Postmortem - The Farsky Interactive story
My name is Tim (aka Spekler), I am a French developer and the founder of the indie video game company Farsky Interactive. The company gave birth to 3 projects: FarSky, Sky Break, and The Free Ones. I am about to close the company, so I decided to give a postmortem, explaining the
My name is Tim (aka Spekler), I am a French developer and the founder of the indie video game company Farsky Interactive. The company gave birth to 3 projects: FarSky, Sky Break, and The Free Ones. I am about to close the company, so I decided to give a postmortem, explaining the good and bad sides, and trying to be as sincere as possible. I hope it can be interesting to some of you, this is the first time I am sharing my story.
I always loved programming and video games, mainly in Java at that time. In 2011, on my spare time, I created my own 3D engine in Java and a game called Overbind, a portal-like game. You can still find my old post here : https://jvm-gaming.org/t/overbind/39055
For years, my father talked to me about scuba diving, showing me his journeys. I was impressed by the underwater world. I loved stories about people practicing freediving like « Loïc Leferme ». During summer 2012, I went to Corsica and was amazed by the underwater life, all the colors, all the fish. I decided I would reproduce this underwater world when I get back home.
FarSky
I started working on FarSky prototype as soon as I finished Overbind. I spent a lot of time upgrading my 3D engine. I wanted to go far on this project, so in February 2013, I left my job and began to work full time on it. I wanted to live of my passion. I was 23. In August 2013, I published FarSky in alpha release on the internet, for free. I was sharing my work here on JGO : https://jvm-gaming.org/t/farsky/43319
I knew being underwater is always a terrible thing in video games, so I decided we would walk normally on the floor to avoid the feeling of being lost. I made many changes to find the good game design that would fit the game. In the end, Minecraft was the game that gave me the best inspiration, with the crafting system.
I contacted an American friend, a musician called « Lapse ». He has some very interesting music vibes. He was motivated by the project and helped me with his talent. Except from the music, I did everything myself. By the end of 2013, the game was stable, I launched the Beta stage of the game, with a buying page on my website.
In January 2014, as I was looking for underwater inspiration visuals, I found an image on google that caught my attention. I clicked on it and was redirected to a game page called… « Subnautica ». My first reaction was to think « damn, I made a game way too closed to another one without knowing about it ». Then I realized the game was not even in development yet, there were only some concept arts and ideas. When I saw the name of the project director, I knew I saw this name somewhere … I went on my Twitter account and discovered he was following me as well as his coworkers. At that time, I was devastated. My game was not even out yet, maybe I showed it too early ? I did not expect that, and I knew I could not compete a bigger company like this one. I also found the Subnautica’s director email in the buyers of the game in Beta stage. I felt I needed to quickly finish the game. As I published the Steam Greenlight trailer on Youtube (you needed to put the game on Greenlight before it gets on Steam at that moment), Subnautica project’s leader put a comment with a link to his website. I removed that comment. Several weeks later, FarSky got greenlit, this was a delightful moment, I knew my game would be on Steam, all this work was leading somewhere. In April 2014, FarSky came out. The reception was very good, even though I needed to fix some bugs after launch. Curiously I had a few days of depression as I did not know where to go next. I was exhausted by all the work.
The game became quickly bankable (I spent very few money on this project as I did everything), it refunded 8 times the investment.
Some precisions
I truly think there is no problem for the Unknow World company to get inspiration from my game, even big inspiration, and they surely wanted to make a game underwater. If we want video game to evolve, there needs to be inspirations. They made a successful game, they went very far in their development, they truly deserve their success, no doubt about it. But the thing is: my game was not even finished. It was too early for me to see a way bigger company taking that much inspiration. And they never mentioned FarSky as an inspiration, surely because it is not in their interest. I saw some interviews where a journalist asks how they came up with the idea, and the response was : the project leader came up with the idea.. Nothing more..
Sky Break
Thanks to the success of FarSky, I started learning to use the game engine Unity, as I did not want to use a homemade engine again, it is too time consuming. I started working on Sky Break and hired Stephane to work with me as a 3D artist. I had to learn many things about company management, and how to work with someone else. The development of the game took 2 years and was difficult. My game design knowledge was too poor, so I started reading books, watching game design talks and played many indie games with interesting game design ideas. During the early access, the game changed in many ways, and my colleague was not in complete trust with me as the project direction was not clear enough. I understand him. He decided to leave me at the end of the development. The game came out in 2016. I was heartbroken, I felt lonely, and I was not proud of Sky Break. I decided to move on, and wanted one thing: not to reproduce the same game design mistakes I made for Sky break.
The game was not bankable and refunded 60% of the investment.
The Free Ones
I hired Alexandre to work with me on the next project. During the preproduction phase, the first prototype was a first-person management game in a flooded city, but something was missing. I came up with the idea of a grappling hook, and it turned out to be the main component and the start of a new project: The Free Ones. There were several inspirations, A Story about my uncle was of course one of those. This time, during the game development, everything was well organized, the different steps of the production were well executed. It was a real pleasure to work with Alexandre. The main bad decision I made on my opinion was to animate the characters during dialogs. It took us a large amount of time, we made some records with low cost mocap systems, but the result was far from good enough. We decided to ask for someone to make the animation based on our mocap result to resolve our problems. If you are a game developer, I would advise to use a very low cost yet very efficient technique: text. The game came out in July 2018, with no early access. I was very proud of the work we put into this game, but sadly, the game was a financial failure. When the game came out, I was devastated, surely even more this time because everything went so well, I did not expect to fall that much.
The game was far from bankable and refunded 25% of the investment.
The end
We decided to create a new project, but there were three main issues: the company did not have enough money as for previous projects, I felt that I did not have the strength to start again, and the indie game market became crowded. One day, we had lunch in a restaurant, and I broke down crying. I knew I could not go any further. A few days later, I decided to stop everything. I felt bad, but at the same time, I remember that the day I decided to stop everything was the day I started sleeping normally after years. Being a game developer and managing his company is a very stressful experience.
I took 2 months off to empty my mind. I then worked as a freelance developer for a company, and finally found a regular job. Nowadays, Farsky Interactive is something from the past for me. Handling the company has a cost, and sales do not fill that cost. It is time to completely close it.
I never thought I would write these lines. I usually like to read stories from others, and I never say anything publicly about me. Maybe some people will find my story helpful. When I warned I would stop selling the games, I really thought no one would care, I was really surprised to see many comments, mainly warm and friendly.
I want to deeply thank Stephane and Alexandre. I shared with you some great and key moments. You were both very passionate about your work and always wanted to bring your best into the game development.
Finally, a big thank you to everyone who played our games and made this incredible adventure possible !