The history of the development of Xenonauts - an independent remake of X-COM
The development of Xenonauts took five years. It took ten times more time and twenty times more money than I expected, but it became such an important part of my life that I even wished that the journey was over. Many personal risks were associated with the development. When it started in 2009, I was 22 years old and I did not know anything about game development. I spent on this project all my savings, a significant part of which was inherited. My office was my bedroom, I worked on Xenonauts in the evenings and on weekends, after a full-time working week as a consultant at KPMG, which included three years of accounting examinations (the failure of each of them would lead to my dismissal). Fortunately, it all ended well. This article is a diary promised at Kickstarter, in which all aspects of the development are evaluated - whether I acted correctly or not. I hope it will be interesting and maybe help someone to avoid my mistakes.
The Xenonauts team involved was almost entirely composed of freelancers working remotely - almost two thousand people participated in the development process. Despite the fairly close relationship with many of them, I saw about five people alive.
Our development process was very simple: I managed every member of the team directly using email. The team members barely contacted each other — the two exceptions were the team of programmers and my colleague Aaron, who joined me for a full day after we moved to the office after a successful campaign on Kickstarter (about three years after starting development).
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This is neither the usual nor the preferred method of developing computer games. Working in the same room with colleagues is not only pleasant, it gives a big increase in productivity and creative energy. Unfortunately, this is much more expensive - at the beginning of development we could not afford even full-time freelancers from England, what can we say about the full working day and office rent.
To give a general idea of ​​our financial situation: I had about 25 thousand dollars accumulated when we started development in 2009. We started taking pre-orders in November 2010 and passed the 1000 copies mark in July 2011, which meant that 50,000 more were available during the first two years of development (during that time I not only worked on Xenonauts for free, but also poured money into my project salaries).
We had no options other than using remote freelancers - it’s much easier to find affordable talent if you can search around the globe. A huge amount of content in Xenonauts would cost millions of dollars at AAA-studio prices, but we could do it all for a small fraction of that amount. That is why the development of Xenonauts took five years. Cheap and gifted freelancers come across infrequently, their search takes a lot of time, looking for a needle in a haystack should be ready to bust a lot of hay. We spent a lot of time on people who ended up unreliable or unable to do what we needed.
After the team was assembled, we had to coordinate its work, taking into account the different time zones and working hours - a painful and ineffective experience. Most of the team worked part-time, which immediately limited the time they could spend on the project. Everything took much longer than if we worked full-time in the same office.
But despite all the difficulties and disappointments, it was thanks to the successful management of the remote team that we were able to do Xenonauts. We simply did not have money to create a project of this magnitude in any other way. This was an inevitable evil that allowed us to make development cheaper than most ordinary games.
Created 20 years ago, UFO: Enemy Unknown is still considered one of the best games of all time. A close bond with her gave us many advantages. The most obvious were pre-orders and press coverage. A huge number of XCOM fans meant having an existing audience ready to pay for pre-orders, of which journalists were part, ready to write about the game.
It also made us more reliable in the eyes of the players and provided a common language for communicating with the community in the early stages. Buyers of pre-orders could easily perceive primitive versions and see a great future behind them, since they already knew what the missing content should look like. All this would not have happened if the original strategic game was created.
Even after Xenonauts became better known by itself, the name X-COM remained a key feature of the game. People accidentally stumbled upon us on the Internet (for example, very many visitors to our site came from the page about X-COM on Wikipedia) or read reviews that they would simply ignore without the word X-COM in the title.
It was also very useful for game design. In the original game there were a lot of elegant and well-documented game mechanics, which I used as a starting point for my own game systems. I reworked almost everything, but the ability to see how they acted in certain situations in the original game made the development process much easier.
In addition, there were two official remake. The first one was The Bureau: X-Com Declassified Shooter. For us, he was just a gift of fate - a protest against the reboot X-Com attracted a lot of attention to us and helped create the Xenonauts community.
XCOM: Firaxis Enemy Unknown was a real monster - with its incredible success among buyers and critics. I admit honestly, I passed it on Classic Iron Man and received a lot of pleasure. Despite some shortcomings, the game really deserved all the praises that it received from the press. She influenced us from two sides. The first one was positive: the game attracted attention to the X-Com franchise and the genre as a whole. We usually earned $ 350 in pre-orders over the weekend, but we received $ 30,000 on the X-COM release weekend — enough to fund development for two additional months.
The problems with X-COM were more subtle: the two projects were opposed to each other. Some members of our community didn’t like a “stupid” remake, and any attempt to simplify the mechanics of the original game caused a lot of accusations that we were doing the same. This is not very useful when you are trying to upgrade the game twenty years ago!
But looking back, positioning Xenonauts was one of the wisest decisions — it was an invaluable insurance that minimized the danger of wiping game design / marketing and allowed us to focus on creating the game.
I can't write an article about the success of Xenonauts without mentioning our community. We sold 30 thousand copies before the release of the game and our forums have generated more than one hundred thousand messages over the past two years. We simply could not make Xenonauts without all the money and feedback that the community gave us.
Individuals have often been very helpful in developing. Here are some examples that I remember well:
- A corporate lawyer helped us create a legal entity in the USA and open an account for our Kickstarter (otherwise we would have to use IndieGoGo);
- One of the community members hosts and administers our sites;
- Someone made translations possible, somehow finding a long-lost program that gives the ability to add new fonts to the engine;
- The user interface design of the air battles was originally invented on the forums;
“Fashion created by the community and maps were often so good that we added them to the official version of the game.
There were too many such people to mention all of them, but even the simplest actions, such as opinions expressed or error messages, helped develop the game. The collective contribution of all those who did something similar was simply enormous.
An endless stream of feedback allowed us to gradually eliminate various shortcomings. Although Xenonauts are far from perfect, I’m afraid to think how much worse they would have been without a million hours of public alpha / beta testing recorded on Steam before the game’s release.
It was also extremely useful because we did not have money for full testing within the team. The huge variety of games meant that it was difficult to even simply imagine all the possible actions of the players, not to mention testing them. Similarly, without the help of the community, it would be almost impossible to test large quantities of various iron configurations!
Our community has proven to be especially valuable during Kickstarter times. At first, we presented the awards that we had invented to them and were extremely surprised by the very negative reviews. By reviewing them before launching the company, we avoided potential problems with low-quality awards. In addition, they provided a very important impetus. We collected 10,000 of our 50,000 goal within a few hours (that is, before the press notified players from outside our community) and it seems to me that we reached half of our 50,000 goal in one day. This gave us a reputation for attracting non-members of the community and eventually helped collect 150,000. I also enjoyed the process of communicating with the community in our forums. I tried to treat forum members with respect and (usually) answered me the same. Discussions were usually polite, helpful and constructive and in many cases led to an improvement in the game. So if you were a member of our community, thank you - you were great!
I did not quit my job until October 2011, when the game was completed by almost half. Although this decision does not affect future projects, it still remains one of the most important.
I did not exaggerate when I said that the development took ten times more time and twenty times more money than I had originally intended. In the beginning, I knew very little about the development of computer games (although I myself thought otherwise) and the project brought serious monetary losses during the first years. If I earned my living by developing video games, I would have turned into a homeless person.
Spending all your free time on business in the evenings and weekends, ending a month with less money than at its beginning, is certainly very, very depressing, but if you continue to receive a salary, then there is nothing worse than despondency. My salary covered my daily expenses until Xenonauts provided for themselves ... and in the end they were able to provide for me too. Anyone who quits his job for the sake of creating something new will immediately be under the pressure of the need to quickly achieve success. His business not only has to become profitable quickly, the profit has to become large enough for it to be enough for life. This can be extremely destructive - not only in terms of stress, but also in terms of encouraging short-term thinking.
The reality of effective work in two jobs during the first half of the development was not particularly attractive. It cost me a number of relationships, friends, and too much sleep, but it gave me the time it takes to succeed with Xenonauts.
Keeping my job for those few years allowed me to quit it forever. If I quit right away, I would have spent all my savings in a year and would have been forced to return with my dreams shattered.
I simply cannot find words to explain how important it is not to rely on game development as the main source of income until this is really justified from a monetary point of view.
Xenonauts took shape through thousands and thousands of individual decisions. I made a lot of mistakes (about them in the appropriate section), but there were also the right decisions.
The first was the introduction of the personality of the Chief Scientist in research reports. The idea was as follows: add at least one memorable character to the game and, instead of dry facts, tell in texts about research about the daily life of the organization.
For a long time it seemed to me that this was a mistake - bad texts destroy immersion very much and it is very easy to make them wrong. It also took an enormous amount of time: I wrote almost 30,000 words for research reports and rewrote them at least three times. It took MUCH time. Therefore, I was very pleased with good reviews about the texts. As it seems to me, the Chief Scientist adds a lot of personal (and a little humor) to the game, where, under a different course of events, such things would simply be absent, I just like to know that I at least have at least some writing skills!
The user interface from the first person was also a great success. I used it to create the illusion of the world around the game, allowing the player in the literal sense of the word to walk around the base and personally see my organization. The technologies used by artists gradually change it as the game progresses, creating the impression that your actions influence the big world. This seems much more impressive to me than our old spreadsheet-like user interface.
I am also proud of the events on the globe generated by UFO activity. The original X-COM in places seemed somewhat empty: you were the only organization fighting the aliens, there were no signs of a global conflict raging around you. The events on the global map helped fill the void and made the world more realistic.
Local forces controlled by AI suddenly created a similar effect in ground battles - players simply fell in love with them. They created a lot of tough moments, about 90% of the stories on the forums included local troops saving the helpless xenonauts. I was somewhat surprised by their popularity, but they definitely turned out to be a good addition to the game. The last good solution was to simplify the game, especially the economy — an unlimited amount of initial equipment and ammunition, an automatic upgrade of weapons for aviation and other equipment, and the like. It seems to me that this allowed us to remove a lot of tedious micromanagement from the game, keeping its depth.
It was a controversial decision, but I would like to clearly separate the complexity from the depth. The first forces the player to make decisions, while the second forces the player to make meaningful decisions (that is, creates pleasure). Personally, I think I did very well in reducing the complexity without reducing the depth, and most of the players agree with me.
Well, let's move on to the bad! Let's start with preliminary planning.
The engine selection was the worst decision we ever made. Playground SDK 5 is a two-dimensional engine designed for casual browser-based games like Diner Dash. It is not supported by developers, its source codes are not available and it cannot even be downloaded anymore.
I hardly select expressions to describe it. There are several serious errors in it and several key features that are considered standard in all other engines are missing and we cannot correct them or add them without having the source codes. Almost everything that looks bad or badly made in Xenonauts most likely became so precisely because of the flaws in the engine.
The engine was chosen by the programmer who was the first (and very short) to work on the project. It was a terrible decision. If we were properly involved in planning and prototyping, we would quickly switch to another engine, since the Playground SDK was simply not suitable for a game like Xenonauts. Instead, we chose a bad base and the next five years were tormented by building a game on top of it.
The second major problem was very poorly structured source code. The code itself was written by skilled programmers and was very, very decent, but we never had a single structure and common agreements - ground battles and the strategic part were written by completely different programmers, they were put together three years after the start of development.
This was a very big problem. Our programmers as a rule understood only their own part of the code, so they could not fix errors in other areas of the game. The inaccessibility of the programmer meant a delay in correcting errors and hiring new programmers was much harder than in a normal situation. Because of this, it was almost impossible to speed up writing when, even when Kickstarter gave us money for it, and I think with horror about what would happen if one of the key coders left. This could all be fixed in two ways - firstly, I could hire a more skilled programmer to select the engine and plan the structure of the code. But such people are very much in demand and would hardly be interested in joining a small indie team without visible progress for demonstration and money, for appropriate payment of their time.
We get the situation of eggs and chicken. The likelihood of project success increases dramatically with proper technical planning, but the team gets access to it only after it has more or less settled (that is, much later than the planning stage).
The second option is reduced to the fact that I had to conduct more thorough research - at least it prevented a catastrophe with the choice of the engine. I could read more materials on this topic and decide on the choice of engine, taking into account the opinion of the programmer, instead of relying on it. I did not do this because of my inexperience, but in the end more than once regretted it.
(We could also abandon this engine at any time and start anew on the engine like Unity. Turning back, this seems like a good idea. But what an indie-group that did not complete a single project look like and start all over again on a new engine in the middle of development "It would hardly have been well received and a negative public reaction could have killed the project. We decided to stay with a familiar evil.)
Ask any indie developer for advice on creating your first game and he will almost certainly smile and advise something small. The reason is simple: you make a lot of mistakes. Having made a small game you can quickly learn all the lessons learned and apply the knowledge gained in the second game.
Xenonaut is a rather big game, very few indie games have as much content as our ground battles alone. Everyone advises to do a little game, but I did a huge one. It turned out to be a mistake.
A game of this magnitude requires much more money, ability, and time. Its creation is much easier to fail, since so many different things can go wrong.
The economy is also in question. Production of all this additional content takes time and money: Xenonauts has over a thousand research drawings, forty thousand land tiles, twenty thousand text words and a million frames of drawn animation. It is very difficult to imagine the amount of effort needed for this before you really try to do it - but believe me, this is a very large amount of work.
The difficulty is that the acceptable price of the game does not increase - indie games cost 20-25 dollars, regardless of the amount of content. Thus, it is not very correct to add large amounts of content to the game beyond what is necessary to justify the price of $ 25.
Thus, the ratio of the cost of development and the possible sales of Xenonauts from the very beginning was not the best, like all X-COM games. Their doubtfulness from a business point of view was most likely one of the reasons why it took so long to create an official X-COM remake!
In any case, I had to listen to the developers who advised to do something small as the first game - the Xenonauts would be much more viable as the second game. I doubt that I would have been able to plan ahead so much, if I had a little bit of experience.
The X-COM remake was a leap into the depths of game development and now it seems very silly. The half-finished game is worthless, so if I tripped at any stage of development and I would have lost a lot of money (most of which belonged to other people), and my career as a developer would have ended without starting.
This is a very serious and, by and large, unnecessary risk.
Xenonauts takes place in 1979, at the historical peak of the Cold War. I chose this setting for several reasons - it distinguished us from the setting of the near future in the X-COM, the deliberately down-to-earth setting contrasted with exotic aliens, it was during this historical period that the newcomers and their invasions were most feared.
I think this is a mistake. First of all, we did not use the setting: the distrust between the two superpowers barely mentions what to say about the game mechanics.We chose an interesting period, after which we almost did not use it.
But the biggest problem was “realism” - or its perception. If your game takes place in relatively modern times, you give the player a lot of recognizable objects. If their behavior differs from the player's expectations, they destroy the immersion in the game.
This is contrary to the main goal of the igrodesigner - the creation of an enjoyable game. Discrepancies in game design with reality are inevitable: for example, very few games prohibit you from playing after your character's death.
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It would be better if we used a solid science fiction setting, based on the real world, but not limited to it. I strongly doubt that I will ever use the real world setting in one of our future games - I really do not want to participate in all these disputes in a new way!
Xenonauts were announced at the stage of a vague idea. Buyers gave money for their own ideas about what a modernized X-COM should be. Unfortunately, in the end, they got my ideas about what a modernized X-COM should be.
We could never satisfy everyone. Each had their own ideas about which parts of the X-COM formula should be changed and how exactly this should be done; very often these proposals were completely incompatible with each other.
Fortunately, most people realized this fact and understood that the Xenonauts would not completely coincide with the images in their heads. They challenged certain points and design decisions, but agreed with our right to make some decisions with which they disagreed.
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This change caused a real outburst of resentment in the community. The difficulty was that most people perceived the issue as players and not game designers - they had already played for several hours and enjoyed the capabilities of super-soldiers. It seemed to them that we were robbing their toys.
The change was 100% correct and 100% necessary, but if you are a community oriented developer, then you cannot simply ignore the community’s disagreement with your opinion. It took us several days to make a decision that would take several seconds without community intervention.
Community participation in development provides tremendous benefits to any team, but in fact the community is better involved after the completion of prototyping and making major design decisions. Unfortunately, monetary reasons forced us from the very beginning to involve the community in the development of Xenonauts and to carry out all the experiments in full view.
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Another mistake was the scaling of the user interface - the font became almost unreadable on small screens. I did not pay attention to this when designing the interface (designed for 1080p screens) and received a lot of complaints. I could have prevented this problem if I thought about it beforehand, but by the time I realized it, it was too late to change anything.
And finally, the rhythm of the final part of the game turned out to be too slow - the game is somewhat delayed at the end. It takes a whole day to complete the game, which makes balancing it difficult (especially when busy with other things). Is this the biggest problem of the game? No, but I still would like to do it better.
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, Xenonauts , -. Thank you for reading!
(Chris England), Xenonauts.
Notes
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Correct # 1: remote command
The Xenonauts team involved was almost entirely composed of freelancers working remotely - almost two thousand people participated in the development process. Despite the fairly close relationship with many of them, I saw about five people alive.
Our development process was very simple: I managed every member of the team directly using email. The team members barely contacted each other — the two exceptions were the team of programmers and my colleague Aaron, who joined me for a full day after we moved to the office after a successful campaign on Kickstarter (about three years after starting development).
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This is neither the usual nor the preferred method of developing computer games. Working in the same room with colleagues is not only pleasant, it gives a big increase in productivity and creative energy. Unfortunately, this is much more expensive - at the beginning of development we could not afford even full-time freelancers from England, what can we say about the full working day and office rent.
To give a general idea of ​​our financial situation: I had about 25 thousand dollars accumulated when we started development in 2009. We started taking pre-orders in November 2010 and passed the 1000 copies mark in July 2011, which meant that 50,000 more were available during the first two years of development (during that time I not only worked on Xenonauts for free, but also poured money into my project salaries).
We had no options other than using remote freelancers - it’s much easier to find affordable talent if you can search around the globe. A huge amount of content in Xenonauts would cost millions of dollars at AAA-studio prices, but we could do it all for a small fraction of that amount. That is why the development of Xenonauts took five years. Cheap and gifted freelancers come across infrequently, their search takes a lot of time, looking for a needle in a haystack should be ready to bust a lot of hay. We spent a lot of time on people who ended up unreliable or unable to do what we needed.
After the team was assembled, we had to coordinate its work, taking into account the different time zones and working hours - a painful and ineffective experience. Most of the team worked part-time, which immediately limited the time they could spend on the project. Everything took much longer than if we worked full-time in the same office.
But despite all the difficulties and disappointments, it was thanks to the successful management of the remote team that we were able to do Xenonauts. We simply did not have money to create a project of this magnitude in any other way. This was an inevitable evil that allowed us to make development cheaper than most ordinary games.
Right # 2: Fidelity X-COM
Created 20 years ago, UFO: Enemy Unknown is still considered one of the best games of all time. A close bond with her gave us many advantages. The most obvious were pre-orders and press coverage. A huge number of XCOM fans meant having an existing audience ready to pay for pre-orders, of which journalists were part, ready to write about the game.
It also made us more reliable in the eyes of the players and provided a common language for communicating with the community in the early stages. Buyers of pre-orders could easily perceive primitive versions and see a great future behind them, since they already knew what the missing content should look like. All this would not have happened if the original strategic game was created.
Even after Xenonauts became better known by itself, the name X-COM remained a key feature of the game. People accidentally stumbled upon us on the Internet (for example, very many visitors to our site came from the page about X-COM on Wikipedia) or read reviews that they would simply ignore without the word X-COM in the title.
It was also very useful for game design. In the original game there were a lot of elegant and well-documented game mechanics, which I used as a starting point for my own game systems. I reworked almost everything, but the ability to see how they acted in certain situations in the original game made the development process much easier.
In addition, there were two official remake. The first one was The Bureau: X-Com Declassified Shooter. For us, he was just a gift of fate - a protest against the reboot X-Com attracted a lot of attention to us and helped create the Xenonauts community.
XCOM: Firaxis Enemy Unknown was a real monster - with its incredible success among buyers and critics. I admit honestly, I passed it on Classic Iron Man and received a lot of pleasure. Despite some shortcomings, the game really deserved all the praises that it received from the press. She influenced us from two sides. The first one was positive: the game attracted attention to the X-Com franchise and the genre as a whole. We usually earned $ 350 in pre-orders over the weekend, but we received $ 30,000 on the X-COM release weekend — enough to fund development for two additional months.
The problems with X-COM were more subtle: the two projects were opposed to each other. Some members of our community didn’t like a “stupid” remake, and any attempt to simplify the mechanics of the original game caused a lot of accusations that we were doing the same. This is not very useful when you are trying to upgrade the game twenty years ago!
But looking back, positioning Xenonauts was one of the wisest decisions — it was an invaluable insurance that minimized the danger of wiping game design / marketing and allowed us to focus on creating the game.
Correct # 3: community
I can't write an article about the success of Xenonauts without mentioning our community. We sold 30 thousand copies before the release of the game and our forums have generated more than one hundred thousand messages over the past two years. We simply could not make Xenonauts without all the money and feedback that the community gave us.
Individuals have often been very helpful in developing. Here are some examples that I remember well:
- A corporate lawyer helped us create a legal entity in the USA and open an account for our Kickstarter (otherwise we would have to use IndieGoGo);
- One of the community members hosts and administers our sites;
- Someone made translations possible, somehow finding a long-lost program that gives the ability to add new fonts to the engine;
- The user interface design of the air battles was originally invented on the forums;
“Fashion created by the community and maps were often so good that we added them to the official version of the game.
There were too many such people to mention all of them, but even the simplest actions, such as opinions expressed or error messages, helped develop the game. The collective contribution of all those who did something similar was simply enormous.
An endless stream of feedback allowed us to gradually eliminate various shortcomings. Although Xenonauts are far from perfect, I’m afraid to think how much worse they would have been without a million hours of public alpha / beta testing recorded on Steam before the game’s release.
It was also extremely useful because we did not have money for full testing within the team. The huge variety of games meant that it was difficult to even simply imagine all the possible actions of the players, not to mention testing them. Similarly, without the help of the community, it would be almost impossible to test large quantities of various iron configurations!
Our community has proven to be especially valuable during Kickstarter times. At first, we presented the awards that we had invented to them and were extremely surprised by the very negative reviews. By reviewing them before launching the company, we avoided potential problems with low-quality awards. In addition, they provided a very important impetus. We collected 10,000 of our 50,000 goal within a few hours (that is, before the press notified players from outside our community) and it seems to me that we reached half of our 50,000 goal in one day. This gave us a reputation for attracting non-members of the community and eventually helped collect 150,000. I also enjoyed the process of communicating with the community in our forums. I tried to treat forum members with respect and (usually) answered me the same. Discussions were usually polite, helpful and constructive and in many cases led to an improvement in the game. So if you were a member of our community, thank you - you were great!
Correct # 4: I didn't quit
I did not quit my job until October 2011, when the game was completed by almost half. Although this decision does not affect future projects, it still remains one of the most important.
I did not exaggerate when I said that the development took ten times more time and twenty times more money than I had originally intended. In the beginning, I knew very little about the development of computer games (although I myself thought otherwise) and the project brought serious monetary losses during the first years. If I earned my living by developing video games, I would have turned into a homeless person.
Spending all your free time on business in the evenings and weekends, ending a month with less money than at its beginning, is certainly very, very depressing, but if you continue to receive a salary, then there is nothing worse than despondency. My salary covered my daily expenses until Xenonauts provided for themselves ... and in the end they were able to provide for me too. Anyone who quits his job for the sake of creating something new will immediately be under the pressure of the need to quickly achieve success. His business not only has to become profitable quickly, the profit has to become large enough for it to be enough for life. This can be extremely destructive - not only in terms of stress, but also in terms of encouraging short-term thinking.
The reality of effective work in two jobs during the first half of the development was not particularly attractive. It cost me a number of relationships, friends, and too much sleep, but it gave me the time it takes to succeed with Xenonauts.
Keeping my job for those few years allowed me to quit it forever. If I quit right away, I would have spent all my savings in a year and would have been forced to return with my dreams shattered.
I simply cannot find words to explain how important it is not to rely on game development as the main source of income until this is really justified from a monetary point of view.
Right number 5: game design
Xenonauts took shape through thousands and thousands of individual decisions. I made a lot of mistakes (about them in the appropriate section), but there were also the right decisions.
The first was the introduction of the personality of the Chief Scientist in research reports. The idea was as follows: add at least one memorable character to the game and, instead of dry facts, tell in texts about research about the daily life of the organization.
For a long time it seemed to me that this was a mistake - bad texts destroy immersion very much and it is very easy to make them wrong. It also took an enormous amount of time: I wrote almost 30,000 words for research reports and rewrote them at least three times. It took MUCH time. Therefore, I was very pleased with good reviews about the texts. As it seems to me, the Chief Scientist adds a lot of personal (and a little humor) to the game, where, under a different course of events, such things would simply be absent, I just like to know that I at least have at least some writing skills!
The user interface from the first person was also a great success. I used it to create the illusion of the world around the game, allowing the player in the literal sense of the word to walk around the base and personally see my organization. The technologies used by artists gradually change it as the game progresses, creating the impression that your actions influence the big world. This seems much more impressive to me than our old spreadsheet-like user interface.
I am also proud of the events on the globe generated by UFO activity. The original X-COM in places seemed somewhat empty: you were the only organization fighting the aliens, there were no signs of a global conflict raging around you. The events on the global map helped fill the void and made the world more realistic.
Local forces controlled by AI suddenly created a similar effect in ground battles - players simply fell in love with them. They created a lot of tough moments, about 90% of the stories on the forums included local troops saving the helpless xenonauts. I was somewhat surprised by their popularity, but they definitely turned out to be a good addition to the game. The last good solution was to simplify the game, especially the economy — an unlimited amount of initial equipment and ammunition, an automatic upgrade of weapons for aviation and other equipment, and the like. It seems to me that this allowed us to remove a lot of tedious micromanagement from the game, keeping its depth.
It was a controversial decision, but I would like to clearly separate the complexity from the depth. The first forces the player to make decisions, while the second forces the player to make meaningful decisions (that is, creates pleasure). Personally, I think I did very well in reducing the complexity without reducing the depth, and most of the players agree with me.
Incorrect # 1: (insufficient) pre-planning
Well, let's move on to the bad! Let's start with preliminary planning.
The engine selection was the worst decision we ever made. Playground SDK 5 is a two-dimensional engine designed for casual browser-based games like Diner Dash. It is not supported by developers, its source codes are not available and it cannot even be downloaded anymore.
I hardly select expressions to describe it. There are several serious errors in it and several key features that are considered standard in all other engines are missing and we cannot correct them or add them without having the source codes. Almost everything that looks bad or badly made in Xenonauts most likely became so precisely because of the flaws in the engine.
The engine was chosen by the programmer who was the first (and very short) to work on the project. It was a terrible decision. If we were properly involved in planning and prototyping, we would quickly switch to another engine, since the Playground SDK was simply not suitable for a game like Xenonauts. Instead, we chose a bad base and the next five years were tormented by building a game on top of it.
The second major problem was very poorly structured source code. The code itself was written by skilled programmers and was very, very decent, but we never had a single structure and common agreements - ground battles and the strategic part were written by completely different programmers, they were put together three years after the start of development.
This was a very big problem. Our programmers as a rule understood only their own part of the code, so they could not fix errors in other areas of the game. The inaccessibility of the programmer meant a delay in correcting errors and hiring new programmers was much harder than in a normal situation. Because of this, it was almost impossible to speed up writing when, even when Kickstarter gave us money for it, and I think with horror about what would happen if one of the key coders left. This could all be fixed in two ways - firstly, I could hire a more skilled programmer to select the engine and plan the structure of the code. But such people are very much in demand and would hardly be interested in joining a small indie team without visible progress for demonstration and money, for appropriate payment of their time.
We get the situation of eggs and chicken. The likelihood of project success increases dramatically with proper technical planning, but the team gets access to it only after it has more or less settled (that is, much later than the planning stage).
The second option is reduced to the fact that I had to conduct more thorough research - at least it prevented a catastrophe with the choice of the engine. I could read more materials on this topic and decide on the choice of engine, taking into account the opinion of the programmer, instead of relying on it. I did not do this because of my inexperience, but in the end more than once regretted it.
(We could also abandon this engine at any time and start anew on the engine like Unity. Turning back, this seems like a good idea. But what an indie-group that did not complete a single project look like and start all over again on a new engine in the middle of development "It would hardly have been well received and a negative public reaction could have killed the project. We decided to stay with a familiar evil.)
Wrong number 2: scale
Ask any indie developer for advice on creating your first game and he will almost certainly smile and advise something small. The reason is simple: you make a lot of mistakes. Having made a small game you can quickly learn all the lessons learned and apply the knowledge gained in the second game.
Xenonaut is a rather big game, very few indie games have as much content as our ground battles alone. Everyone advises to do a little game, but I did a huge one. It turned out to be a mistake.
A game of this magnitude requires much more money, ability, and time. Its creation is much easier to fail, since so many different things can go wrong.
The economy is also in question. Production of all this additional content takes time and money: Xenonauts has over a thousand research drawings, forty thousand land tiles, twenty thousand text words and a million frames of drawn animation. It is very difficult to imagine the amount of effort needed for this before you really try to do it - but believe me, this is a very large amount of work.
The difficulty is that the acceptable price of the game does not increase - indie games cost 20-25 dollars, regardless of the amount of content. Thus, it is not very correct to add large amounts of content to the game beyond what is necessary to justify the price of $ 25.
Thus, the ratio of the cost of development and the possible sales of Xenonauts from the very beginning was not the best, like all X-COM games. Their doubtfulness from a business point of view was most likely one of the reasons why it took so long to create an official X-COM remake!
In any case, I had to listen to the developers who advised to do something small as the first game - the Xenonauts would be much more viable as the second game. I doubt that I would have been able to plan ahead so much, if I had a little bit of experience.
The X-COM remake was a leap into the depths of game development and now it seems very silly. The half-finished game is worthless, so if I tripped at any stage of development and I would have lost a lot of money (most of which belonged to other people), and my career as a developer would have ended without starting.
This is a very serious and, by and large, unnecessary risk.
Wrong # 3: Realistic Cold War Setting
Xenonauts takes place in 1979, at the historical peak of the Cold War. I chose this setting for several reasons - it distinguished us from the setting of the near future in the X-COM, the deliberately down-to-earth setting contrasted with exotic aliens, it was during this historical period that the newcomers and their invasions were most feared.
I think this is a mistake. First of all, we did not use the setting: the distrust between the two superpowers barely mentions what to say about the game mechanics.We chose an interesting period, after which we almost did not use it.
But the biggest problem was “realism” - or its perception. If your game takes place in relatively modern times, you give the player a lot of recognizable objects. If their behavior differs from the player's expectations, they destroy the immersion in the game.
This is contrary to the main goal of the igrodesigner - the creation of an enjoyable game. Discrepancies in game design with reality are inevitable: for example, very few games prohibit you from playing after your character's death.
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It would be better if we used a solid science fiction setting, based on the real world, but not limited to it. I strongly doubt that I will ever use the real world setting in one of our future games - I really do not want to participate in all these disputes in a new way!
Wrong # 4: Early Preorders
Xenonauts were announced at the stage of a vague idea. Buyers gave money for their own ideas about what a modernized X-COM should be. Unfortunately, in the end, they got my ideas about what a modernized X-COM should be.
We could never satisfy everyone. Each had their own ideas about which parts of the X-COM formula should be changed and how exactly this should be done; very often these proposals were completely incompatible with each other.
Fortunately, most people realized this fact and understood that the Xenonauts would not completely coincide with the images in their heads. They challenged certain points and design decisions, but agreed with our right to make some decisions with which they disagreed.
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This change caused a real outburst of resentment in the community. The difficulty was that most people perceived the issue as players and not game designers - they had already played for several hours and enjoyed the capabilities of super-soldiers. It seemed to them that we were robbing their toys.
The change was 100% correct and 100% necessary, but if you are a community oriented developer, then you cannot simply ignore the community’s disagreement with your opinion. It took us several days to make a decision that would take several seconds without community intervention.
Community participation in development provides tremendous benefits to any team, but in fact the community is better involved after the completion of prototyping and making major design decisions. Unfortunately, monetary reasons forced us from the very beginning to involve the community in the development of Xenonauts and to carry out all the experiments in full view.
Wrong number 5: gameplay
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Another mistake was the scaling of the user interface - the font became almost unreadable on small screens. I did not pay attention to this when designing the interface (designed for 1080p screens) and received a lot of complaints. I could have prevented this problem if I thought about it beforehand, but by the time I realized it, it was too late to change anything.
And finally, the rhythm of the final part of the game turned out to be too slow - the game is somewhat delayed at the end. It takes a whole day to complete the game, which makes balancing it difficult (especially when busy with other things). Is this the biggest problem of the game? No, but I still would like to do it better.
Conclusion
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Notes
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/239295/
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