The Basingstoke Post-Mortem, Part 2

Is your brew of tea steaming before you? Has it stewed for the obligatory duration of three of your Earth minutes? Then let us continue... on to the car crash bit.

So What Went Wrong?

Toolchain

Alas, it turns out Unity is a honey trap for artists and developers. It makes a few things that are tediously difficult suddenly really very easy - "make this animated 3D model appear here and move there" is something that requires disproportionate effort without an existing engine to do it all for you.

It also turns out that as soon as you stray from the beaten path, suddenly Unity abandons you, and you end up having to write all sorts of clever shaders yourself anyway. And worry about performance - a lot. The Mono backend is way slower than the Java stuff we’re used to using.

Unity lures you down the rabbit hole of attempting to make everything look awesome in 3D. You get to thinking, hmm, a monster can't just be turned 90 degrees to show that it's asleep - it's got to be animated falling over. You facepalm when you realise that if a player walks into a traffic cone you want it to be kicked over, not just stop them dead like a concrete bollard. You groan inwardly when you realise a simple bouncing arc animation is no longer sufficient for jumping over a railing or through a window, and that you need to animate it too. And so on.

This is fine if you're a AAA studio with a team of 50 people. Not when there are two or three of you.

Inexperience

Without the experience of how things inevitably end up getting complex - we'd never made a 3D game before - we would let tiny features suddenly consume insane amounts of time. In 2D you'd think nothing of setting fire to enemies - add flame particles, move them around screaming a bit a bit faster, change sprite to a heap of ash, done. In 3D, simply inventing "fire" as a way to kill monsters requires custom animation for every single monster which takes days or weeks to implement. Multiplied by every stupid feature you can think of.

An especially daft idea was having tentacles in the game (both the tentacles in manhole covers, and the floating eye). Seemed like a good idea to start with… then you try animating it.

Player and monster deaths also took absolutely ages (compared to what we’ve had in our other games, for example, where we just go, “Explosions!” and shower particles everywhere) Though they do look great.

I think a basic rule of thumb I've often heard is that 3D is 3x as complex as 2D. Every time we thought of something cool...

Scope Creep

...it meant that it would take 3x as long as it might have done if we'd done it all in 2D. And in this way, Basingstoke grew from a 6 month project to a 1 year project to a 2 year project. And still the scope kept growing.

But we couldn't just ship it! Because it took another two years just to get the actual gameplay into a state where it was actually fun to play for ordinary people. In 2016, Basingstoke was recognisably Basingstoke, but also it was awful to play. By this time we'd already sunk a fortune into it, and it looked so promising we didn't want to throw our hands in the air and eject.

Mismanagement

The blame for getting into this state almost certainly lies directly with me, for not laying out a schedule. Or rather not forcing the schedule to be adhered to. Or rather for keeping on coming up with changes and ideas that would cause the schedule to change. Or rather for not being happy with the way things were implemented and insisting on changing them.

Part of the problem was that initially we had a simple concept that we were trying to get out the door fast to make some cash, and it always felt we had to hurry to get it out. The original concept changed so radically it might have been better to create a new project from scratch and plan properly for a longer development rather than continually adding things on to an increasingly shaky foundation. Or just ruthlessly forked it off onto a backburner project and carried on delivering the original concept without change.

We did eventually attempt to wrangle everybody into a plan of action using Trello, which works great for agile teams working methodically towards a common goal of a timely release, but unfortunately it was sort of ignored by everyone, which is again, a failing of mine for not impressing its importance on everyone. So this led to a lot of...

Arguing!

...mainly arguments about things between me (business owner) and lead programmer. Which took hours to resolve painstakingly typing messages into Skype, instead of a 15 minute call.

Unfortunately we probably set off all on a bit too much of an equal footing, and harsh as it is to admit it, it probably hindered the project. Some arguments went on for ages to no purpose, killing productivity and morale…

Delay

...because we spent so much time arguing about stuff that could have been more productively put towards just trying stuff out to see if it worked.

In the end, a one year idea took four years to implement, through our inability to agree on things, inability to work smarter, and inability to nail down a good idea early on, and poor use of communications and tools for remote collaborative work.

Did I mention remote working is hard?

Unfriendly Homegrown Tools

Basingstoke has a "square editor" (also Unity), by which we could develop new "squares" for the levels - the prefabbed tiles and all their variations that get clipped together to make the maps.

Unfortunately the tool was cobbled together as a bare-minimum effort to get stuff done. In the latter stages of the project it would have been very handy to be able to use it to create a load more level content for the game (and free the others up to do more useful work elsewhere on the game), but it was just too obfuscated and buggy for me to turn up late to the party and start using effectively.

It is also a shame it was so obtuse that we couldn't release it as a community mod tool.

Publisher Fail

In the final run up to release, our publishers who were formerly very interested in the game suddenly weren't. This was perplexing; the game was slick-as, and indeed of a higher quality and polish than many other titles coming out and a whole dimension more awesome than anything we'd made before. And we'd even done nearly all the work, and being in Unity, it was going to be a cinch to port.

Where we failed here is relying on having that publisher even though they had no skin in the game.

We panicked a bit, and tried to find other publishers, but there were no takers.

Being Skint

It goes without saying, if we weren't broke, we'd have been able to put another year or two into the game, mostly in the form of more content like monsters, scenery, set pieces, items, unlockable characters, etc.

As it is, the game is complete, but has massive scope for so much more. If it had made 10x the money at launch, we'd have simply carried on adding stuff to it.

During the entire development we were constantly worried about running out of money, which lead to hacky solutions that bit us in the arse later, and dropping good ideas for fear we’d run out of money before we could finish them.

Launch (The Bad Bits)

A lot of the launch went spectacularly poorly.

The PR company we hired that was meant to do a “coming soon” press release with the teaser video two weeks before the release, never sent the release. Then they sent the launch PR with the teaser video in it, which had very little actual game footage, rather than the actual launch trailer. I'm not sure quite how they managed to screw it up, but there we go. The difference it all might have made is questionable anyway.

We’d done a show in London two months before launch, at great expense. We met a fair few journalists but almost none of them actually covered the game properly at launch (those who did - we know who you are, and huge thanks! You are not forgotten).

Otherwise, press coverage was pretty much zero. I think the week we released also had some sort of monster/prom themed dating game that was trendy and was selling buckets. These days if you’re not in the number one spot in a week, you’re fucked, and we were 2nd.

Launch Price?

To this day we'll never know if the $29.95 launch price helped or hindered launch takings or not. It certainly kept the actual sales numbers lower, but each sale was worth vastly more to us than a game launched at the then indie-standard $9.95.

The plan was, obviously, to minimise support time by having fewer customers, and devoting more time to the ones that cared enough about a game to lay down thirty bucks. Then we'd make up for the low sales volume by discounting reasonably during sales, and still make enough money to pay back Basingstoke's colossal development costs.

As of February, we're trying a base price of $19.95, with lower sales discounts. Let's see how it does.

"Basingstoke"

A few people (mostly other developers) commented on how the name is terrible, though looking at the titles of games on Steam in general and attempting to correlate them with success or failure yields few positive results. Is "Basingstoke" too obscure? Should we have called it "Escape from New York"? Should we have called it "Roguelike Stealth Action Game"? We'll never know, which is a source of irritation.

The Dreaded Algorithm

Also to this day we'll never know if the Steam algorithm didn't just randomly do us over. I can tell you that in 20 months, we've had just 16 million Steam store impressions, with a CTR of 6.5% leading to about 1 million store page visits. I don't know how that compares with anyone else's games but the CTR is considerably higher than our other games. 1 million store page views to 10,000 sales also seems like a pretty good conversion rate, at about 1%.

This means the thing holding us back is most likely simply ... exposure. If Steam threw 10x the traffic at Basingstoke, we'd maybe be seeing 10x the sales - but the problem is we'll never find out. Presumably Steam's algorithm sends only the best-quality traffic that it thinks will convert into sales to our page.

This is particularly vexing because....

Advertising

...we spent the best part of £9k on advertising. Why didn't that go right? Well, mainly because we've no idea whether it really did anything or not. It didn't seem to increase Steam store footfall. What if we'd just kept that £9k? We'd have increased our annual take-home pay for the game by 25%! What if we'd spent our entire income on more advertising? Would we make even more money in return?

I know developers who absolutely swear by advertising. But when you've got bugger all to spend in the first place, you simply can't throw tens of thousands into advertising without ever knowing if it'll ever make its money back. It's hardly any different from gambling: there is no guarantee of a positive result.

Financial Ruin

I personally put in tens of thousands of dollars into the development of Basingstoke. You millenials reading this and dreaming one day of owning your own shoebox to live in will probably sputter your chai lattes all over your avocado toast as you realise how much money I spaffed away on a single game project. Enough to get a deposit on a fancy house.

So, Basingstoke financially ruined me (and my family - sorry Mrs. P and kids). 

The Hard Numbers

So now (a cold, bleak January in 2020), after ~20 months on sale on Steam, the numbers look like this (we'll ignore all other store revenues, as they're sadly piffling):

Gross revenues less returns, chargebacks and taxes:  $70,252

Units sold: 9,415

Total net revenue, including from all the minor sources: £41,296.97

But wait! We've spent £8598.50 on marketing - chiefly advertising.

That's left us with £32,698.47... before tax. Tax is mysterious and calculated by wizards, so we won't even guess how much tax we paid on that amount, some amount between 0% and 20% but I honestly have no real idea.

Let's be generous and assume we paid no tax at all, which leaves us with take-home pay of approximately £3270 per year each.

Go and make another cup of tea at this point so you can let that figure sink in while it brews. Make sure it brews for at least 3 minutes, you heathen. And don't you dare put the milk in with the teabag.

So, What Have We Learned?

Well, clearly nothing, because we're making all the same mistakes again :) Once again we find ourselves doing an outrageously ambitious project in 3D that's taking years and nobody else is taking any notice of the Trello board. Here are a few things that really stood out as lessons.

Controller Support

Controllers suck. The APIs suck. I have no good things to say about controllers or supporting controllers. If you can avoid designing a game that can be played with a controller, I recommend that you do that.

Arcade Games Aren't Popular On Steam

It has been noticed before that some genres do well on Steam and others do badly. Arcade games - of which Basingstoke is one, loosely - tend to have less chance of success than, say, RTS games. This wouldn't have been a problem if the game only took its original year-long scope to create. But at four years, its chances of making a profit on Steam alone were tiny.

So This Time Around...

This time however, we won't have access to the super-easy toolchains in use in Basingstoke. No Autodesk, no FBX format, no Unity. Hopefully this will reign in a little of our excess but looking at the latest Battledroid visuals, it would appear not...

This time we're not looking for a publisher for Battledroid. Battledroid is desktop-only, and Steam-only at that. Sorry Epic, but you never replied.

This time we won't be charging $30 up front to play it. We've designed the game from the ground up to be free to play, removing a major barrier to entry for many consumers.

This time we won't wait until it's finished before everyone gets to play it. We'll be going the Early Access route, which if nothing else will help us guide the development of the game from a customer-centric perspective rather than keeping it hidden away for years trying to second-guess what people enjoy most.

This time we're not making an arcade game. Honestly, time and time again, we've seen from our own figures and public figures or anecdotes from other developers that on Steam, strategy and simulation games are king. It generally does very poorly for most other genres, and of the other genres that tend to do well, a tiny indie studio has little hope of competing. Dusk excepted. You guys rock.

This time we won't have to support controllers. Win.