Hi friends,
We want to share a bit more detail about why we're moving on from Late For Work. We first wrote this post a bit defensively, but the overwhelmingly positive feedback we've received since the 1.0 release makes us really appreciate the community around our game. Thank you for being so supportive. The positive reviews and feedback have been a joy to read for the entire team.
Why are we stopping work on Late For Work?
This game has been super satisfying to make. We think local asymmetric VR games is extremely under-served but unfortunately, after 2+ years on this project we understand a bit better why there aren’t more:
- Making a stable VR game with local multiplayer is extremely hard. Like really technically hard, just recognizing and handling all the different input schemes and not crashing. Never mind all the gameplay balancing.
- Most players play VR on their own. This means our target audience is a fraction of the VR market.
The frank reality is that LFW doesn't make enough for us to justify us continuing to work on it (or even the past year's worth of updates). All in all, as of July 13thth, we sold 2,417 units for a net income of $22,575. That's...actually not bad for a local multiplayer VR game. But it's not enough to justify even one person working on it full-time for 2+ years.
When we started this game, we didn't really think about this potential financial downside too much. We wanted to make a fun, social (in the classic sense) game that people could enjoy with their friends, that parents could enjoy with their kids. We're a small indie studio trying to make a mark in VR games. LFW was a fun idea and a way to deepen our skills in VR.
We haven't sold nearly enough copies to justify the investment we made developing this game, let alone continuing to support it. In order to keep operating as a studio, to keep making games, we need to start focusing on the financial side as well.
This is one reason our next game GrowRilla will be single player focused. We want to target the largest possible market. We hope you'll check it out and wishlist it.
Let's dig a little bit into the challenges we faced...
Local VR Multiplayer is Hard
We've observed the local multiplayer scene for the past two years. There are actually quite a few really great games. Check out this awesome list! But what we learned is that it's really hard to make a local multiplayer VR game, let alone a stable one with 4 player support, hot-swapping, keyboard + gamepad (and all sorts of gamepads). It's like making two separate games.
Testing alone took so much time. Check out our QA sheet. This represents just our official test list. A lot of multiplayer related bugs would only get caught after a lot of rounds of testing and trying to break things.
We're proud of where we stand in comparison to the other games out there, especially in terms of stability and fun. But oh man was it a hard and sustained challenge.
Our Codebase Got Complex
Late For Work first started out as a prototype and evolved from there. We're experienced dev but VR was a new area with unique challenges. Our codebase went through a LOT of evolutions as we figured out VR, physics issues, controller issues, player management, all the vehicle controls, the SteamVR plugin, the OculusVR plugin and so on.
Further, the nature of the game required a lot of experimentation to create new game modes. This all happened on the same codebase. Next to the 7 game modes live in the game today we also have half a dozen sitting around unfinished (including a gokart version, a tower defense-like, humans hoping in and out of vehicle and multi-stage missions). We also used the same codebase to prototype bigger experiments for future projects that haven't seen the light of day:
- A single player story mode
- A sandbox town simulator with giant gorilla doing odd jobs around town to make ends meet (this one was waaaaay too ambitious)
- online sandboxes
- an action game where you take revenge on your tormentors and you get bigger every time you eat. Sounds familiar?
Unfortunately this has become a big delicate mess of code (in spite of our best efforts to refactor and think ahead, and trust me, we spent a lot of time cleaning up). It's harder to make changes without breaking things. We're stuck on an outdated version of Unity without modern goodies like nested prefabs, too scared to upgrade because past experiences have shown us it takes so much work to fix up after.
So we want to start new and we have. We're working on a new project on a fresh codebase with all our learnings from LFW applied. It's a liberating experience for our team. We're so much more productive, possibly an order of magnitude more efficient.
Let's be clear, LFW is near and dear to us all. We love this game and enjoy firing it up on a Friday afternoon. We feel that with all the game modes and maps there's something for everyone. And we feel we've left it in a solid state. And, again, we will keep monitoring feedback for critical bugs.
So, the future of the game: this is a 1.0 release. For us, the game is mostly done. There's a ton more we would like to add, but then we will never be able to focus on the next game.
What about online?
Many players have requested this. And we agree, it would be genuinely fun. We would love to have added online but it's such a time and cost commitment without a guarantee it will pay off even if we produce something great. Getting that critical mass of players and/or really convincing bot behaviors is not a trivial effort. Online is an area we really want to focus on in future projects, but shoehorning it to LFW would have been a massive project.
We've observed other similar games introduce online and be forced to remove it due to the instabilities it introduced and the backlash from the players (both for instability and for removal).
Online is something we're continuously experimenting with, also for our next projects, but we're not going to release anything until we're confident it's going to be a net positive for everyone (stable, fun, sustainable).
How To Support Us
So those were some of the technical challenges we faced making Late For Work. We’re now focusing on our new game GrowRilla (and a few other prototypes). Late For Work has been a long and incredible journey but we are relieved to put it behind us and focus on fresh ideas on a fresh codebase.
If you've read this far it means you've probably bought one of our games and enjoy it, so first of all: thank you, we can't really ask you for more. But if you want to help us keep making games, then the best way:
- Leave us a review
- Buy and wishlist our other games
- Tell other people about our games
Thank you for reading!
