When you're forced to release a game...

News & General Discussion
1

“Beta”

Definitely pre-alpha.
If you guys made pass the login, congrats.

I’m frustrated and very tired right now.

Dev time around 3 months.
1 programmer (me), 1 concept artist, 1 UI person, 1 modeler.

We never got our funding, unnecessary features were requested and pushed (well hello login / payment screen), then our modeler left, team disbanded, and this past month I was tasked on handling everything alone. I could rant walls of texts of how unrealistic the scope is. But even writing right now I can feel the fumes still coming out, so I’m just gonna pull back.

Today is the day I leave. Can’t deal with the stress anymore.

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For what did you actually need a modeler, UI person and a concept artist?
This looks like thrown together with some store assets.

No offense since you’re the programmer, but it feels really cheap on the visual side.

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Precisely because we don’t have a pro modeller that most stuff comes from the store, placeholders before we get new guys in. Like the title suggest, this is a premature release.

The 2 artists are fresh grads and have no prior experience.

4

I am a bit confused, perhaps I am lacking some context, but when you say forced to release a game… who was forcing you? Who was requesting the features that were unnecessary?

I mean were you working for a studio? Were you dealing with publishers or end clients?

I know you are angry and venting but what is the story that lead you to this?

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If you put together a real-time MMO-style multiplayer game in 3 months, you’re a hero. Which may have been part of the problem… The other members of your team clearly weren’t up to snuff, and this probably led to you carrying the weight of the team.

I don’t see how there’s any room for a concept artist on a 4-person team. That’s barely any better than an “Ideas Guy”. And while the UI seems to bee functional, it’s far from good. In fact, even my non-designer brain is protesting the failure of the straight line elements to align properly in that last screenshot.

My condolences.

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My evaluation is that it was a paid project from beeZmall, an online retailer from Malaysia that fashions themselves to be structured more like a traditional mall than something like, say, Amazon. I can only imagine the forced part was threatening to not pay the team if they missed their release date.

7

I clicked on the link and then viewed the video. In the video, you wasted the first 42 seconds on text. You need to show users something long before that point. Boring them with text for 42 seconds won’t lead to a lot of customers. Most users will click away after a few seconds if you don’t grab their interest.

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I dont get why they would force you to release a bad product cause no one will download it

9

Maybe the OP will fill in some specifics but generally speaking it sounds like kind of normal business stuff. You know the whole deadlines for release and likely budget as well.

Where most Indies seem to just work on their games for as long as it takes companies don’t generally view things this way. There is always a budget and deadline.

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10

In addition to making our own games we also make games and do general software development for clients. With our own games we have internal milestones of when we want certain parts to be done, but many times those dates can slip if we need to polish something a bit more, etc. With clients, that’s not the case. You have fairly clear milestones laid out, including a finish date, and you don’t want to miss it. Make sure you plan properly, because someone else’s money is on the line. Not saying the OP didn’t plan well, because yeah, sometimes bad things happen. Just chiming in on the whole “doing your own thing” vs. “doing it for someone else” idea.

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My mind has clear up a bit, so I’ll give more insight on what happened. @Schneider21 is partly correct.

We were an internal team. Formerly as a freelancer I was hired to kick-start the project. Initial ideas were from the management, but I was given the responsibility of coming up with the whole budgeting & timeline. So I did, with the help of the UI person (he was already working there, but pulled to help me).

The following fully described concept came to light after I was hired, so don’t blame me of why I joined in (haha).

They wanted multistorey stores, up to forty floors. Holding individual lots, that user can enter and interact. Each lots are owned by different sellers/vendors. They wanted user to look around the INDIVIDUAL SHELVES and ITEMS. Really like what you do in real life.

Reasoning as a game designer, I questioned why the hell would people want to do that? It’s tedious. By the time you have reach the lot that have the items you wanted, someone using Amazon would already have the items shipped to them. But they kept insisting on that, saying to just duplicate the thing 40 times. Okay, whatever, maybe I’ll figure a way even if I don’t agree one bit.

The demo video you saw? That intro slideshow stuff and the fly-through was hacked in 3-4 weeks because they want it. So we have not much control there. (That’s not how the game plays, btw)

Skipping a bit,

I figured out on how to deal with the very large amount of space they wanted. They were happy with what we have shown; budget & proposal were approved and so we’ve receive the blessing of expanding. Things kept going downhill from here on.

I planned in stages, each took around 5-6 months.

Stage 1 is character customization, and be made as standalone app hosted on the web. Like a 3D preview of items when you go to their site. Was needed to sell the whole ‘virtual shopping’.
By the end of stage 2, we should have all the framework and tools working,
and by stage 3 models/assets/gameplay are to be added in. Here, it can be released to the public.
Multiplayer (Read : NOT MMO) & networking are only to be added by 4th stage.

I need to stress this out, THEY AGREED to the whole thing.

What we planned vs what we got :

4 additional team members for startup | Only 2 additional members.
Development machine for new members | Nadaaaaa.
Licensing for tools | Zilch. I forked my own money to speed up development time.

Later on I learned from my team that our budget was put on hold until the end of stage 1. Uhhh, that was not was agreed upon.

Features from Stages 2,3 & 4 were pulled to Stage 1. The worse is networking features, why the hell do I need to connect to their network so early on is beyond my understanding. So suddenly you’ve got a login/registration screen 1 & half month in…and live payment system (without a working store) 3 months in. It might have been easy, but every hour working on some unrelated stuff means less time for me to develop gameplay tools and features.

That 5-6 months stage cycle? Cut to 3 months, with the additional extras that doesn’t contribute to game play at all.
E.g a live payment system, without any in-game items to be sold. And it’s not using Google Wallet or whatever Apple uses.

Models? Well our modeler could only do so much in such a short time. So we went to the asset store for some placeholders. Oh yeah, the character changing scene, I was the one who modeled that.

We managed to give what they wanted for stage 1 in 3 months, but somehow we were accused to be delayed by 2 months. Huh?

Then our modeler left. (he was under contract, and didn’t want to work full time)
Panicked, the management called me in and asked to find someone else to lead the team in 2 days.

Wait, what? Apparently I was softly demoted from Lead to 2nd in charge somewhere along the project.

Of course I can’t find someone, so the team was disbanded and they’re looking to outsource the stuff.

So in the interim, I was tasked to handle the project alone until their deal was solidified. Suddenly they wanted to publish the game in 1 month, under the beta tag.

I tendered my resignation.

Forced to release, as in features were half-implemented, lack of contents, a 2 year dev time compressed into total of 3 + 1 months. Nobody pointed a gun to our head, but as developers we are horribly heartbroken that this has become a release candidate.

12

Second Life shopping?
But no construction.

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13

Everything you mentioned is easily adhered to and ‘agreed’ upon in a contract.
Was there any contract in place?
Of course you know this as a freelance contractor, ‘Agreeing’ to something is not the same as signing a contract.

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14

I’ve been in that situation before, where you have no control over managements bad decision making.
Leave a glassdoor review and push on to better things! Never give up hope for a better opportunity!

On a bit of a rant:
If I have learned anything in my professional and contract work it’s that certain types of business people can’t let go of their absolutely stupid ideas that they put on a pedestal and force you to implement, regardless of your feedback and experience. These are usually the people who ask to much of their workers in the vain attempt to squeeze every penny they think they can get away with. Every single time it backfires in some way, even if they project is salvageable. They eventually lose a team or team members (generally leads or critical non-leads first), and the process starts all over again until they’re out of money or can’t hire any decent people because their reputation is in the garbage can.

For turnkey projects, a well-defined set of contract terms is indispensable. If the client is unwilling to negotiate terms in good faith and agree to a reasonable, price they should be dropped before the project gets off the ground.

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15

Unfortunately this is not unique to the games industry. I worked on an enterprise application that was so given to poor management and scope creep that the whole team was working from 9am to 2am the following morning for about three months which resulted in a large number of the team leaving. For those of us on hourly contracts though it was not so bad…

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It’s not just software. There are chemical plants that get built this way too. Big, toxic, explosive chemical plants…

Fortunately for everyone my industry is heavily regulated. But accidents still happen.

18

This video can never be shared enough, and yeah I imagine there’s foolish behavior on the part of management no matter what industry you’re in.

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