How I learned to stop worrying and love the mountain

It’s your guy, Arn, game director on Trailblazers : Into the March, back with a new weekly log series for the most curious amongst you.

I'm going to be honest, I'm not exactly sure what this series is going to cover. For now, I'm picturing it as an open platform to talk about the project and the intricacies of building a game like ours. But who knows where that will lead us.

So if you've ever wondered how people who've never met could transform a whiteboard sticky note into a game ; if you want to learn and ask anything about the project, how it's crafted, or who the humans behind it are ; if you're interested in the challenges, the happy accidents, the highs and lows of a journey like this - you're in the right place. So let me start by answering this question…

Where we’re at right now?

Back in the beginning of April, we reached a deadline we had set for ourselves. It was defined internally as our first “Alpha” and it was supposed to be the build we would use for open playtests. Playtests that would lead to our first public demo.

Technically, we succeeded in implementing the systems we were aiming for, trimming the scope here and there and keeping some big features for later.

Players can now experience the full core loop in a single build. In Terminas, they can recruit crew, buy supplies, take on a contract, pick a preset landship layout, and head out into the overworld. From there, they explore journey maps, fight other landships, send their crew on excursions, rebuild their landship interior, secure resources of all kinds, provide for their crew, craft items and gear - and plenty more - all the way to completing the contract, returning to the main hub, and collecting their rewards.

It was at this point, benevolent reader, that we realized the nature of the beast we had created. I had longed for this moment. I kept telling my wife that we were soon going to reach a land behind the hills, where peace and contentment were awaiting us.

But there was no land behind the hills. There was a plateau, yes indeed. Shrouded by the shadow of a mountain. Mount Now-Connect-The-Dots-And-Cut-The-Fat-You-Naive-Fool.

So that’s what we started doing. For the whole duration of April, we began to scrutinize one major system after the other and looked for ways to make them “click”.

I was very keen on naming this phase the “sauce reduction” phase. But no one in the team seems to be fond on culinary metaphors.

It’s a tough process, but a joyful one too. We had to gave up on premises some of us were very attached to. And accept to lose parts of features we had poured a lot of time and energy in.

I’m planning to come back in details on those challenges and decisions in future logs. I think it’s a very interesting set of problems to know for anyone wanting to get involved in game development. Or any creative endeavor for all that matters.

A more experienced team could have avoided some of them and there’s lessons we have to learn if we survive long enough to ever start working another project. I thought about a quote I’ve read in an interview of the Eremite people a lot : “There's no trick we can pull off, and no 'main character' advantage we have.” Not that I