Postmortem: Leaving Lyndow - A very short first person adventure

News & General Discussion
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I wrote a thorough postmortem on gamasutra about our recent release Leaving Lyndow. It was a bit experimental. Given the massive effort involved in an effective crowdfunding campaign, I thought, for similar effort, it might be possible to make a small game instead. I wondered if this would be just as effective at raising funds and brand publicity, or maybe even more so. I can’t say for sure if it scored us more funds than a kickstarter would have, but I can say for sure that it gave us more experience in shipping games, and I’ve fairly confident it earned us more publicity and interest. It was also almost certainly more work than a kickstarter as well. That being said, I have no regrets about our decision.

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Quick Facts

  • Released February 8th, 2017
  • 45 minute play time
  • $3.99 list price
  • 1 developer full-time, 4 contractors part-time
  • six month development time
  • Revenue for first 3 months on PC: $10,000 USD
  • Game engine: Unity
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The game looks very nice and polished. May I ask how much did you spend on assets and contractors?

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Thank you! I estimate about $9k USD. Hardly any on assets. The reason why its not perfectly easy to quantify is because some of that work will be used for Eastshade too. Not included in that 9k is the six months of my own time which account for the vast majority of the productions costs.

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Great read and some of the key points rings true… I kind of summarised some points in un-related topic: https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/how-close-can-indies-get-to-aaa-games.468858/page-2

But the major point is games don’t scale linearly and it’s just a fact of life you can’t accomodate for every situation, like the duplicate ID’s you mentioned.

Lets say you make a game 1KM2, you have all your core systems set up and art (story, audio, art, UI, event system, combat, general logic, movement, environment, quest, dialogue and so on), you have what’s essentially a game and if you’ve done it before you could probably put it together in 12 weeks.

Now lets say you decide to double everything in a 2KM2 world, you’d expect it to take 24 weeks right? Well of course as you aptly surmised after optimisation due to scaling you’ve doubled your double…

Lets say we have a game now that’s 2 to the power of 3 larger than your previous attempt, you find out a mechanic works well in the original 1KM2 small game but becomes monotonous after long game play. How long would it take you to remove one of the core concepts out of a game that large?

Like @zombiegorilla has kindly provided before large outfits spend 100X / 200X your budget and the rest on prototypes alone. Again point being you mentioned what would it be like if you’d of suffered that ID issue with Eastshade? It’s a fickle thing designing big games as one setback can cost you months…

In terms of game length, well it’s one of those things for 39.99 you can get a game that will last you 500 hours… So should a game today last 50 hours for 3.99? Well no, probably not but there is a question of value… Not saying the way you did things is wrong in any sense, it’s just something to ponder.

Again, great write up and it’s one of those things that I can empathise with… Although I would love to see Eastshade when it arrives.

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