DEVLOG #23 - Project Regolith's Postmortem, What Comes Next?
Hey there everyone, we're back from our short rest this week, and I wanted to start the week with a pretty important update. Today I'm gonna be going over some of our key talking points following a post-mortem discussion the team had before we took our break this past week, and t
Hey there everyone, we're back from our short rest this week, and I wanted to start the week with a pretty important update. Today I'm gonna be going over some of our key talking points following a post-mortem discussion the team had before we took our break this past week, and then covering what's next for us as a studio.
This process marked the official conclusion of our major support patches for the game post-launch, and we're now much happier with the state of the game, performance and bug-wise, but we still have plenty to talk about concerning the game, it's dev cycle, and a slew of other things across the board.
Project Regolith's Postmortem
A week ago, just after launching patch 1.04 for Project Regolith, we sat down as a team and had a thorough discussion about the last 20 months of development. We thought it would be a good idea to share the major talking points with you all as a way to provide a bit of closure to the project as a whole. So, let's start with a bit of an overview before getting into specifics.
Project Overview
Ever since the end of March of 2022, we've been working on Project Regolith, and on the last day of October of 2023 we released the full game to the public - Our first commercial game after 3 years of study, and 1 year of business development. Originally, we had a few major goals: one was to build a short co-op experience inspired by the likes of We Were Here, Operation: Tango, Escape Simulator, and a whole lot more that I'll refrain from naming in the interest of saving a bit of writing time.
Another was to build the foundation of our studio, establish reliable workflows, and begin to make a name for ourselves in the Australian Game Dev scene. And lastly, of course, to prove our ability to work to a timeline and help make a case for more official funding/publishing channels for future projects (more on that later!).
The past 20 months have been an incredible learning experience for all of us on the team, from building new working relationships with voice artists, improving our technical skills, developing marketing materials, working events, and so, SO much more. We feel as though we've at least partially hit the mark on each of our outlined goals.
All-in-all, we're proud of the work we've done on Project Regolith, although the game hasn't pushed as far as we'd hoped in terms of sales, we're still extremely happy with the development of both our skills and our working pipelines over the course of the project. However, we'd be remiss not to address the state of the game on launch, and the steps we've taken this past month to rectify it.
Launch Issues
At the very end of October, Project Regolith went live, and right away players spotted issues we'd missed, some fairly critical, and some that were more minor that we had leeway to fix. As well as a handful of issues we were aware of, but had run out of time to fix. This unfortunately meant that the game, despite being technically feature, and story complete, still felt unfinished and very rough.
So, why did this happen?
Throughout the course of development, getting people on-board to help test the game was always on our minds. However, in a lot of cases we were apprehensive to organize these kinds of testing sessions due to features still being incomplete, puzzles missing vital context clues or components, networking issues, among other reasons.
At the end of the day, we were being very precious about our testing process. A mindset that definitely cost us dearly when we finally clicked the big green "Release" button.
How do we remedy this process in the future?
Well, a recurring theme I'll be touching on throughout this entire write-up is EXPERIENCE. In our previous works as students, games we'd worked on were often much, MUCH smaller in scope. This meant less features, far fewer moving parts, and a more easily-defined testing process.
Knowing what we know now about larger projects like ProjReg, and how easily things can fall apart without a proper testing framework, we'll be able to focus on a more rigid, well-organized pipeline for testing new features, scoping out more time for keeping all these moving parts in order, and generally avoiding these kinds of issues in the future.
Speaking of timelines and scope, this transitions well into what I'd like to surmise next...
Timeline Management
When we'd outlined our intentions for Scope back in October of 2022, when we launched our Kickstarter campaign for voice acting, we'd originally cited a release window of Early Q3 of this year. Some roadblocks we'd encountered regarding funding (which I'll be covering next), and some big marketing opportunities for the studio that we couldn't pass up in the form of PAX Aus and SXSW Sydney ended up pushing us back slightly. In the end, we still managed to hit our new deadline of late October (in spite of some awkward build approval issues too, whoops).
All up, we're pleased with our timeline management, and also happy with our decision making earlier in the year when it came to the original delays, and our transparency in announcing them. This is something we're hoping to maintain going forward.
A major influence on these timelines, however, comes in the form of...
Funding
As long-term followers of the project may know, back in January of 2023 we'd approached a couple of Government bodies here in Australia with pitches to secure some additional funding for Project Regolith's development, which were ultimately unsuccessful after a lengthy review and reapplication process. This was the major roadblock that contributed to our initial delay I mentioned earlier. The general consensus was that due to our inexperience, and lack of any backlog of titles, we weren't a safe bet for investment, which is a reasonable conclusion.
While we were disheartened, we were still committed to finishing Project Regolith, come hell or high water. Thanks to the Academy of Interactive Entertainment's Incubator Program, we still had a small fund to draw from for major marketing events and materials, plus the generous contributions from our Kickstarter backers for voice talent. All other costs on the project were covered out of pocket by those of us on the dev team.
With most of the team working full-time on this, and part-time on other commitments and jobs, funding is still a bit of a sore spot for us. It's our hope that with Project Regolith under our belt as a released title, we'll be more seriously considered by publishers and/or funding bodies next time.
With the more external influences out of the way, let's reflect more about the actual gameplay elements of ProjReg...
Puzzles and World Design (Warning: Spoilers Ahead!)
When we'd first set out to build Project Regolith, we'd had a handful of ideas for cooperatively-charged puzzles, and a vision of some fanciful non-Euclidean mechanics to help spice them up. In most cases, particularly the front half of the game, we feel we achieved our initial vision. While Life Support, the first "official" puzzle the players encounter features no non-Euclidean elements, the steady ramp up of these elements from Refinery through to Hydroponics feels pretty good to us.
We're particularly proud of those first four major sections - Life Support, Refinery, Quarantine, and Hydroponics are definitely the highlights of the game's puzzle designs, which is unfortunate, because it meant that the back half was lacking.
To get specific, the Terraforming Lab, and Admin Department puzzles are definitely not as well-explained to players, and have a more abstract feel to them. This was due to a mixture of design burnout, some over-scoping, and networking limitations that forced some changes in our original design plans.
Looking ahead, we're planning on how we can best take advantage of our strengths and ideas to build something that's more engaging all throughout the game.
Narrative
Thanks to our Kickstarter backers, we were able to deliver a fully-voiced narrative to Project Regolith in the form of the game's audio logs. We're extremely grateful to have been able to work with such an amazingly talented cast to pull off what we have.
That said, the casting process (which we had originally documented in devlogs #8 through #10) took a massive toll on both myself and Ryan, and definitely took a lot more time than we'd originally expected, although I suppose 360 applicants to review will do that.
Another important narrative-related issue that we became more aware of as we went was our pacing. Many of our audio logs run for 60+ seconds, which creates either a lot of downtime, or moments where players are waiting for one audio log to finish before interacting with the next. This saturation was in part due to us overestimating how many additional side logs we'd need to have written to accommodate all our "Name an NPC" Backers, whilst also being able to give attention to our main cast, and the main story of Outpost Rhea. Essentially, we had too much story with not enough time to tell it.
The audio-log format of the game also meant that integrating narrative into what was actively happening to the players in-the-moment was a little more difficult than expected, and it led to the major narrative beats feeling a little disjointed and confusing to some.
We'll make sure we avoid similar mistakes in the future with a more refined narrative-writing process, making a more consistent plan for story beats and making sure the team is clear on how each of them can be integrated with the game at appropriate times.
Mechanics and Systems
At last, we come to my wheelhouse. As the game's sole programmer/technical lead, I have a lot of gripes about how I'd handled systems built in the early phases of development coming back to haunt me as we got into the more complicated sections of the game.
This was not only my first commercial title, but also my first as an actual programmer, as I'd originally studied Design instead. Some might say making a networked multiplayer game as your first game is a bad idea.
To that, I'd say, "Yes. Yes it was."
But the experience has been well worth it. The main takeaways I've taken from this project revolve around the importance of being consistent as a programmer, making sure everything is well-documented, and built with future systems in mind. Overall, I'm incredibly proud of my contributions to the game, and I'm super excited to keep working with the rest of the guys!
Art and Visuals
A lot of our internal discussion about our Art pipeline has related to just generally being a bit more organized. Virtually everyone that's put their hands on ProjReg has been impressed with it's visuals, and even more impressed when told that it was all done by one person!
If there's one major point we'd want to focus on for future works in the art department, it would be speeding up our SetDressing and Lighting pipelines using a whole bunch of better practices we've picked up throughout this project.
Marketing
When it comes to marketing for Project Regolith, personally I'm of two minds - Our in-person efforts/events felt really successful. We got to meet literally hundreds of people, expand our professional networks massively, and get a measurable increase in our analytics for wishlists, demo plays, etc. But, our digital efforts were almost the opposite, for a couple of reasons:
1. Social Media is HARD. It's not really a secret, but getting likes, follows, and general engagement isn't easy. Especially without a dedicated marketing person/team.
And 2. Splitting our time up when everyone on the team is already wearing 2-4 different hats made it difficult to find the spare time to schedule posts, edit trailers and TikToks, and generally market the game (and ourselves to an extent) digitally.
Over the past few weeks, I've seen a lot of great marketing talks, and spoken to some really wonderful people about how we can improve, and there's really no easy answer for this other than to make the time we have count. Starting next project, all of us will be putting in more effort to the marketing department!
Conclusion
So, this has easily been our longest devlog yet, and likely the final devlog under the banner of "Project Regolith". What can we take away from all of this?
Well, 20 months ago we were fresh out of our studies, learning how to run a business and making a game at the same time. Here we are today, that game is done, for better or worse, and it's time to look towards the future.
There was a lot to look back on with Project Regolith. A lot of good, a lot of bad, but thankfully not a lot of ugly. Most of the processes and practices we've built are a fantastic foundation to keep building from, and most importantly...
We're richer for this experience, we know we have what it takes to not only make something, but to throw it out into the world. A lot of people have told us that just getting to this point is an achievement in itself, and that we should be proud to have made it this far. And we are proud, but, we're going to go further.
So, what comes next for Regolith Interactive?
The four of us are really excited to say that we're starting on something new very soon. In fact, we've already started the pre-production process!
While we're not ready to share a whole lot of details right now, we hope you'll stick around for the ride. Check in with us on our socials and in our Discord where we'll be keeping everyone up-to-date on any important news from the studio.
Discord - Twitter - Instagram - TikTok - LinkedIn - YouTube
On behalf of the team here at Regolith Interactive - Myself, Brandon, Harrison, and Ryan, thank you again from the bottom of our hearts for all of your support for Project Regolith.
Talk soon,
- Conor
