After a pretty intense February and March, things were really starting to take shape.

After GDC, we were a little burned out from the big March push, but we were determined to ship Summer 2015. We had a lot to do, yes, but we had made a lot of progress recently, and we had good momentum.

This is a good case of either temporary insanity, inexcusable hubris, or both. Shipping Summer 2015 meant that we were trying to take a game from roughly 10% done all the way to 100% done in a fraction of the time it took to even get to 10%. Anyways, as if it needs to be stated at all, it could not and did not happen.

Two other important things did happen between March and, well, today basically. The first is that the game started to get really, really good. It started to play very well, and to look far better than even the well-received previous public builds. These trends continue in a very encouraging way right up to the writing of this paragraph.

The other interesting thing that happened is that we started to run out of money. Reserves that we were relying on to bridge the gap between the deliberately-inadequate advances and our personal burn rate were drying up, which was (and is) driving our monthly burn rate at Finji closer to $20,000 per month. This was a part of the plan, and not particularly alarming on its own, but the money in our bank account did not match the amount of work that remained.

And with that, I think we’re almost caught up with the decisions and meetings we did this past week, but I wanted to cover two other things first. I think it will help illuminate some of what I’ve already written and some of the things I’m going to talk about for the future of Overland as well.

The first is that completion percentages are extremely weird. There was an interview translated recently with some Nintendo folks that did a great job of explaining this, but basically an overall percentage completion for a game project is sort of a laughable idea. Which parts are how complete and to whom is a really complicated and multi-layered question. For example, in Overland, by all our best estimates, we have put in roughly 80% or more of the actual hours required to take the game to launch. If you were to look at the game in its current state, though, as an outsider, you might feel it is only 40% done or 50% done, because our efforts until very recently have been mainly focused on getting the plumbing and foundations as solid as possible.

But even a month ago, we would still have been over 75% hours logged and maybe only 30% “player complete”. Procedural or randomly generated games commonly have this weird curve, where you build up those basic systems and it takes a long time, and then everything clicks and things start to come together with less trial and error. But even if you ignore whether you’re talking about a developer or player, the percentage complete is still technically a joke. What do I mean by saying we are 80% complete? Is that the UI or the levels or what? Even if it’s the UI, is it UI style, UI functionality, UI polish? There are too many shards. Like quarterback ratings, this is kind of a hopeless attempt to boil down a complex and unpredictable system into a single number, and you just lose too much resolution.

The other interesting thing that happened

is that we we started to run out of money.

The second idea I wanted to share is that the process of experimental game making and the process of commercial game making are fundamentally incompatible. They can not and do not fit together. That some studios are able to somehow make them fit, or fit enough, for a while, sometimes, is a colossal victory. This is a little tricky because the indie dream is basically to make experimental games commercially.

For the sake of clarity and again to hopefully illuminate some of the situation with Overland, I want to break this down slightly more. When I say experimental game making what I mean is the process of “forward” game design, of Church of the Prototype, of iteration, of exploring a design space and listening to the game and figuring out what it wants to be.

Experimental game making is attractive because even though it yields very unpredictable schedules, occasionally frustrating amounts of backtracking, and risky experiments, it is also a relatively fun and creative process period, but more importantly it leaves room for discoveries and organic improvements. It’s the only remotely reliable way to make a playable game that can successfully mix or straight-up avoid existing genres.

Commercial game making, on the other hand, is about building a thing, on a budget, making steady predictable progress, and releasing on time, at a predetermined level of quality and complexity. It is almost the complete opposite of the actual creative process of making a thing. There are huge inevitable clashes here.

There’s a reason that design-oriented giants like

Blizzard take five years or more to make a new game.

I think some studios are better than others at finding ways to somehow reconcile these differences, or avoid the conflicts altogether, and again, that’s awesome, more power to them. Even we occasionally managed it in the past. But there’s a reason that design-oriented giants like Blizzard take five years or more to make a new game. Sometimes finding the magic takes a long time, and sometimes refining the magic takes even longer. Commercial game making is fundamentally, inherently opposed to delays of any sort. But without delays, well, it’s more of a luck-based operation. Sometimes that works I guess. But I’d feel weird literally betting my house on that particular gamble.

Anyways, to quickly summarize where I was before, the time between March 2015 and now (the end of July, 2015) was a period of extremes. On one end, we saw massive improvements in the way we work as a team, massive improvements to the game itself, and we’re finding ourselves more and more on the side of the line where playtesters mainly only get mad at the game because we have to pack up our laptops and get some sleep.

But also we used up pretty much everything we had. Even though it was shorter than the last phase of development, we approached $50,000 in expenses again, thanks in part to those depleted reserve tanks. Toss in the $60,000 we invested earlier, not to mention some substantial amount to make sure Bekah and I could pay our own bills in 2014, Overland’s budget gets pretty big.