It has been said that the most difficult part of making a game is to actually complete it. That could not be further from the truth. It may hold up when a developer is just starting out, and have little to no experience of what lies beyond completing a game (let alone making it*), but when there's enough in the bag, so to speak, this statement loses its value and becomes a derogatory term to sway people towards a certain direction: A form of false pretense to hide the bigger picture, the bigger calamity.

*The loops-and-hoops only begin at the end of production (or usually at the very start, in parallel). The fighting with marketing, platforms, retailers, outlets, etc. is where it's at. A sudden, and fierce battle nobody is (can be) prepared for.

Situational awareness (the lack of it) [A side note]

Life differs for every person, and what one might think is natural, might not be for others; a staple of life (not projecting one's situation on others). This is especially true, when it comes to game development; as it has a lot of variables that can go wrong easily. Unfortunately, it takes a conscious effort to understand all this, to be emphatic about one's situation. Have seen it all too many times (and sadly, have been reminded of this just recently) how revolting the atmosphere can get within the gamedev community: How people, for having a dream, an idea, or having a different opinion could get obliterated by the sheer amount of hate and discontent that certain members of the community can produce (and feel vindicated to do so, by overpowering their own agenda).

Have seen people questioning their own beliefs (especially younger folk), feeling berated and humiliated just because of who they were or what they hoped to achieve (e.g., idea person, or wanting to do too much). Have been mentioning this for a long time that a change is much needed, but looking back, now it makes more sense why the industry is in the state that it's in (the scandals, harassment, work environment, etc.); a situation that might not be possible, or at least easy to change. Not here to debate if there is a hope for all this, that would take a more in-depth analysis (e.g., explaining the difference between living in the US or Bulgaria per say, both in terms of opportunities, living, economy, costs for production, etc.), but after all, change never comes from above, it comes from within. It's just demoralizing to see that a media that has so much potential, can be all-so narrow-minded.

"Was done by design"

Originally, Endomorium was supposed to ship by the end of this summer: That is not going to be the case, now it is certain. But am getting ahead, as there is more to this that what meets the eye: About a month ago, when things were still looking up (after releasing the previous blog entry), was under the impression that at least the core of the game (without voice-overs and sound) was reaching to its completion (around 90% technical completion), and that there were hopes that the gap in the finance department's might be able to close (which was pressed more and more by the ongoing crisis, how the cost of living just skyrocketed; but will get back to this later).

So in so in fact that a spontaneous "campaign" was fashioned, and reached moderate success; as far as the numbers are concerned. The latter holds great importance, as working as an indie, technically, all social media is against us, when it comes to advertisement (that's associated with monetization). That being said, for a strange and bizarre reason this isn't the case when Artists share their commission profiles. In order to make good content money has to be invested, which has to come from somewhere... Furthermore, there's a growing feeling (inside) of recognizing that these questions might rub people in the wrong way; which should not be the case.

In just over a day, 8.2k people agreed to have a peek at the project (sales directed); which is something extraordinary (to reach as a solo developer, with inadequate tools, as visual awe dominates the scene and can only be bought with raw capital) in the eye of a developer who's struggling to promote their product (and reaching any target number). On top of this, there were many who showed interest, which further added to (the illusion of) an already pleasant experience. It wasn't long after, unfortunately, that things began to go sideways (mostly because of the difficulties that the production had to circumvent; or at least tried to).

Time to continue

The project was estimated to be at the 90% completion stage. Some major bug-fixing and rendering of CGI (for the story-telling), and creating of sound design aside, there wasn't much else left to do (according the schedule; well finishing the voice-acting that is). Or at least it was thought to be the case. However, upon further inspection it turned out that when the latest version was deployed (onto mobile that's been used as a base) it didn't function properly (see image below).

For some unknown reason, the project didn't render properly, and one of the main, if not the key-features of the game (the background) was utterly broken. At first it was thought that the culprit was the latest installment of Unreal Engine 4.27.2 (as previous versions worked just fine), which prompted a weeklong crusade to test, back and forth (even with different versions), if that was the case.

Suffice to say that this wasn't the best of experiences as of late; as working on project, under extremely difficult circumstances, for over 14 months, deserved better. The final blow came when the device (an old mobile phone, that was limping beforehand) gave up all together, and refused to launch any project from that point forwards. At that point, desperately scanning through crash-logs and forums for help yielded nothing. It seemed that the world has ended, as there were no funds available to replace said phone... Which can be considered an issue, when speaking of android-only title.

Right Before The End – A side-story to the madness

This was the moment when Right Before The End (RBTE) was born: An allegory to what was happening at the time (that whenever a project was getting closer to completion, something always had to break, and stop said project; an true testament for being penniless).

To funnel this confusion and anxiety far away, works began on building another prototype (a joystick based ARPG; as coming up with new ways of interaction is a strong part of this whole idea of making games, for my person that is), which took around 4-5 weeks, of which a small commentary video has been put together to give a more in-depth view of the whole idea (about half an hour long):

Link in case broken: https://youtu.be/1F2F9T-DHQg​

Link to the project: https://theaaronstory.itch.io/rightbeforetheend​

[In short: Have been obsessed with RPGs for as long as time goes, as they were an integral part of my childhood and left an ever-lasting impression. Naturally, it was bound to happen that at some point, making an RPG (the idea) would return. This side project was not planned, but it turned out the way it did.]

Meanwhile back in hell

Alongside, of course, numerous attempts were made to somehow get a hand on someone else's phone, to find out once and for all what was behind all of this. That wasn't an easy task, and took weeks, however, in the end it turned out that indeed said phone was broken beyond belief; have no idea how it managed to work this far...

This wasn't good news, but wasn't as bad either as one would think: This gave hope that all that hard work didn't just get flushed down the toilet, and that work might resume. That being said, upon further inspections, it was found out that elements of the UI was also broken (and who knows what else, as there wasn't enough time to test it), and in the long run, all of it had to be scrapped (probably). It was (and still) an issue, as having access to other's phones were as rare as a white crow. You just can't develop under conditions like that (also, asking other's help can get frustrating fast; which it did, unfortunately).

The other side of this misfortune was that now suddenly there was the option to be able to use "newer" features (e.g., dynamic lighting instead of using those low-level, yet still expensive for that phone, per vertex based "fake" ones (which uses vector calculations for light direction), shadows, multi-texturing, other atmospheric post-processing features like bloom, being able to use shaders, etc.), and had (potentially) more processing power at my fingertips (that could push the looks and feel above 1990s, with higher triangle counts, and so forth), which could have the potential to improve the overall perceived value of the product (by making it more pleasant to the eye). Put together a quick example to showcase what a big of a difference being able to use light can do to a model:

Having more control over the aesthetics strongly translates to the fact that now, any potential customer will have a higher chance to give this project a thumbs up (again, cannot over-stress how extremely important this is, especially for a newcomer, to have a visually pleasing game), as it will look less amateurish and more professional (despite the facts that could contradict this argument, because of the restrictions that the project was built upon, well was forced into); hopefully.

And on the other side, this sudden new availability of begin able to use more advanced visual "tools" left a sort of bad taste in the mouth (especially knowing that over 2 months were spent on coding the touch controls, which kept hindering the project tremendously), as a lot of work (without exaggeration) went into squeezing every inch out of that phone's capabilities: All animations were hand-keyframed (e.g., that meant that there were 5 different types of asteroids, all five of them had different explosion animations (stacked on top of another), based on the face of each triangle, which were separately animated by hand (by manually positioning bones, while procedural methods couldn't be used), totaling up to a whopping 5x75(bones)=375 pieces to animate just for one type of explosion vfx; and there were others, like the travel animation which also has hand animated bones, or the dust cloud for said explosions, etc.), and all of the visual were catered to that level of technology. Now there's this unexpected gap to fill in with the debate of where to progress to? Adjusting the current art assets, or try to cater for a higher-end experience (essentially remaking and upgrading each and every art piece; which would take a considerable time, added, also that would mean that the current art direction would need to be re-evaluated (potentially ditching the entire low-poly aesthetics to realism), to make the jump from low-poly per say). It is certainly not an easy decision to make, and will require a couple of art test beforehand...

[Side note on statistics, and why "looks" matter: Have been carefully monitoring all interactions across all social media platforms for years now, with all the analytics that were provided from these sites, and the historical data tells the tale that there were a higher chance for interactions, whenever a (more) pleasing render was presented (rendered outside the engine), and much less so when shown as ingame footage. Which also had a great effect on reach, and the probability of getting shared (which is the de facto for growing your business, without targeted advertisements). And on another side note, to put the numbers into another perspective, an older RPG blog of mine (for a prototype) has 74,844 views total as of today, which if were of potential customers (and not developers), could yield some benefits.]

This wasn't the end of the misfortunes, as the brainstorming went on, another setbacks began to crop up: All attempts to gain capital organically had failed (e.g., releasing the soundtrack), and it was discovered (after hoping to reach out to a few publishers) that the game was broken (which prompted the Armageddon mentioned above), and that the idea (what would really sell the game, technically the main selling point that is) of using voice actors would not be possible (professional ones that is); which was an almost fatal blow to the project (it may be so). Sending out termination letters (to some VAs) wasn't something that brought joy to my heart...

Furthermore, as a test, hoped to publish RBTE on the Play Store, when that also failed due to version mismatch from the build itself (and the updated requirements for the store); which at the moment remains unsolved (on version 4.27.2). This was the last and final straw in this whole circus of jumping hoops-and-loops, in order to publish a small game on mobile (e.g., the development restrictions for mobile, the compatibility issues, the lack of testing tools for deployment (there's no in-built input for mobile in the engine), the long build process, the countless of errors and workarounds, the Play Store, the GPUs, the setup, the market, and so on...); one that was born as an idea of "wanting to make a small and fun game for mobile, to utilize touch functions" because that would've added an new dimension to a standard game. Without being able to publish anything online (speaking of Google Play) the decision was made, after days of agony, to temporarily halt the production all together (may become permanent): to stop developing for mobile. The only saving grace for the project at this point, if there are any left (or were at the very beginning), to try to publish it on PC (which is only possible due to the fact that Unreal is capable of deploying onto multiple platforms, thus the code, the 14 months of code could be saved). Of which have mixed feelings, as the project was solely hoped to be published on mobile, and if not, a lot more work would be needed in order to polish it up (albeit, already the UI has to go, so adding more work might not be as bad, just time consuming), as best as this workstation can handle (which is not a lot to begin with).

Is there a way out?

However, even if all goes well, and somehow miraculously the project gets converted to a PC version, there's still the problem of publishing: Steam. Forgetting other platforms, as by far Steam is the only (miserable) option for a(n unknown) solo-dev to have a fighting chance to get some sort of recognition and income. Which is also highly unlikely, as the project hasn't been advertised for PC users at all. Leaving everything on Ground-Absolute-Zero. Also, there's the issue with paying the Steam tax ($100), which is now getting really expensive, and more so as time goes on (in monopoly money over here, which increased over 30% in the last year or so, and now exceeds the equivalent of several weeks of grocery for many; not mentioning the similar increase in utility bills per say), which there isn't funding for. All options, up to this point, had been exhausted. The life of a solo developer is unsustainable, without the right finance, tools, knowledge, connections, geographical location and social media coverage. Being locked out of Kickstarter (not available here), not having a following (say for Patreon support) technically sentences this whole project to death. The only other way would be to somehow finance the project via donations: There's a Go-Get-Funding page set up just for this case. Realistically speaking, however, the hill is even steeper with this way of funding (from a pure business perspective, at this stage, and from previous campaign experiences, and from social media reach), as it highly depends on the ability of reaching people on targeted platforms (which is "rigged" away from monetization, as mentioned above, and barred from trying to do so); the more options, the better.

If, and that is a big IF there were any sanity left inside, any breath of energy, would just give up here (many have told this before, and many hoped as well). This comes from years of experience, not just these past 14 months… However, this project holds its importance not because of somebody's idea or dreams of making it, but because the deliberate notion of creating a business, a studio per say. There are big plans in the drawer, with exciting changes (as to how to try to make games differently, and how to promote a new way of thinking in the industry), which are all waiting to be made. Dreams and hopes are just a pillar, elevating a new generation of titles (into existence) is another; years in the making. If that is not something for a developer to thrive for, then there's nothing else left to say on this matter...