I followed Fez development from the very start. I finally get to play it like I wanted, paying 95% to the developer and getting my Windows version. It starts flawlessly, I’m smiling jumping on platforms, discovering treasures with my arcade stick.
And then I get stuck in a door, impossible to escape. The file auto-saves constantly so I’m fucked. I can’t get out. I also can’t fucking stop thinking how terrible this is. It’s a bug, it happens. There’s a design flaw too. But five years of development and a console release should have solved that, right? I guess not.
Between releasing games with major bugs and making sequels, “indie” developers are now as good as “AAA” developers, amirite. I feel bad for Renaud, though.
There’s also the Double Fine Kickstarter mayhem. Summary: they ask for 400K, receive 3.3 million, run out of money and the game would be ready by 2015 but half of it would be ready in 6 months.
It’s all right, they’ll get the extra money needed on their own but it is scary: receiving almost ten times more money for a project led by a veteran and it still is not enough? Who can get away with that, what business runs like that?
But in the end it demonstrates what people still don’t get because most are still in a “it looks gorgeous, I’m buying” mode: it’s in-sa-ne-ly hard to make good games, regardless of time and budget. Just thinking about Fez’s collision and detection system with platforms in a fake/real 3D world my nose starts to bleed, man. The gorgeous part of a game explodes development needs at a speed that you wouldn’t imagine.
I hope these stories will push people to understand the basic economics and R&D, very high risk nature of making games.