Cyclops (V.O.): Previously, on Sexy X-Men Dating Sim. Dorian killed one of our mutant cuties, though Amanda and I vowed to keep our beast man alive through not-so-subtle references throughout the game.
Jess, the VP of Creator Growth at Dorian (our publisher), was about to lay another bombshell on my creative partner Amanda and I during our first Zoom call together with the three of us. This bombshell wasn’t about our content, though. This time, it would be about our process. She wanted us to make our unfinished work public.
Here’s how I would normally approach an indie game project. As an example, I’ll use Fix Your Mother’s Printer, a visual novel I designed for IFComp last year. I started with a (deeply uncommercial) idea for a game where the player is on a harrowing Zoom call with their mother, attempting to help them through a computer challenge. Once the basic idea was settled on, I wrote a reasonably comprehensive design document to outline the full arc of the story, the game design pillars, the types of choices I’d be offering, the relationship system, et al. After that, I went into production, where I wrote the script, sourced the artwork, and programmed the underlying systems.
The private beta version of Fix Your Mother’s Printer was playtested extensively. I got important feedback from those playtests, which I iterated on in multiple builds of the game, until the game launched at IFComp. At that point, I was pencils down. The process took more than half a year from concept to completion for this particular game, but I’ve worked on some projects for years before launch.
At Dorian, they have a different philosophy about release. Jess explained there wasn’t a lengthy private playtesting and iteration phase. Instead, all of that was made public. Once creators had three episodes ready (the “pilot”), they launch on the Dorian app. Using Dorian’s backend tools, creators collect data on the in-game choices and make adjustments in real time. Let’s say the game has a thousand players in its first week and less than 1% opt-into the first “premium choice” the game offers. The creators can tweak the choice wording or setup live to see if they can get that choice up to 5% opt-in.
This workflow isn’t entirely unprecedented. On Steam, there are games that go into Early Access, in which players buy the game knowing it’s still in pre-release. They can offer feedback to the developers and be part of the process. Similarly, when a game crowdfunds, it’s often still in development when announced, and sometimes a creator will give backers access to betas for feedback. But in both these cases, the game is presented as pre-release. The Dorian model is more like TV – hence the term “pilot” – where they commission a small amount of content, see if the public responds favorably, and use that to determine if this project is worth further investment. Only in Dorian’s case, they can adjust the characters and plot points of their pilots in real time.
At first, I was jolted by the idea of reworking the game after it went live. Patches are very common in games, where bugs and things are fixed post-release, but this is different. This is saying to the world, “Behold, a finished game,” when it hasn’t been thoroughly playtested and could change considerably over time. Maybe even a short amount of time! Maybe the game would launch, it would be clear that choices 3, 5, and 9 are performing poorly and that would prompt us to make significant alterations to the story that only new players would see. Then, if we then launched an episode 4 a few weeks later, half the player base may have experienced a radically different episodes 1-3 before playing episode 4.
What would radical shifts to the timeline do to our universe? Would we cause an Age of Apocalypse situation?!
After a few moments, I eased up a bit. This could actually be a pretty exciting and fun opportunity. So many times after a project, I’ll do a post-mortem with myself where I regret creative decisions I made. That certainly happened with Fix Your Mother’s Printer. What if there didn’t have to be a post-mortem? What if I could just change the creative choices I regretted after launch? Furthermore, one of the driving forces behind Equip Story is to discover ways of making game development more fun. Perhaps shaking things up and changing my normal process could that. What would I learn from exploring a new way to launch a game?
I decided to “lean in,” Sheryl Sandberg style, and though I’ve never read Sheryl’s book and really only know the title, I’m certain using it in reference to a specific type of game development pipeline is essentially what she was talking about.
Soon after the call, Amanda and I got our first look at the sprite artwork Dorian commissioned. The artist they hired, Clarissa, is really good! She captured the look and feel we were going for with the character designs. This was high quality, professional work that Dorian invested good money in. I may do a whole separate post on the art of the game and how it’s coming together. For now, all you need to know is that we loved the art and were super grateful to have Dorian as a publishing partner, helping bring our vision to life.
Jess was thrilled that we loved the art so much. Then, she wrote to us that we had a month to make the pilot.
A month.
Basically, she gave us three optional dates for a release window. The one furthest away was a month.
I am a professional writer with over 15 years experience. On a good day, I write 1K words. I’m not saying other writers can’t write faster than me, but I also don’t think I’m particularly slow. According to Jess, the average Dorian pilot is about 10k-15K words, so the expectation was that we would spend… what? Ten work days in the month writing this game? Not to mention various art and design tasks. For example, Clarissa would be designing the three main characters, but we also have side characters and backgrounds, which we were responsible for.
Jess said the average Dorian creator takes a month to make a pilot. What about… day jobs? School?
I gently pushed back and said we have a strict “no crunch” policy when it comes to all projects, paid or otherwise. Jess said Dorian doesn’t push creators to crunch. She said the word counts were average estimates. If we could tell a satisfying story in fewer words, that’d be fine. She gave us another window two months away, but made clear if we wanted to be part of Dorian’s “Art Accelerator Program,” we would need to release at one of their scheduled times.
Two months. Could we do it? Should we do it? Would this be a fun race against time, like a game jam? Or a panicky process that gives us unnecessary stress? Amanda and I would have to make a big decision about how to proceed from here. We could still make the game entirely ourselves and release it on Itch. As we made our decision, the fate of our sexy superhero universe lay in the balance.
🎲 Your Turn: Have you ever worked on a project with a tight turnaround? How did you manage stress while it was happening? Reply to this email or hit the orange button below to tell the world.
📨 Next Time: Amanda and I make our intentions clear to Dorian.
2 responses to “No Crunch Policy”
Never really dealt with a deadline outside of a school setting, and while turn around on school projects are always tight, the scope of such is usually tiny and rarely multi-disciplinary… I do believe one of my final projects for either my first or second semester of C++ was technically delivered in a incomplete state, though I still got an A on it because the professor judged I did more than was sufficient for the scale of a course end project(Somewhere in there, I implemented functions to perfectly riffle shuffle a deck of cards, possibly of arbitrary card count, when a simpler shuffle function that just picks a random card to move to the top of hte deck, then a random card to move to the second place and so fore would have been sufficient and I implemented multiple card games when just one was have sufficed, etc.).
Though, my experience has been external deadlines are helpful. Procrastination is the enemy of productivity, but it’s a much easier beast to knock out when there’s expectation to get things done by a certain time and date, whereas it’s so much easier to fall into its traps when the only thing pushing me to get it done is self motivation.
Yeah, I agree that external deadlines are helpful! I appreciate a fair deadline all parties agree to. Game jams are useful because they give you a deadline and structure to complete a project.