Dear community:
It’s been a few months since we stopped with the regular news updates, while we focused all of our attention on implementing the long-overdue changes in our development process.
We sincerely apologize if you felt let down because of this and wondered about what has happened. The reality is that we’re a small team that strives to spend its time in the most efficient way, which we decided is best invested into “doing what we need to get a good game done” rather than “talking about how we’re going to do this”.
Today, we bring back a new build of the game to Steam under the Limited Early Access program. If you own the app, you will see an update scheduled for the public branch. But before you launch it, please allow us a few words on how we arrived to this build in the first place.
SPIRE OF SORCERY IN 2018-2019
We started working on the concept art for with Spire of Sorcery in the summer of 2017, first with two people and later with more of our team members joining the project from Gremlins, Inc. We spent all of 2018 and 2019 working on the game that was “just around the corner”, even though the goalpost kept moving as the time progressed.
At some point, we honestly expected that we might enter Early Access in the summer of 2018. When we didn’t enter Early Access by the summer of the following year, we crunched for several months to launch it before the end of 2019.
Our main mistake was that having successfully released and operated Gremlins, Inc. for a number of years, we never prototyped the new project, or even documented our game design: we simply relied on our game designer’s “vision”, which we would follow until the game is ready for release.
Unfortunately, only while crunching for release, have we discovered that the “vision” was too vague and undefined and could not be completed in any predictable timeframe, because it was never properly defined. In the games industry, people call such projects “ghost ships” – it looks like a ship, but you can never board it. Ultimately, we ended up working on a game that was “fun to develop” – as opposed to creating a game that is “fun to play”.
In November 2019, we entered the Limited Early Access program with the first version of Spire of Sorcery. If you played the game around that time, you would probably remember that it looked like this:
WHY WE DID NOT PURSUE THE 2019 VERSION
On the face of it, the version of Spire of Sorcery from 2019, was what players have expected: indirect control, survival mechanics, and an open world to explore.
Gradually, though, some serious underlying problems started to become clear:
- A game about a dying mage and his disciples had no magic in the game.
- The early survival mechanics were pretty knee-jerk: get lots of food now or die.
- The lack of control over quests lead to passive spectator experience, where it didn’t matter what happened on the quest; people just clicked through to see the loot of the returning party.
For sure, certain aspects of the game were fun: some weird diseases, and the choice of party behavior that was based on personal preferences. But mostly these were fun in a “cool to talk about” way, not in the “cool to play with” way. And our game events were so very mundane and so boring…
The game displayed three tendencies that ultimately broke player experience for us:
- Everything was random to the point of becoming meaningless. For example, randomly seeded resources contained randomly assigned alchemic properties. Thus, you were never certain, what exactly did you need – you just hoovered up everything in sight, and then mass-produced whatever you could manufacture.
- Magic played little, if any, role in the game about mages. You hunted, gathered minerals, and read books in ancient tongue, but you didn’t do a single thing that a mage would be expected to do. “Spire of Sorcery” was, more than anything else, “Spire of Foraging”.
- The existing player experience naturally lead to automation, and then to more automation. The fact that every character could teach every other character resulted in constant multi-scheduling of classes. The fact that reading books upgraded skills resulted in lining up every single book for reading by every single disciple. And the never-ending foraging and crafting of consumables turned the game into “Spire of Mass Production”.
After 6 weeks of development sprint, during which we updated the game with new features and content on a weekly basis, we understood that no amount of patching will solve the core problems of that version, and so we took a break for a few months to change the direction of the project.
SPIRE OF SORCERY IN 2020, PART 1
From an indirect control game happening in real-time mode with pause, we went towards a direct control turn-based system – breaking the world map into hexes and introducing turns, or days.
The visual style changed from “you read a book” to “you play a book”, thanks to the community suggestions of trying 2.5D format for the map that changed the camera’s angle with the mouse wheel.
We spent January, February and March of 2020 in a soft crunch – working whenever each of us could, sometimes at 4 in the morning and sometimes during the weekend nights – looking for the magic solution to the game’s core challenges.
You may remember that the game started to look like this:
We started to take seriously the need to document, and structure, our game design, which lead to some conflicting emotions internally. After weeks of discussions, we finally let go of our game designer, who couldn’t see himself working in the “new” way, which required documenting every mechanic before it was actually put into production.
Looking back from today’s perspective, at that time we still did not recognize the fact that the game lacked the very main thing: a concept.
Sure, we had tons of beautiful content, and dozens of mechanics (my favorite was character’s mood, which changed because of so many other mechanics that is almost always remained neutral, going through ups and downs with every turn to settle at zero: a pointless exercise). But we lacked the definition of what “playing Spire of Sorcery” should feel like.
WHAT WE KEPT FROM THE TURN-BASED VERSION
A bit later, we will go through another crisis, but in the meantime, we’d like to highlight the things that worked well in the turn-based version:
- Everyone loved the 2.5D map;
- The algorithm-generated open world made of hexes where opponents chase you to push you into aggressive encounters, and where you explore different locations by discovering them as you travel, felt intuitive;
- It was becoming obvious that managing multiple player parties simultaneously was more of a chore than real fun; it was a “we can do this” feature that didn’t really translate into “this is fun to do” experience.
Nevertheless, the version from April 2020 retained huge problems:
- The game about a mage and their disciples still had almost no magic: we got to making 4 spells, but all of them were copies of actions that you could do without magic anyway. Come to think of it, it seems unbelievable how any developer would spend 3 years to produce a game about a mage – but didn’t add any magic there!
- Alchemy was still meant to be mass-produced. We didn’t design “one item”, we designed series of them – ranges of antidotes, lines of consumables, and sets of amulets. It was a design that I call “filler-style”, and that we’re not proud of. We fell into this trap like a tired horse trotting along a well-worn road, which doesn’t ask itself where it goes – it just places one leg in front of the other.
- Most importantly, the skill system of the game – the key to competing any of the in-game events – was boring as hell. Essentially, it was a grind: scout around to level up, then venture further to level up some more. Even after transition to skill checks with risks and dice rolls, it felt automated to the point of yawning.
We had a moment of revelation when we found ourselves writing the texts for dozens of game events that felt flat and weak even as we wrote them. They’ve been designed to “fill the space”: we had N skills, and we needed N x Z events that would rely on these skills. This felt very mechanical and seemed to be the opposite of what making fun feels like.
I mean, seriously: perhaps this is how pulp fiction is written, but certainly this is not how we saw ourselves creating Spire of Sorcery.
SPIRE OF SORCERY IN 2020, PART 2
By the summer of 2020, our studio has spent a bit over $1 million on the production of Spire of Sorcery – and the stress from still being stuck with something that we didn’t want to ship to players was palpable.
People talk about crunch being bad when it’s applied externally: say, when you need some art, and you push your artists like the horses that you don’t care about, as long as they carry you fast enough to reach the destination in time. That kind of crunch is physical, you feel it in your bones.
It’s less common to talk about mental crunch which comes from the realization that you’re working on a game that doesn’t have a reliable roadmap, and where what you do today can become meaningless tomorrow.
During the summer months of 2020, pretty much everyone in the team – with the lucky exception of the two of us who worked exclusively on Gremlins, Inc. – was under terrible mental pressure. How the hell do you take a project where we lost our way already twice, and make it into a fun game?
Against the background of the pandemic, and working from home, a couple of people on the team came up with the idea of replacing the skill system with a card-based event system. Forget the skills, it’s all about decks: each character would receive their own deck, which would be upgradeable, and each encounter would be played out as “opponents VS player party”.
In one way, this moved the game closer towards Gremlins, Inc., which is a familiar ground for all of us. In another way, this moved the game away from what we dreamt of, towards “yet another card battler” – a cliché of the modern games market which didn’t offer anything that the other games wouldn’t offer.
Most importantly, with that proposal we lost the feelings of exploration, open world, and individuality of characters. While the earlier versions of Spire of Sorcery had major problems, at least they offered the glimpses of what Spire of Sorcery could be… and if we decided to instead turn the game into a card battler, it would kill these hopes entirely.
SPIRE OF SORCERY IN 2020, PART 3
If you are one of the 2.000 players who supported us by purchasing Spire of Sorcery in Limited Early Access, and after several month of updates that changed the game from one thing into another you felt unhappy… consider for a moment what we felt internally at that time:
Like soldiers at war, who first storm one hill and then another, only to discover that the goal of the current military operation has changed, at times we just wanted to lay down the arms and go home. Which would have meant either cancelling the project or shipping “something”, and then closing the chapter with it.
At one point we’ve been in a team meeting where the probability of Spire of Sorcery being cancelled exceeded 50%, for the lack of vision and leadership.
And as stressed as we’ve been, we still had a few more lessons to learn:
- We still thought in large swathes of time, such as “we’ll need six months to do this”. This is the approach that probably wouldn’t work even in a large company, as long as that company tries to invent something new. Innovation requires rapid experimenting.
- We still theorized a lot: what if we take mechanic A, add it to mechanic B, and then have player do Z? However, theories of why something is “fun” are normally made by people who cannot ship a product. Pretending to understand how a game will function in theory is like pretending to understand how a dish will taste, without cooking.
- We lacked one vision and we relied too much on group discussions, which are a great tool to fine-tune and polish – but when everything is up for a discussion and people don’t have a hard budget constraint, the talks can be endless, and fruitless.
Eventually, after a couple of months, we broke through the fog and found new footing as a new concept got assembled, from scratch, incorporating what was valuable from the earlier prototypes and going forward step by step, based on actual player experience.
SPIRE OF SORCERY 2021
The version that we bring to you today has the following key highlights:
- Open world for you to explore
- Turn-based mode to give you control
- Spellcasting as the core activity, with alchemy playing a supportive role
- Events that are only partially designed around killing and destruction
- A player experience where some things are made “just for the fun of it”, no big theories behind why you can lick a skull or chew on ashes
- Decks of magic elements and spell formulas as the mechanic of completing encounters, which combines luck and planning
We aim for a game where:
- It’s easy to die for a character, and it’s possible for the whole party to lose the campaign due to taking a wrong turn; losing is actually a part of the fun.
- It’s fun to discover how things work in the world: to try exotic fruits, to drink strange potions, and to meet new creatures.
And this is our pledge to not screwing up with the development process anymore:
- We update the game every week; nothing is developed for months on end, because everything that is developed is directly related to some already existing mechanic. Forget the theories. Focus on the actual experience.
- We design the UI and content for what already exists in the game right now. If we don’t have diseases yet, we don’t design user interface for diseases. We spend time making things, and shipping them, rather than trying to harmonize the two things that we have, and then throwing it out the window when a third thing is added.
- We move in parallel with the tooltips, user interface and the mechanics. We’re sick of having buttons that have no explanations, or items in the game that don’t have descriptions – all of which are the signs of a team where people don’t sync, but just do their stuff, and let it burn.
WHAT NEXT?
Starting from next week, we’re back to updating the Steam build on a weekly basis.
The English and Russian-language texts will appear in the game first, with the Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Korean translations following the lead. We’re not sure yet about French and German texts, which may have to wait.
You will see us taking small steps with every new build, balancing things and adding more content. Each new item is there to connect with the existing loop. We’ll be closely following player feedback on the Discord server to understand what the community finds appealing or burdensome, and in a few months, we intend to arrive at the version that, finally, we’ll be proud of – which we will then release under the general Early Access.
We thank you for your trust, and for your patience through the difficult year of 2020, and we hope that your wait would be worthwhile.
It sucks when a game is delayed, but it sucks so much more, when a boring game is released and quickly forgotten.
We’re throwing in our last money on the bet that this time around, we’ll deliver a fun experience that will keep improving – just like we keep improving Gremlins, Inc. that recently celebrated five years on Steam.
Thank you one more time, and see you around!