Greetings! We’ve spent the last several months in a long and steady process of reorganizing how we handle development for 800 North projects. For several years we worked pretty much exclusively on whatever game project we wanted to. This includes Dino D-Day and Grappledrome as well as some other projects.
Following the Early Access release of Grappledome – which didn’t exactly set the world on fire – we decided to return to our former careers and pursue game development on the side. If you’ve followed us for a while you may know that we previously worked in television production before embarking on Dino D-Day. The primary reason for this change is the new Steam store front. When Dino D-Day was launched the risk of financial failure on Steam was low. You could make a game, get front page, main capsule exposure for a week or two and feel confident that you’d at least make most of your money back. With the ongoing flood of games onto the Steam platform the risk equation is dramatically worse for developers. It’s quite difficult to get meaningful exposure on the platform without an existing title that is hugely successful (or a large, expensive marketing effort). Dino D-Day is a successful title for us but it was never a mega-hit.
In short, it’s too risky for us to hang our careers on game development alone. The times they are a-changing.
Let me take a minute to answer a few questions you may have:
Will you finish Grappledrome?
Yes, once we get this preamble out of the way we’ll lay out the plan for Grappledrome.
Sounds like Grappledrome didn’t work out. Can you even fund development?
Yes. Early Access release was never meant to be a funding mechanism for us. Money is nice of course and we hoped for a better response to the game but it's not a deal breaker.
You said you'd release the game in 4-6 months. What gives?
The plan has changed. More explanation at the bottom but pushing forward with a multiplayer-only title of this type from a small studio would almost cerainly end in failure. The Steam marketplace has changed dramatically, especially for developers of our size.
Why not make more Dino D-Day?
Good point. If the only thing we cared about was having a successful game development studio it would make sense to keep pumping out Dino D-Day content. For us though, we’re doing this primarily to work on projects we find fun and creatively challenging. While we love Dino D-Day, and always will, we put nearly 10 years of our lives into it and we’re looking for new challenges.
The Road Ahead for Grappledrome
We could have pushed forward with a multiplayer release for Grappledrome. As we thought about it though we felt that it was almost a certainty that it would simply disappear into Steam and be washed down the river. Competition for multiplayer players was always tough for small developers and it’s only gotten more difficult. With that in mind, we decided to pursue what has always been goal of ours: a singleplayer campaign.
We feel that adding a singleplayer campaign to the game will add a lot of value. It will also allow us to release Grappledrome on more platforms and ease our dependence on Steam as our sole source of revenue. We think players will be much more inclined to take a risk on a small game that has a great singleplayer campaign than a multiplayer-only title from a relatively unknown development studio.
We’ve got a lot of great ideas for a campaign and storytelling in general remains our primary creative passion. We’re excited by the storytelling possibilities Grappledrome brings to the table and we think we can put something together that will be really great.
Our work on the singleplayer side will feed into the multiplayer as well. So new maps, new weapons, etc. will be added to multiplayer as they are completed. Visual design ideas that we flesh out in singleplayer can, and likely will, influence maps in multiplayer.
Here is some visual development that our concept and environment artist Brandon Richard has been working on:
We're playing with a lot of ideas for the spaces you'll see in singleplayer. There are more experiments we'll show as development progresses. We want to kick the visual design of Grappledrome up a notch…move away from the Tron aesthetic and find something a little more distinct.
We’ve also done some work on NPCs. Look for video to pop up in the next few weeks with some explanation of what we’re playing with on that end.
Now that regular work is being done we will have more updates. Look for concept art, environment art when we have it, videos of prototypes and experiments, etc. Even if it’s not much we’ll try and get something out to you on a regular basis. When aspects of singleplayer are playable we will ship them so you can check them out. We will keep full singleplayer levels under wraps until they're nearing completion so you can experience the story.
The first major development goal for Grappledrome singleplayer is a vertical slice of the first 30 minutes or so of the game. We’re focusing heavily on the beginning of the game as a means of refining the visual aesthetic and working out some of the systems we’ll need for the rest of the game. We won’t do much aside from writing on the rest of the campaign until we’re happy with the introduction.
That about covers it. Thanks for your interest in our games. More to come!
The Devs
