My name is Adrian Novell, I'm a game designer from Argentina, and I began working on SkyRider & the Journey to the AirCitadel, the 2 player Co-op Action Puzzle Platformer for PC and consoles, in 2014.

SkyRider & the Journey to the AirCitadel Concept Art 17 IMAGES

The Pitch

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“ It’s dizzying, the first time you realize that this curious idea you had in the back of your head actually works and that at least some people get to enjoy it.

Best Games of 2019 53 IMAGES

GDC 2015

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Kickstarter

The Apartment

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“ When you’re working on meeting an expo date, you’re not actively working on your game, but rather a ‘demo’ of sorts to showcase.

2 Player Only

“ Developing a video game four nights a week after a grueling day at the office is not a sustainable practice. So we cut it back to three nights. Then two nights. But even then, we felt ruined.

Switching to Switch

“ The irony is, the world was finally ready for SkyRider. But we weren’t.

It’s quite likely you’ve never heard of it, though. After more than four years in development, SkyRider never got finished. It’s one of the pitfalls of working in this industry, and far more common than you might think. It nearly broke me, but I learned a lot of lessons from it. Here’s what happened.Back in 2014, while I was working for a French mobile game company, I started making the first prototype for SkyRider using the free game engine Construct 2. The idea was basically to make a 2-player game where both players had to communicate constantly in order to get ahead, but the controls were simple enough that one person could play as both characters at once if needed.As a game designer, managing to program or script a prototype of an idea is an absolute game-changer, because it means that I can start showing what’s in my head from the get-go. That’s pretty much how I talked a couple of coworkers into joining this project, some of who are still a part of the team to this day (Damián Fernandez Gomez and Roberto Andriuolo), and we all set off to make SkyRider & the Journey to the AirCitadel during our after hours. We wanted to make a fresh game.The elevator pitch for SkyRider & The Journey to the AirCitadel was: you play as a scavenger, jumping, fighting and collecting energy for your drone, while your buddy plays as that drone, making platforms, energy shields and shooting. Together, you must work together in order to make it to the AirCitadel and face off against the establishment.Beyond that, a good story was also important to us. The sci-fi world was to be an analogy for our real world, where the rich are living in cities flying overhead while the rest of the folk have to extract minerals from the ground in order to hold the citadel in the air. That’s where our hero and his robot companion rise to face the corrupt powers at the top, and, more importantly, it’s where our game mechanics come in.Both characters, and that applies to the players as well, need one another to survive. They were designed so that they’re interacting permanently, protecting each other and working together.We got our team together and we started developing the game using Unity, hitting all the local game development expos we could find, wherever we can plug in our laptop. And the response from the audience was unbelievable. People loved it. They were having fun! It’s rather dizzying, the first time you realize that this curious idea you had in the back of your head actually works and that at least some people get to enjoy it.So, I decided that the best course of action would be to quit my job, take a demo of the game to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in order to get funding and publishing and get everything set up in order to create a Kickstarter campaign in the near future. Yup.Now, let’s do this step by step. GDC 2015 was a marvelous experience, if an expensive one. It was also an absolute failure, in no small part due to my lack of preparation. I had no idea how to tackle a business meeting. I got to GDC (hoping to land a million-dollar deal, mind you) with my laptop, two joysticks, what I thought was a business plan and a PowerPoint presentation. Needless to say, it was a long week.GDC is a lot of things happening at once, and those who’ve been there a couple of times know that the important business deals usually get done in the less noisy areas. As a first-timer, I got drawn into the shiny lights and loud noises. It’s got a rather festive environment, and if you’re not careful it’s really easy to get swept into it, to get lost in all the partying, that you forget why you got there in the first place.To a point, I probably didn’t take it as seriously as I should have. But I did manage to adapt as the week went on. At first, I got there with the intention of having people try the game out on my laptop, until I realized that the opportunity for that rarely came up, and when it did it ended up being rather awkward, with me taking minutes trying to set up the game.Luckily, we had a really beautiful teaser trailer, and by the end of the week I was pretty much showing that on my phone. A 55-second trailer sure beats ten minutes of a sweaty guy awkwardly trying to set up a demo on a laptop. However, a 30-second trailer plus an elevator pitch would have probably been a better combination. But, live and learn, my first GDC didn’t get me very far, but we did manage to get in touch with a bunch of publishing companies.For a couple of months after GDC, everything was a roller coaster. We kept working on SkyRider while we waited for any of those publishers to call. Some did, but nothing came of it. Every rejection began to take a toll. All the faith we had in ourselves, that developers in our local game community had, didn’t make much of a difference when it came to doing business.See, working with a publisher is very much a business decision, in the sense that it’ll only work if you have a well-defined product (which we didn’t) and you are able to communicate your needs very clearly (which we didn’t). At the time, we pretty much saw a publisher as an opportunity to get enough money to finish the game. Of course, we were also willing to make lifestyle sacrifices in order to get the game done, so our budget was also a bit off.GDC 2015 was very much a wake-up call. Seeing 20,000 game developers from all around the world in one same city really helps to put things in perspective: I was a developer amidst a sea of developers, nothing special. It meant great networking, but it also meant a chance to burst the bubble we’d been trapped in. It was a real shock to the system.After that, came the Kickstarter campaign.In our quest for financial independence, we explored the option of becoming a crowdfunded game, since everyone else was doing it. A campaign would surely garner us loads of press, enough money to make the game and, as opposed to working with a publisher, we wouldn’t have to give a percentage of our earnings to a third party.Or so we thought.Turns out, not so much. Even though we were in Argentina, to run a Kickstarter campaign in 2015 we would need a US bank account and social security number, which meant getting involved with one of the developers we had met at GDC and giving them a cut.Also, as mentioned, our estimated budget wasn’t much, as we were willing to make some sacrifices in order to get the game out the door. Luckily, considering our exchange rate, we were happy to get any income at all. We dreamed of being able to work 9 hours a day on SkyRider, without having to worry about maintaining our day jobs in the meantime. And Kickstarter seemed like a way of making that happen.Turns out, in order to crowdfund a game you need to get a crowd first, and while GDC had taught us that the people around us weren’t enough, it was a lesson we were still learning. Being outside of the US, getting to the games press felt particularly hard, partly because of the language barrier.Ultimately, despite eventually getting some signal boosting, we gave up on the Kickstarter campaign - it just wasn’t enough. Enough with the sidetracking, we thought, let’s get back to making the actual game.The following months were the most fun we had during the development, even if they were also maybe the least reasonable. I went back to my old job, we had a new programmer join the team and we all decided to rent an office, which was essentially just a small apartment. There, the three of us would work on the game at night, four days a week, after we were done with our 9 to 5s.It was a rough couple of months and we barely slept, but you could feel the electricity in the air the minute you walked into that place. We were absolutely thrilled to be breathing life into SkyRider. Even though the nights got very dark, and the rejections to publish our game kept coming, we never lost faith in the game.One of the first things we did in that office was upload a demo on GameJolt, Newgrounds and Itch.io for the world to see, and the reception was outstanding. Loads of YouTubers picked it up and started having fun with it, giving us that external morale boost we were in desperate need of.Crucially, it provided us with all new beta testers at the palm of our hands. We had hours and hours of people playing our game, and footage we could freeze and rewind at will in order to figure out what was working and what was not.This was a perfect opportunity to improve, we put our backs into it and started using expo dates as our own development milestones, with the idea that we would have new versions of the game at every expo. This worked to our advantage, since it meant that we always had a clear goal we could aim towards without getting lost in the development process. However, it did involve its share of problems.When you’re working on meeting an expo date, you’re not actively working on your game, but rather a ‘demo’ of sorts to showcase. That usually involves redesigning the tutorial, since you’ll have dozens of people playing your game through the day, ten minutes at a time (mainly those same first ten minutes), and you want them to have the best experience possible. We spent ages working on tutorial levels, only to then rework them a week after, and then working on them again a few days after that.When you’re on a deadline, you also tend to take shortcuts that’ll make your game work in the moment, but definitely not in the long run. By the end of 2015, SkyRider had suffered quite a bit. Not in terms of public image, it was doing better than ever, but in the backend. It was all spaghetti code, a jumbled mess you get when you’re fixing things on the fly. Picture putting a band-aid on a broken leg, and then another one, except the band-aids start piling up and contradicting each other and making the leg’s animations crash, so you’d be better off just getting a new leg.We took this reset as an opportunity to make SkyRider an exclusively 2 player experience- rather than a single player/co-op one - something that we had been considering for quite some time. Designwise, it meant interesting changes for both characters, making each of them lean more on the other. But it also brought up an extra question: do we leave it as a couch co-op experience, or do we include online multiplayer?It was a long discussion, but in terms of project scope and consistency, there was only one right answer to us. Up to that point, the design philosophy was such that if a player placed a platform somewhere you didn’t like, you should be able to comfortably slap them in the back of the head in real life. So we stuck to that spirit.However, we went to Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime’s Matt Hammill for advice. He most likely had a better idea of what we were going through, since both games have philosophies in common, and could offer us a helping hand.He got right to the point: we had to develop an online mode. He and his development team had chosen not to, and their game suffered from that decision.It was not a wise decision.In the meantime, we were feeling burnt out. Developing a video game four nights a week after a grueling day at the office is not a sustainable practice. So we cut it back to three nights. Then two nights. But even then, we felt ruined. We’d exhausted ourselves working long periods of time on a game that wasn’t getting anywhere.The killing blow came when some crucial funding fell through at the last minute, with the publisher stating its decision not to sign us was mainly because we weren’t offering an online mode. Rejection can be hard to bear when you’re on your best day, but when you’re in the doldrums it can be downright devastating.By July of 2016, we’d left that apartment, and abandoned SkyRider & the Journey to the AirCitadel.After that, we didn’t speak to one another for 7 months. It’s not that we were mad or angry or anything. It’s just that seeing each other was a reminder of what we had lost. So we each chose to grieve our own way.Then, in 2017, Nintendo announced a video game console.The Nintendo Switch called to us. A hybrid console that you could play at home or on the go, meant to host a parade of indie games, where a set of joysticks could split up so that two could play. It sounded designed with SkyRider in mind. So we decided we’d give it another shot, only this time we’d take the time we needed, so as not to burn ourselves out in the process. We hired another programmer, and around mid-2017 we set our sights for GDC 2018.This time, we got together each weekend, rediscovering the joy of game development as we went along. And for a while it was good. Everything seemed to fit together, the team felt fresh again, especially with the new programmer helping out. However, our new, more relaxed schedule meant that we got to GDC with less of a game than what we’d hoped for, and we ended up coming back home with not much to show for it, just a couple of emails that didn’t get us anywhere.We managed to apply for Nintendo admissions after all, but that didn’t work out either. The publisher got back to us saying we were approved for publishing on Nintendo Switch, we just had to register our company within the system. And that’s when we got into the final snag: we didn’t have a company. We barely even had what you would call a working game. More importantly, we didn’t have any energy left after working for almost a year trying to make it to GDC. We were spent.The irony is, the world was finally ready for SkyRider. But we weren’t. After years of struggling, of developing in our spare time and trying to scrounge up enough money in order to do it full time, we’d all found solid jobs that we weren’t willing to sacrifice for this project.The project had also become part of my identity. Those who know me well understand how painful it is to never have released it, knowing I failed.And yet I couldn’t deny the lessons I learned, or the joy I felt working on it. That tiny little office, right after our day jobs, was filled with laughter every night we were there. We never did manage to make the dream come true, but we sure had fun chasing it. And I owe that project a lot of the opportunities that have come since.Producing or managing a project is hard to teach, so people learn those skills by doing. It’s also why you’re gonna see lots of video game projects end abruptly. Through my experience with SkyRider, I learned about knowing what decisions to push for, or when to back down, or when a ship is rudderless.I know now it’s not only about having a good idea, or even about having a great game in your hands. There’s a balance that must be struck between the creative and the business side in order to make a project come true. And above all, you must understand the market you’re getting into before you jump into production of your first game.Making games is hard, but it can be highly rewarding as well. Don’t give up, just be smart.And that’s pretty much how SkyRider never got made, at least so far. That’s not to say it never will. For now, you can try the first 5 levels here. Maybe someday we’ll get the timing right. And hopefully, we’ll be able to make that Journey to the AirCitadel.

Adrián Novell is an Argentinian game designer and producer working at EA. Follow him on Twitter.