The game is called ‘SkyRider & the Journey to the AirCitadel’ (@SkyRiderTheGame) and it’s a 2 player Co-op Action Puzzle Platformer for PC, and consoles where cooperation is key ALL the time.
The game was born from a prototype I made in 'Construct 2'. The idea was to make a 2 player game with communication being necessary all the time, but also with simple controls so single players could control both characters at the same time if needed.
After having a functional and fun prototype some (really talented) co-workers wanted to develop it as a full project.
There came my first lesson: as a game designer, programming or scripting in order to (at least) prototype your ideas is game changer.
There came my first lesson: as a game designer, programming or scripting in order to (at least) prototype your ideas is game changer.
We wanted to make a fresh and dynamic game with new mechanics and also an interesting setting. Story was important for us, we saw it as a way to express meaningful stuff. So the world we designed was an analogy of the real world we live in:
It’s a story of disparity in a place where rich people live in flying cities while the masses extract the minerals that makes them stay in the air. A social hero and his robot companion will go against the established to change things.
We started developing the game in Unity, and as we showed it to several people, the faith in it and in the team grew. We thought we could use this to stop working for others, and finally be independent.
After quitting my job, I took a demo of the game to the GDC 2015. We wanted to get funding and publishing. I also used the trip to open a US bank account in order to do a Kickstarter campaign in a near future.
GDC 2015 was a great experience, but a complete (REALLY expensive) failure. I felt completely lost, didn’t know how to tackle business meetings and the event itself was way too much for me.
Then we focused in the KS campaign, which, from Argentina it's almost impossible to do (you need a US bank account and a Social Security Number) But finally we did it and the campaign failed. I wrote a whole gamasutra post with some of the reasons: (gamasutra.com/blogs/AdrianNo…)
Then out of nowhere, a contact I made in the GDC wrote us. It was @11bitstudios. They wanted to invest & publish. In our 4th meeting they said their marketing team didn’t know how to work with our product, so we weren’t going to work together. We understood it but it was tough
Obviously continued anyway, we felt the game was special enough. We rented an office and went there after our 9 to 6 jobs. At that time we were 3: me doing GD/PR/PM, Damian doing Art and Federico all the Programming.
We uploaded the demo to Game Jolt and Itch.io and got a really good reception. Lots of youtubers i.e @BrettUltimus played it and seemed to have fun with it.
We wanted to show it in more events (locally and regionally) but the game was suffering from that. A lot of hard coding was done in order to achieve the milestones and at some point we had to restart the whole project as the game was purely spaghetti code.
In one of the refactors we decided the game was going to be a ONLY 2 player experience. With this decision, both characters could be more interesting, but a new question arose: will it be couch co-op or will it have online multiplayer?
After long discussions, we decided that it wasn’t going to have any online mode. It made sense both from a scope and design philosophy standpoint.
We talked with @matthammill, one of the ‘Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime’ devs. He told us to develop online without a doubt, that they didn’t and suffered from that decision. Even though our games shared spirit we didn’t listen and continued our way. Big mistake
So we decided to keep trying, pitching the game to publishers. We had online conversations and/or opportunities to pitch the game in person to @devolverdigital, @RawFury, @humble among others. We got a ‘No’ for different reasons, but mainly thanks to the ‘no online’ point.
We had 2 opportunities of being funded by particulars but failed as well in the last minute. That was really hard for us. After several years of working extra hours to develop this and getting nowhere we decided to stop for a while.
We didn’t talk to each other for the next 7 months, we were burnt out. But suddenly the Nintendo Switch came out and we allk thought that that console was pretty much designed to host our game. A new hope. We even welcomed a new and fresh developer @ValeZumZum to help us
I pitched the game to Nintendo and got the approval to publish the game in Switch. But a small detail: there was no game yet. And there wasn’t any energy left as well. We were all having incredible jobs at the moment that we didn’t want to risk. So the development died again.
Conclusions. We changed the scope and design several times. We did some bad technical and business-wise decisions. We decided to not consider having online even when everyone told us to. We had a weak roadmap, filled with milestones tied to events.
Conclusions. We ventured in a complete strange world without knowing anything. Business, publishing, etc. We knew nothing and didn’t look for advice first. We thought everything was just about having a good game, and it is not like that at all.
People that knows me understands how painful not releasing Skyrider is for me. Some people even uses it to bother me (like @GarstProduction haha) But I can also say that the joy and lessons this game gave me are priceless.
Doing games is hard, but highly rewarding as well. If you are doing something on your own, don’t give up, just be smart. Hear the people that has experience and use that advice.
If you want to play our game, you’ll find a 5 levels demo of it in here: adriannovell.itch.io/skyrider-and-t…. <3
If you want to play our game, you’ll find a 5 levels demo of it in here: adriannovell.itch.io/skyrider-and-t…. <3
