Why is releasing a video game so god damned hard?: A Post-Mortem
Seasonspree came out almost two weeks ago as of this writing. Clifton, the game's Creative Lead, approached me about the idea in June of 2020. We had initially met at PixelPop in 2019 (a game conference and exhibition held in St. Louis, MO). I played Keyhole, a game that Kitewing has had in development long before Seasonspree was even a concept, in a demo state and Clifton and I found that we got along quite well.
The pitch was simple: a cutesy time travel game with movement on a single axis. Development was expected to take about a year. The art style, story and mechanics were already decided on. I was asked to provide a folksy, upbeat soundtrack. I enthusiastically accepted.
If you do some quick math, you will notice that the game did not take a year to develop. It took 4 years to complete and we took 3 extra months for polish and QA. A lot of hands went into this game, a lot more than I ever expected would be needed, but was absolutely necessary to get Seasonspree out the door.
As I said earlier, I was hired initially as just the composer. In total, I wrote more than an hour worth of music for the game. I’m still incredibly proud of the score I landed on. It was only possible through the feedback I got from the team and my peers. No one is an island, and I’ll be forever grateful to them.
As development went on, it became clear that we needed a producer. Clifton was having trouble filling the role, so he approached me about it. At that point, I did not have a ton of experience in project management, but I knew the role needed to be filled and I was willing to learn.
Hey, did you know that being a producer is fucking hard? Like… unbelievably hard? It was taxing in ways that I had never experienced before in my life. It feels like you are a puzzle master, piecing together a large puzzle, but YOU have to also carve out all the pieces. My two years of producing and doing almost the entirety of QA for Seasonspree left me with unending reverence for both positions. These are the strongest people in games.
So why did Seasonspree, a simple game on paper, take 4 years to ship? Well… making a game is hard. Really hard. Everything you think will be easy is difficult, and everything you think will be difficult is borderline impossible. You are constantly putting out fires and throwing spaghetti at walls hoping something will stick.
Was it hard? Yes. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
Was it worth it? Yeah. I definitely think it was.