At some point in our development, we laid out all the assets we created and took a good look at them. We acquainted ourselves with every nook and cranny of our game and made a physical map of the storyline, adding all sorts of sticky note reminders. We did all this in order to truly see the scope of the whole project.

At first glance, everything was there. The story ran its course and the assets were meaningful. Yet there was a suspicion that the game we had wasn’t the game we set out to do: we want Lightstep Chronicles to be an epic adventure full of self-exploration, to stand out in the sci-fi genre with elements of value to the genre. Our vision got muddled in the process and we lost sight of the finish line.

Here’s what went wrong.

Before we started building a game we built a narrative. We didn’t greenlight it until we were completely happy with each story beat, character, goal. As we worked on the project, new ideas came pouring in. All these ideas were technically good – we did add them to the project after all, but they watered the game down. The project got too big and we lost control of the story’s flow – and Lightstep Chronicles started to look like a run-of-the-mill space opera crammed into a tight space.

Changes are not cost-effective.

Obviously we had to get our vision back on track, but how do you go back and edit a video game painlessly? More specifically, how do you account for all the work you’ve already done on the game and agree to the time-consuming and expensive changes you need to introduce? We already had fantastic settings, assets and models. We worked hard on the animations and love how they look. The atmosphere is exciting and most of the characters are great. The only change had to be the story itself.

Sensible, targeted revisions.

Our solution was to ask the writers to solve the puzzle of incorporating existing assets into a new narrative frame. This frame would turn out to be much different than we initially planned – now we weren’t making the game we originally wanted to because after all the iterations the game went through, we grew. Since we were scrapping things, we had a new opportunity to create a superior sci-fi story. Our writers came through and cooked up a trippy psychological adventure with horror themes.

A more personal story.

Lightstep Chronicles now plays with the psychological theory of the grieving process and sadness as a narrative structure. Our characters are based on the Jungian and Freudian Personality Theory. Can you imagine it? It’s dark and awesome. And the whole new story is a functional lego puzzle created out of our original assets, so we didn’t have to lose time and money making new ones! #thrifty

Still, there’s more work to be done on the game. The writers reached their boiling point of urgency and soldiered through it. We will keep our eyes open for more dire situations, hoping they can be easily bypassed, but the Lightstep Chronicles team is experienced enough to take them as fine-tuning. We have regained faith in the quality of our project, fueled by a rekindled passion to bringing you the most beautiful text-based adventure you’ve ever seen.