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This post was originally intended for a Patreon audience.

Access Retrospective

After four years of development, I finally decided to stop working on Access. For those of you who might not know (since this post will be made public), Access was a detective noir game which examined trans-humanism themes in the distant future. I’ve learned a lot from working on it and I still love the idea, but I think it’s time for me to let go of it. In this post, I’ll go into a brief history of the game’s development, talk about the two biggest problems I struggled with, and why I made the ultimate decision to cancel the game.

To give you a quick recap of the game’s development history, I first made a prototype of Access for the Electronic Game Developer Society’s (EGaDS) Narrative Game Jam in March 2015. A friend expressed to me how they would like to see a full version of the game some day, and I considered it briefly before deciding not to. It wasn’t until I graduated, worked full time for a while, and quit that I started thinking about it again. I wanted to try being an independent game developer for a while and Access seemed like an ideal candidate for the kind of game I could make — it seemed to have a small scope as it did not require very many assets to be created and I could do everything by myself if I really wanted to. I created a Patreon page and announced the development of the game on August 12th, 2017 and went to work. A few months into development, a friend suggested a writer to me who I was happy to recruit as I was not confident that I could write everything well. In March 2018, I was able to do the first playtests for the game. It was around this time that I also started a full-time job again which meant I had much less time to work on the game in general, but that wasn’t the only change. Based on the feedback from that playtest, we actually decided to scrap the game entirely so we could make several fundamental changes to the gameplay and the narrative arc of the game. We finally had more playtests starting in May 2019. This time, we actually received feedback we were happy with and we worked on another level, which was playtested in February 2020. In August 2020, the writer for Access decided to leave the project and the slow progress on the game subsequently stopped. I found a new writer, but we never got particularly far, and I announced the cancellation of the game on July 31, 2021.

Looking back on those dates, I can’t help but feel disappointed in myself. Part of the reason everything took longer than I wanted every step of the way was because I was, and still am, depressed. I was also constantly at odds with myself, wanting to make update posts about the game but not doing so because I couldn’t without also spoiling it. However, those were by far not the only problems I encountered with the game. In my opinion, the biggest problem was instead the long iteration time for making each level. Each level required a lot of writing — both to set the context for the scene and to establish the suspects. Not only that, but the dialog was actually interlocked with the gameplay mechanics to form a single puzzle. There was also an additional dialog mechanic which allowed players to assemble questions out of sentence pieces and though this seemed like it would result in a lot of work, this was surprisingly the easiest part of the dialog to deal with. Instead, the problem was that every time we needed to tweak a level in response to player feedback, we sometimes had to make significant changes to how the puzzle worked. Of course, this meant making significant changes to the writing, which once resulted in us needing to scrap a level and re-do it from scratch. This meant we had to spend a lot of time putting the dialog together for the game and this was complicated by the fact that we wanted to find ways to make the gameplay mechanics interlock with the narrative. This, in turn, also made it difficult to figure out how to make the game fun, because every time we wanted to iterate on something, it would take a long time before we could see how everything fit together in a level.

The other big problem was how the game was contracted out to team members. I did not have very much in the way of funds and I also wanted to make sure that other team members felt as if they had part ownership of the game. I did this by offering a royalty percentage upfront, but this ended up making things complicated as more and more time passed. Priorities and circumstances change and sometimes people need to leave through no fault of their own, like the original writer for Access. This requires re-negotiating the contract and figuring out how to have someone pick up from where they left off. I was able to navigate this when finding a new writer, but it did take a long time. This desire to offer an upfront royalty in principle coupled with the complex reality of renegotiating when things necessarily change (which is especially so when everyone is working on the game in their free time) discouraged me from being more active in finding other people to help with the game.

I had, after four years of working on Access, lost much of the enthusiasm I started with. Of course, I expected this to be the case as the novelty of working on something new can only last for so long. However, I now felt like I was in a sticky mess. Iterating on the game was difficult. It took a long time and after four years I only had a tutorial level and two (of the seven or nine levels I wanted) to show for it. I was reluctant to continue development in part because I was afraid of needing to (eventually) renegotiate contracts again and it made me uninterested in finding more long-term help to finish the game with. I wanted to finish the game before the end of 2021, but the new writer and I were both diverted from the project in order to attend to real-life problems and without significant progress I finally decided to cancel the game.

It is a disappointing feeling, for sure. However, I think I have learned a lot from this experience and I’m looking forward to making my next game. I plan on making sure the next idea avoids the problems I had with Access. It needs to have a development cycle which lends itself more to iteration, both to make sure I can more easily share my progress as well as make it easier to figure out how to make the game fun. I want to make sure the vertical slice of the game can be easier and less monolithic to assemble. I have new ideas on how to manage the project, such as changing from up-front royalties to instead negotiating fixed prices for specific pieces of work. I want to hire many more people than I did this time to make sure the game is completed more quickly. These are all things I’m looking forward to doing in my next project, and I hope I will be able to take these lessons with me into a future successful games release.