Throughout the years, especially the last 3 years or so, I’ve been working on quite a few game projects, none of which made it to release. They could be seen as failures for that reason, however, I myself don’t. Why’s that? Well, even though the project didn’t release, it helped me with this project. CINIS. I learnt a lot from all my previous projects. Not only did my technical and artistic skills improve, but my overall knowledge of myself and the way I work, and how to actually work on game projects that can be released.

So to give some details of how I learnt all of this, I’ll go through most of my previous projects and talk about what didn’t work, and what did work, and by the end wrap it up with how all that added to the development of CINIS.

Whatever happened with Red-Knight?

You may or may not know of Red-Knight. If you’re coming from my YouTube channel, you most likely do. But if not, you may have seen, or even read, the prequel comic that was going to tie into the game. So years later, and there’s no Red-Knight. Why’s that?

It’s December 2020, and me and my buddy Austin are working on Red-Knight. I’m starting to feel a little burned out on the project. At the time, I wasn’t sure why, so I blamed it on overwork. Looking back on it, I don’t think that’s the only reason I was so unmotivated to work on the game. I think the game lacked a point. What did it actually mean in the end?

By the end of December, Austin and I finally talked about my burnout. I brought up some of my concerns for the project, and also the new ideas I had developed. Ideas of how to save Red-Knight as a game. You see, I had been tinkering with an alternate version of Red-Knight during December. Something radically different, that I thought could work, if done right. This version of the game might’ve worked, but even that one probably would’ve been too much for two developers, and it would’ve been better off being an entirely new game, instead of a rework of the old one. But we had promised to make Red-Knight, and were therefore committed to doing so. People were waiting for it after all. 

So we both pivoted and started working on an all new version of the game, this time no open world, no detective system or advanced movement, mostly just sword combat. The story was different too, more like a medieval drama than a superhero comic. The plan for the development was to make a combat demo, and have that be free while the bigger game was being worked on.

By march of 2021, the demo is actually completed, and ready to be released. I was even making a video explaining the game and the choices we made for it. And it didn’t happen. We instead decided to split up, and not work together anymore. Nothing bad happened between us, but we realized that the project had strayed way too far, and we were both limited in what we could do, compared to what we really wanted to do. For that reason, working solo would be best for me at that time. I needed to be free of the promises made in YouTube videos, and I needed to not have a team to work with for a while, as that was also an obligation. You can’t just stop working on a game if you have a team that’s waiting for you to do your part. As such, I wanted to be free from all of that, at least for some time.

The takeaway from this was to not announce things too early. Red-Knight was out in the public the very week we started development. With CINIS it has taken me 5 months to get to even mentioning it publicly. For that reason, I always want to have something tangible to show from my projects from now on. In this case, I decided to release CINIS as part of my announcement, a bit like what was planned for the new version of Red-Knight.

The many successful failures

I briefly worked on a bronze-age project. It probably didn’t last longer than a month all in all. The reason for its short development span was that I lost direction completely. I didn’t actually have any real ideas for a game, just the setting. From that I learned that I needed a specific goal. Without it, I’d just be prototyping forever and not know what to work on next. Direction and goals are some of the most important parts of game development. It’s impossible to make estimates, plans, and quick progress without them. Instead you’ll just end up getting lost working on pointless stuff.

Other projects I worked on were just plainly too ambitious, and I could never make them by myself. So I had to manage my expectations, and I needed to find out what I can, and cannot do, especially by myself. So a new project was started, this time with a goal, and it’d be smaller than before.

Here, the player would be a special unit working for a counter-terrorist police squad. It would be a movement shooter, a bit like Titanfall, and it’d have more linear levels and be a much simpler game than I had made previously. But the graphics would be even better than other projects that I made. I started experimenting with Unreal Engine 5 in its pre-release builds, and I had improved my 3D modeling skills. So it looked good, but only played okay, and was progressing very slowly. Making any 3D model for the game would take days of work. But I still just kept working on it.

I’ve since then stopped work on it, and while I can’t say that it’s canceled for sure, I’m not working on it any time soon. The graphic fidelity was simply not something I could keep up with by myself. It took too long to create any visuals. I didn’t fully learn that just yet though.

By February of this year, 2022, I was going to Seattle for an entire month to work on a game project as part of my education. So I put a hold on my own project while over there. The project that my group and I ended up with was pretty cool, and is also on Itch now. It was 2D, Pixel Art, and not like anything I had worked on before. But the lower fidelity of the graphics helped me learn just how much faster, and yet effective, retro-graphics could be. Up until this point I had the wrong attitude towards it. I was of the opinion that games with graphics like that were just made that way because it was easy, and people didn’t want to put in the work to make it look actually good.

It was a pretentious and naive mindset. But with this project I had my eyes opened for how good simpler graphics could actually be. I also learned that everything really does take longer than you think. Game development starts out really quick, but is slow to finish. Out of the three weeks we worked on it, we had a playable prototype in the first couple of days, and we thought it’d be easy from there. But after our first test, we realized how much more work we actually needed to put into it to make it fun to play and complete.

You can plan out your project perfectly according to your original design, but with testing and iterations, you may need to redesign, add, and refocus your efforts mid-development, which causes it to take up more time than what was planned. Over half of that project was spent reworking the game based on feedback, which changed our plans significantly.

But a month later when I came back from Seattle, finals were starting, and for this I had to work on another game project in a group.

CINIS

So one of my school finals had the assignment to create an existing game in a new genre. For this, me and my buddy Jeppe, decided to work on a simple concept that could be made quickly, but could be adjusted in its ambition and size. It needed to have simple graphics, and simple gameplay. We also needed to plan the project around being 2-3 times smaller than the final deadline, as we also had to write a report for the project, along with all the testing and iteration we’d have to do. So we settled on making QUAKE into a roguelike game. QUAKE has simple graphics to recreate on modern hardware, its gameplay is fairly simple to recreate, as first person shooters didn’t have a lot of complex mechanics in 1996. The roguelike aspects made it so that we could have an arbitrary length of the game, so that it didn’t need to have a complete end, just a single goal and repeatable gameplay. So all in all, this game would be smaller, simpler, and faster to make than previous projects, allowing for a lot more testing and iterating. The game has since then seen 3 iterations, all in a 5 month span. I’ve recently heard that each iteration phase of a game should take around 1-2 months to make and test, which seems to add up with CINIS.

Obviously, the game isn’t completely finished yet. A lot of work is still to be done, but I have a good idea of what direction it’s headed in. I wouldn’t have been able to make the game what it is without all the failed games though. Which is perhaps why I should rather call them “failed” games. While I in the end didn’t end up releasing even half of my game projects, I don’t regret anything. I learned from all of them, by either practicing my technical, artistic, or design skills. And in any case, I was working on all of them, and that’s just more experience. I don’t know everything there is to know about game development yet. But just like you don’t make games, you develop them, you also don’t make knowledge, but you develop it. It’s an ongoing constant process, and experience is best at developing your knowledge of everything, even when you think you know all there is to know about a topic. 3 years ago, I was sure I could make Red-Knight a thing. “How hard could it be?” said the 16 year old me, not having made an entire game before. Now, I’ve worked on a lot of games. I’ve finished just around 3-4 games, some of which have been released, others that cannot be released (copyright, lol), and I’ve assisted others in designing and developing their games as well. As such, when I look back at it, most of those projects would never have been finished by me. But I could only know that by actually going through it. I had to find out somehow.

If you are working on a hugely ambitious game, the takeaway shouldn’t be to stop making it right now. Perhaps you should keep going, just to see what you’ll learn from it. If some parts of what you learn is to stop working on that game, and do something different, then go for it. It’s hard to scrap a game. But sometimes, we need to.

If you read all of this, I appreciate you sticking around to read about some of my projects and what I got out of them. I hope that you got something from them, and that it might help you when you’re making your games.

That’s all for this one, thanks!