Hel... Hello? Oh, this is so dusty. *cough*
Well. It's been - checks the date - almost A YEAR since the last time I wrote here. What happened? Lots. Not so much for Highway to Heal though. Let's travel through time, it will explain everything.
2022
I'm alone at Manufacture 43. The company has some money in the bank from previous contract works. I prototyped quite a few games but the one standing out is one with a top down vehicle. It started as some kind of Micro Machines revival but quickly diverted to something more old school GTA. Physics are not great but it's funny. Two paths unveil before me: make the game more systemic or more narrative.
I do my first ever marketing research and it looks like the narrative way would be the best. It would be expensive, but everyone around me says bank load easily these days. I also do my first ever real financial estimates and it sounds feasible, if I can secure help from the local government, the CNC and one or two loans. Sounds like a plan.
It took me a few months to make that plan, it wasn't exactly fun, but it was interesting nonetheless. I would have preferred just working on the game though...
2023
Tom has been helping on the side for a few months but joins in fulltime. Wissam is a junior but has the perfect résumé for the game, he's hired too. Progress is way faster than last year and things come together like in the plan. It looks and feels better everyday.
There's just one hiccup: turns out banks are not loaning anything to anyone now. I even get answers like "bank X doesn't do video games at all" (except I know of several projects they backed last year so wtf). If only I had started a year earlier... Fortunately, we got support from the region. Our bank account is not empty, but it's looking bad.
A year with even more time spent not working on the game. More time spent on not getting any more money. It feels so pointless.
2024
Well, money is getting real tight and banks are not moving. Wissam choses to leave the sinking boat, which we all understand perfectly. The game is more or less put on hold. That means contract work becomes a priority. We only work on the game when there's no contract work. Fortunately, I find a big job that takes me almost the whole year. This delays all the code of the game but at least we're not dead.
At the end of the year, we won a small local contest that secures us 5K€ on a french crowdfunding platform.
2025
With money in the bank, we now rely less on the bank loans we needed to finish the game. We're back at it full time! But we still need more than what we have to realize the vision we have for it. I have one bank that could follow us in this but things are super tight. They would only loans us the money if we can secure a grant from the CNC. I was fairly confident on this one. I shouldn't have been. We didn't get it... We try to get the tax breaks from the CNC. We prepare the whole document, dozens of pages and... we did not file it.
Are we crazy? No, because we realize something: we won't be able to finish the game like we want to make it. Banks don't load to video games, they just don't loan at all. To anyone. Full economic crisis. We have to finish this on our own dime. We have long stopped paying ourselves already.
We also did that crowdfunding thing. Ulule is not Kickstarter. It barely got us 10K€. And with all the money we spent to make that campaign work, we barely broke even. *sigh*
All this time lost chasing money. I wish we would have just worked on the game. We would be poor, but it would be out already...
Tom has a weird idea: if we can't find any money, why not make some? Let's just make a small trendy game. Ideas are bounced around. Some small prototypes are made. Nothing goes very far. Except for one crazy idea! It got out of track quite intensely. We will soon talk about it on our other channels, stay tuned.
2026
The year starts with a bank account of almost zero. Contract works are back again on the table. 2025 already ended with a few small ones, but I need to find a big one. I did! And it almost drove me crazy. I was supposed to work on it up to the end of the year but I cut it short. Health is more important than a bank account.
So I spent maybe half of the year working on contract work. The rest of it was spent partly on that new weird game, partly on Highway to Heal. Remember when I said than in 2022 I hesitated between making the game more narrative or more systemic? One reason for going narrative was the marketing benchmark. The other one was that I did not know how to make it systemic and not boring.
Well, we tried a few things. Right now the game is a blend of what we had minus all the narration and with half a prototype of some kind of crazy autobattler driving roguelike!
It does not work at all. I mean technically it's fine, it's just not fun. The autobattler part breaks the rhythm too much. But that's fine, we'll cut it. Maybe we will make an autobattler some day and I'll be able to re-use all that work. The main idea in this new version of the game revolves around resource management. The game must not just be a taxi driving game. It's still all about taking care of patients. Our new goal is to have players take the right medicine to the patients, sometimes take it to hospitals if necessary, bring them back home, etc.
2027
Right now, we are working on a plan to try to release the game in 2027. It will definitely be different from the demo you might have played previously. The last time we talked about it, it sounded like it would be something reminiscent of some kind of metroidvania? Except that, obviously, you don't kill people and unlock new weapons to progress. Instead, you help deliver new cures, make the city evolve by helping citizens, etc.
Maybe that future will realize? Maybe it will be different? Anyway, we endure, we work, we try our best to make it happen. And this folks, is how you delay a game. For years.
Cheers.