i finally got around to and finished Darya Noghani's (@SketchyJeremy) Small Saga! i have a lot of thoughts about it, and most of them amount to "it's good," "hey play this thing," "hey you should play this thing," "it's really good." but i've also got a more useful thought i'd like to take a minute to write about!
so one of the common complaints about the game is that it's short. which it is, it's about 8 hours long, that's pretty bite size for the genre. for a moment, let's take... for the nearly immutable fact that it is, that a team of Darya's size (seems like 1, plus some help here and there) could not possibly make a game bigger than that. and that an 8 hour solo developed game is a miracle to begin with. one might be tempted to say, then, "ok well i really wish this had a bigger team"
i think there's a lot gained from the circumstances of its development that would have been lost, though!
small saga is full of ideas that a larger team would have been likely to collectively decide against, and any involvement of a corpo in any capacity would have definitely prevented. but even without a real suit and tie bastard like you're imagining, even a team bigger than like, 2 or 3, starts to run into the realities of Needing To Make Some Money in a bigger way, and that changes the decision making.
for one example, small saga seems to have near-completely unique art for just about every single room in the game, PLUS unique battle scene background art to match. some of Darya's art appears as if they have never heard of a tileset (this is a compliment). this was a decision which flies in the face of art-for-profit or even art-for-enough-profit to sustain a group of people. the work hours to dollars ratio of a decision like this just isn't there, because i and everyone else who bought it and loved it would have almost definitely still bought and loved it without. and yet... it wouldn't have been the same. we'd love it less. it'd be less what it is. this was a decision that you can only make because you want to make good art.
another good example is the game's politics. small saga has some ""controversial elements"" in it, and an artifact of its short runtime means that sometimes (not always, it really varies), those elements hit with all the subtlety of a bumper sticker. fortunately, that bumper sticker says something like "KILL TYRANTS. MAKE CO-OPS. BE GAY" and whips absolute ass. i think a larger team with more mouths to feed would have had to make some Difficult Choices about how much of that stuff to leave in, and corpos are, you know, corpos.
last little rule-of-three third example here: i would say small saga's real peaks are mostly back-loaded. the whole thing's good, but the most fun parts of an rpg are the "run around and do sidequests and explore characters before the point of no return" part and the finale, and those also seem like they got the most attention here, which is ideal, art quality-wise, imo. i think conventional gamedev for profit wisdom would probably caution against that approach though.
the point is, it's easy to wish Darya had more money and a bigger team and we got a bigger, longer game. but i think in that world, we inevitably lose out on some of the decisions that can only be made by a smaller team, or a team of one, though, and we'd get a pretty different experience. and would we even be happier with it? i'm not sure we would!
