Post-Mortem

Lootfest for Steam – Post-Mortem

Lootfest is a failed Early Access project that I regret — a big, ugly stain on my developer career. So what went wrong?

**Burnout**

By the time I got the Steam license, the project had already been in development for seven years, and all I could see were the bugs and issues.

**Massive Technical Debt**

Lootfest was my learning project — my first fully 3D game, my first networked game, my first menu system, etc. Lootfest 2 became an impossible knot of broken beginner code, which made me want to start over from scratch.

**Minecraft Clone Obsession**

At the time, there was a huge surge in Minecraft clones, and I felt Lootfest was seen as just another one. As the issue grew, I kept changing the art direction in an effort to look unique.

**Unhealthy Lifestyle**

When I got the Steam license, it still felt like a ticket to guaranteed success. But as Steam opened up to more and more developers, the pressure to work every hour of every day grew unbearable.

**Being a Bad Boss**

I invested a lot of my own money to hire someone for a year. I thought giving him complete creative freedom would inspire great work, but it just led to experimentation with a lot of fun features — few of which were ever completed.

**No Soul**

Stripping out all the wild randomness, as well as the resource collection and crafting, removed what made the game fun in the first place.

**Handmade Content**

Lootfest started as a “Zelda forever” project — the idea was that if I randomized everything, it could be played forever, right?

But as I removed the randomness, I had no idea how much work it would take to handcraft all the levels. I remember working on a dungeon with a boss for two months, and when it was complete I ran through the level and killed the boss in two minutes - thinking “I’m screwed!”.

**Wrong Platform**

In the end, Lootfest was a console game for kids and simply not suited for the Steam audience. I also underestimated how different PC development is. I wasn’t alone — just look at other major XBLIG games like Total Miner; we all struggled to adapt.

*I will remove Lootfest from Steam in about a month.*