Wednesday 18 August 2010

Bad Game, Bad Reviews, Bad Sales, Bad Business.

Yup, things have been pretty slow on this blog. The main reason? The game that I helped develop at my day job launched a little while ago (hooray!), to critical derision and poor sales (boo!). A couple of months on, and... well, we're (almost) all redundant.

Now a really annoying thing from my point of view is that I managed to completely nuke my little game/testbed's content. I have backups, but they're slightly older than I'd like. That'll teach me to use version control for source only. Just when the program might be most useful, I have to go do a load of content wrangling...

So for now I'm in damage control mode. Updating the CV, desperately recreating shaders and materials, polishing up demos, and generally sharpening up my portfolio.

It's a massive shame the game went so very wrong. A huge amount of money and creative energy was spent, and the project had huge potential. Still, it was fun and I personally learnt a lot from the experience, so if I'm saddened by the eventual fate of the product and the company as a whole I'm also excited to be looking for a job. The industry as a whole remains an inspiring place to be.

Next step... who knows? I look forward to waxing verbose about the joys of (somewhat) functional programming to another batch of unconvinced C++/C# engineers.

3 comments:

James McNeill said...

Based on your location I know a bit more about the specifics. My condolences, and best of luck landing a new job! I enjoy reading this blog.

Krice said...

What game was that? Why did you make a game that sucks?

Snut said...

James: Thanks! I'm pretty excited to be moving on, and hopeful about some new positions.

Krice: Too many reasons. When you're that close to something huge and ungainly with hundreds of developers, it can be hard to see large-scale problems. Even if you do notice them and convince a critical mass of people that they're important, sometimes they just end up as compromises that needed to be made. I may write a postmortem about it from my worm's-eye point of view at the time, but I don't know how useful that would be to anyone.

Absolutely no-one sets out to make a game that sucks. Still happens though.