Hold To Reset

Building a new game, a new studio and a new life from the ground up

Alex Hutchinson on extending one’s deadlines. Christ, if only

You’ll know the Miyamoto quote by now: “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” It’s a pithy line, and more true than not, but it hides the complexity behind not only game creation but also the impacts of delays on people, cashflow and market position. Delays give you time to polish, edit and refine your game, but they also cost money, affect team morale, throw a wrench in marketing plans if mistimed and impact your release window.

All this became more relevant at Typhoon when we decided to add a few months to the development of Savage Planet. This is not really a delay – we hadn’t announced a release date – but it affects our internal schedule in the same way. It was an easy choice to make because we don’t think any of our ‘unchangeable’ decisions up to now mean we can’t keep improving game quality. We have a list of things we’d like to add, and are excruciatingly aware that our first game will likely define the perception of the company.

But a delay costs money. Generally contracts are structured so that publishers are under no obligation to foot the bill, and even if they are, this extra cost will either be paid for by taking royalty points from the developer or, at best, be added to their costs ahead of any possible royalties. This means Typhoon will foot the bill, so we need to believe that the extra time would not just improve the game, but not sink us financially by putting us in debt with no hope of breaking even. The legendary studio Looking Glass, for example, did not close for creative reasons – it collapsed for business ones.

More challengingly, even though we have shown very little, we needed to imagine how to stretch our marketing budget to cover a longer campaign. Large studios tend to have an aggressive flow of assets, interviews, and other content to create a regular stream of communication between the game team and potential players, but with everyone at Typhoon actually making the game, and the game being much more focused than the

usual triple-A buffet, we need to pick our moments carefully. Should we show gameplay at GDC first, or E3? How much competition for attention will there be at either event? Will someone announce a game with similar principles if we wait too long?

We also had to manage the team and their expectations. We have been driving toward GDC with the intention of showing real gameplay for the first time, so rewarding all that hard work by announcing that we weren’t going to show it yet would have been hugely disappointing. In the end we decided to push ahead with GDC anyway, but you could feel the air leave the room when we raised the possibility at a team meeting.

The goal of both the marketing beats and the presentation beats is not just to raise awareness, but also to give some external validation to the team so they can be excited about their work. Game-making can be a fragile endeavour, and despite popular opinion games are made by human beings with a strong emotional connection to their work. If they believe their work will mean something and find an audience, then they will push hard. If on the other hand they think that the game will be cancelled, the urge to hit the pub instead will take over.

Which brings us back to how time and deadlines affect development. It may sound like more time is always a good thing – and a good team is keenly aware when they don’t have enough of it – but you also need a clear plan for what you want to do with it. During development, you need to make decisions and then commit to them, otherwise you work in circles instead of making progress. And sometimes you realise with a sudden sense of dread that some of the decisions you can no longer change will have a negative impact on what players or reviewers think of the game, and that no amount of delay will fix it.

When I joined the Army Of Two team for the making of the sequel, we changed the tone from brotastic to black comedy, while trying to keep making the best, most bombastic ’80s movie about you and your best friend versus the world. But the first game had already embedded a brotastic tone in the franchise and the public’s perception of it, meaning that many people would never look at the sequel with fresh eyes.

Thankfully for Savage Planet we are not falling into an existing franchise, or attaching an external brand, so we are free to succeed or fail on our own merits. And now, with a bit more time, we can hopefully turn our slightly delayed game into a great one.

You need to make decisions and then commit to them, otherwise you work in circles instead of making progress