Another week has passed and we have been hard at work…

Tales of the Shepherd has come quite a long way. We’re currently giving it the last couple touch-ups it needs and are beyond happy to announce it’s release date being right around the corner:

Saturday, the 3rd of December is the date you can try to brave the depths!

We don’t want to spoil anything yet, so we decided on a rather different topic for this devlog. Last week we talked about how you can manage the scope of your own game ideas, and today we want to take a look back and share the story of how we had to learn these lessons ourselves. Or in other words:

How Not to Develop a Game

Our past trips into the game development world started out as a group of four unexperienced software developers about 10 years ago. Like many before us we really wanted to live the dream of creating our own games and since we already had experience with programming it shouldn’t be too difficult… right?

Well, fast-forward about half a dozen inspirations and we noticed how hard this can actually be. A couple of our ideas were half-developed when we abandoned them, some of them died off before we could even have a proper concept going. And the core issue was always with one thing:

The software development part is only one slice of the entire game creation cake. And like many other people, just wildly dreaming of bringing their ideas to life, we completely underestimated the importance of everything else: graphics, music, sfx, story but also organization, planning and scope management. It didn’t help that a group of four people is also very difficult to coordinate.

Be it creative differences or just different ways of working, we just couldn’t get our feet off the ground, not due to a lack of ideas, but because we didn’t manage and plan properly and didn’t keep our scopes in check.

Here is a small portion of our project graveyard:

One game idea was an FPS concept which literally ended with only a modeled Can of Energy and Unity being chosen as our game engine (only chosen, not actually used). Another was a game similar to Missile Command for Android Phones which came surprisingly close to being a Proof of Concept, you can even listen to its amateurish soundtrack, but just silently died off anyway. Another was a full on physics-based mech shooter with customized construction, realistic physics, completely destroyable mech parts and PVP… you can guess why that went nowhere?

But the best example for a game being suffocated by its own scope might be the “true” first Tales of the Shepherd - a game which we obviously never released. The first TotS started out in a time where our team was already in its current state of Goblinization, consisting only of us: Geeky and Groovy Goblin. A smaller team made everything easier, but also proved to be even more difficult in some aspects.

Geeky Goblin had the idea to make a dice-based RPG, similar to Dicey Dungeons, and started to build a Proof of Concept for the game’s combat system and started creating pixel art. Groovy Goblin meanwhile, inspired by this concept, let his creative juices flow and composed a chiptune title theme, which in turn also motivated Geeky again. Both being quite overzealous (and not actually planning ahead) started to jot down ideas in a 10 page long document, and after this feedback loop of motivation TotS grew from a small and bite-sized mini-game to something a bit more… unmanagable:

• Suddenly it needed a fancy animation for the title screen.
• It needed a huge overarching story, with different countries and species and lore and whatnot.
• It just had to have multiple worlds to traverse, each completely themed with different enemies, music, dungeons and cutscenes.
• Oh, and this huge lore document about the games cosmology and deities was also completely necessary!

We were excited. We were motivated. And we were running into walls left and right, again and again facing the reality that our super cool game idea might not actually be possible to create. It grew so much in its scope and its size, and all it needed were two sleep-deprived Code Goblins and one and a half brainstorming sessions via Discord to get there. To quote the Darkest Dungeon narrator: It is a travesty! Just replace Hatred with Incompetence and Rage with Naivety.

While this was easy to notice, it was really difficult to own up to this mistake. So, after months of writing and coding, we scrapped the game. It still lies around in some repository somewhere.

But we don’t want to end on a low note!

Geeky started developing an ASCII based game engine for fun and it turned out quite well. Despite being humbled by the last project we decided to give this whole thing yet another try. This led to the current Tales of the Shepherd.

Its scope is smaller, we defined it very soon and gave our best to keep it small. Our tasks were organized and timelines were created and suddenly… it worked.

We got sh/t done. Code was written, the game was balanced, enemies and weapons were created, music was composed and we finally got to a point where we felt like we got over this mountain of banging our heads against impossible ideas. That’s why we’re so excited about the upcoming release. And that’s why we want to share this story and want to tell all aspiring game devs one thing:

IF YOU WANT TO MAKE A GAME, JUST DO IT!! It is extremely fun and rewarding, and if you learn from our and other people’s mistakes you can absolutely create something incredible. Just try to keep it simple :)

Anyway, this is a small tale of our game dev ventures. We hope it was enjoyable to read and helpful for your own projects. Also, check out last week’s devlog for more tips on how to manage your development process.

We also hope you’re going to check out this game’s beta 1.0 release on Saturday, the 3rd of December. Have fun!

Cheers

GG