Wonder
2. Play & Explore
3. Make & Make Better

They're all essential, but I think the second one can sometimes be overlooked, especially as timelines and budgets get squeezed. Developing original IP and games separate from client work encourages play and exploration. We'll never be successful at developing our own IP by being solely business focussed, chasing research and market trends, or by jumping straight into familiar creative territory.?

I'm reminded of the often quoted Sun Tsu here:

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

This is sage advice that our production-honed teams can grow from. Process-based work requires a strategic foundation to build from and longer projects like our game help develop those muscles.?

But this is also a war metaphor and limited as such. While we certainly want to succeed in games, we're not here to conquer. We're not just thinkers, and not just doers. We're players and explorers.