so like, this is a really interesting (and painful) read but there's something that really strikes me, where he mentions how close to ship everything was coming together, and god. What a mood.
I feel like it's one of those things that would absolutely shock gamers but is just kind of Understood among many gamedevs - that when games come out bad, it's not that the developers somehow were lying or concealing something, but that many games are very, very bad for 99% of their development time and then they become good at the last minute, like putting the final piece into a puzzle. Everything interlocks and then it finally makes sense.
Or it doesn't fit. And then you do what you can and hope.
and so like, you know. you come off a game like clockwork empires, which I worked on for like 4+ years, and it's like "didn't you know it was bad?" No, I simply hoped - down to the literal last second patch we never shipped - that it would become good. You spend most of development feeling that feeling. You have to feel that feeling, because otherwise it's impossible to get through that lengthy middle bit that's just working and working and so little obvious impact from it. The fact that it never manifested sucked for me and sucked for the playerbase, but there's never any maliciousness in it. It's just so damn hard to tell whether something is going to work out or not until you do the work.
Maybe I'm especially prone to this because I work in indie, which often lacks dedicated designers. I've been on a lot of games where the development process could be perhaps kindly described as "improvisational". I imagine, or I'd like to hope, it's a lot cleaner on stuff like action games where the terms are clearly understood. But, you know, when the gaslamp crew set out to make "dwarf fortress but accessible" I think we truly were figuring out every single step as we went. That doesn't have to be bad - sometimes it works out, and I think sticking explicitly to 'best practices' can lead to really conservative games. But the tradeoffs are pretty clear, right? Ambition can sometimes be like a really cool prototype plane that looks a lot less cool when it stalls and crashes.
One of the things I truly believe is that no one on a dev team ever sets out to make a bad game. Gamedev is buoyed by nothing if not eternal optimism. And so it's really hard to know what "honesty" looks like, right? Do you go out there and say "well it's awful but it'll be good by ship?" Will anyone understand? I've been working in this industry for over a decade and I still don't think I've ever shipped a game where I truly knew whether anyone was going to like it or not when it released. So you hope, and you do your best to make it good, and you hope some more. And if you're lucky, it works out.
And if you're not... well, maybe you end up like that guy linked above and get pilloried for a decade for things your boss's boss's boss did. Idk. It's a rough position to be in.
another sort of mini-addendum I want to make to this is that when you're head down on a specific aspect of a game - and this happens to me a LOT as an artist - it can be really hard to see the big picture, to even know what the big picture looks like anymore. In the same way that when I work on a single drawing for over 80 hours I start to lose all sense of perspective and have no idea whether I'm making the drawing better or worse anymore, when you work on a game for a long time it can be really easy to become completely incapable of playing it like a normal person or knowing what that experience would be like anymore. I play all my old games that came out and I just see things I want to fix, things I'd do differently. How do you even judge the quality of that in the run-up to release? Most often the answer is I can't. I just have to trust in the process.
I've been working on an indie project off and on for about five years doing most of the development work and I genuinely cannot read the script I wrote anymore and know if it feels natural or good. I have seen the first scene in particular more times than I can count and it's effectively just glyphs because of how long I've been staring at it.
This is part of why breaks are important. The times I've sat down to do full playthroughs after not having done so for a while, I can get some of the perspective back and let the game do what it's supposed to do.
In normal production though? You can't take months away from something to take the blinders off. You have to trust your colleagues, playtesters, and everyone else.
