Zofia - Post Mortem

In the past I've jokingly said that I'm making every mistake I can on Zofia so I can learn from those failures.

I've taken a lot of missteps on this project – Enough that detailing all of them would turn this into a book and I don't think anyone wants that. Instead, I'm going to share some highlights of a few critical ones.

In short it was too big of a project. The game finally got to 1.0 and went out the door, and I have some people excited for what's next...  So this is my cautionary tale of what we ran into.

1. Documentation and 'the plan'

I set out to make Zofia to test a hypothesis. You see, I used to be on Reddit and about every other week I would see some gaming discussion that would lament the lack of co-op RPGs and especially the lack of splitscreen. My wife and I played a lot of local co-op RPGs and ran into this same complaint.

So, gears were turning and I said, I can make games, why don't I try to make this RPG? Surely there is a market here as people complain about wanting it all the time.

(Sorry, some spoilers – The amount of people that played splitscreen was a tiny fraction of the player base.)

Zofia started as a solo project, and when things started to really get cooking, I brought on a few people to help me make it.

We had a fairly successful expo event in 2019, and in my mind, I felt we could nail out the remaining levels and enemies and finish the project in 2020.  

Most of the team had different expectations at that point. To me the game was in its final stretch, to others it was a good foundation for something else. Some of us felt the art was lacking, nearly all of us felt the melee combat was lacking, and I thought I could somehow get the game out the door in 2020.

I'm pretty laissez-faire in management and I wanted to allow Zofia to be open to ideas, internal criticism and comments. There was a design document, but if something wasn't specific enough, it was something that could be discussed. (A strategy which I had some success with on smaller projects in the past)

I started this as a solo project - Meaning a lot of core ideas and implementations were already in place, but opening it up to discussion meant that the design document was just a guideline. This in turn ended up hurting its focus and its scope.

After many discussions, opinions, and tests, designs that were once foundational features were being overhauled or adjusted. This is the time the magic system was changed, the art style was entirely redone, and the dialogue system was overhauled.

This might be ok on a smaller project, but on a bigger one, going back and reworking many overlapping pieces can be an absolute slog. The art style change alone easily pushed development back ~2 years, and switching the dialogue system created an incredible amount of writing to now fill in. (Well it was a lot for me, I'm a slow writer)

There was a price to pay – As some features got expanded, others had to be cut back. Higher quality art just took much longer to make. Armor equipment was roughly halved, Enemies/NPCs had to be removed, a few maps were now a little too much, and much more.

 

Standing back now that the dust is mostly cleared, some of those were good decisions and others were probably bad.  The biggest flaw is that once connected mechanics were now disjointed, which became more noticeable as the game got further along, but as it got further along, the more difficult it would be to circle back around to add things back in.

I'm not going to sit here and say all of those things that got cut would have made a better game, because I don't know if they would have – They may have done the opposite – My point here is that I think I didn't uphold Zofia's design pillars as well as I could have. At least one design pillar (A local co-op RPG) was already a non-starter so it may have been the same for others.

2. Moving to early access  

Zofia was getting to a decent enough phase where it was playable, but we exhausted our friends/families, who didn't really care to test small iterative changes. I also didn't feel we were getting much feedback from people who were in the demographic we were aiming for.

I discussed with a few devs and they suggested I look into Early Access... So I put my foot down and decided to get Zofia moving in that direction.

I'll say it outright - I put Zofia into early access too early. There wasn't enough content or enough fleshed out features to get good feedback. Something I heard a lot was "I don't know what's done and what isn't." (A little something I like to call 'failing to manage expectations')

This wasn't as bad as the other side effect: The feedback we got was either uninterested in the game, or outright negative of it. This absolutely crushed morale. I'd say Late ~2022 onward, the team went from "This could be really cool on release." to "Let's just get this out the door."

I've found that, even with how I phrased that, is the incorrect approach. I took Zofia to early access with the hope that someone would find the incomplete game, contribute some ideas or have opinions on the game's direction, and it would be something we could work with to make the game better.

Most people that played Zofia were not looking for that. They wanted a complete (or semi-complete) experience that may have rough spots, and maybe throw some ideas at. (Also a failing to manage expectations)

The discussion came out to just outright cancel the project, but I had the much more enlightened idea of slogging through the next ~1.5 years to get it done and many of those tasks were things I had to do solo.

3. Failure to market

Good gravy did we have marketing issues. I hate this 'term' because it's such an umbrella phrase to describe all sorts of failures for any game that fails to sell well. This can be a lot to parse through so let's rapid fire some of them off:

• Misleading demo – The demo paints the game as a slow paced dialogue-heavy fantasy game with a little bit of combat. Most players feel that the game doesn't get to the core gameplay until ~30-45 minutes into the game, which is right about when the demo ends.
• Technical issues – At least two builds of the demo had a significant game breaking bug that got through. I'm positive this would be a deal breaker for any prospective buyer. At least two streamers ran into game breaking bugs while they were streaming which forced them to quit the game.
• Magic - Surface magic is unique to Zofia and it's actually a difficult selling point. Explaining 'it's a bit like Avatar: the last airbender' is hard to articulate until you actually start messing with the magic. Even then, the magic system ended up being a little divisive. (And unbalanced)

• Art Direction – Poorly summed up, the design has low curb appeal. I've asked a lot of people (that had not played the game) to peruse the Steam page and let me know their thoughts and they really didn't see much that stood out or appealed to them.
• The lack of social media – We initially had a larger social media presence but we found some sites just weren't worth pursuing, including some being actively hostile to indie game marketing. This combined with a weak early access caused us (me) to go silent and just start chipping away at the game itself rather than talk about it.
• Bad EA launch – Early Access launched in a rough state, and I didn't realize it at the time, but on Steam your launch is (probably) your one shot. During launch month I was so focused on bug fixes and adding content that I basically stopped marketing. It didn't help that feedback around this time was pretty rough too.
• Bad 1.0 Launch – We (regrettably) launched during the 2024 Steam Spring Sale which immediately caused our progress to be drowned out by everything else going on. 

A few of those alone would have been problematic – All of them combined put a serious damper on getting our game known.

It's worth noting that the marketing failures don't just tie into sales, it was very difficult to convince people to check it out for testing or feedback because it didn't look like it was going to be a fun time, and the lack of good feedback led to more developmental missteps.

4. Meh zone

If I had to put every feature on a 1-10 scale, most implementations would end up somewhere between a 4-6. This puts it in the dangerously 'just ok' range. I've called this the 'meh zone', where a design isn't so bad its meme worthy and not so great that it gets people talking about it. It's just there. It exists.  

Part of this was skill. I had never animated a character previous to working on Zofia, and now that I've made 400+ character animations, I feel I'm a little better than I was before but by no means an expert.

The other part was just time. Some features I just cobbled together to get it working and just could never get back to doing it the proper way. AI/NPCs come to mind, where some aspects of them are very basic and really need to be overhauled, but as there are 36+ enemies and several NPC types... Well that's quite a project on its own.

5. Reception

Zofia actually did better than I had expected though didn't hit any of my intended goals.

Pretty much all the 'weak points' we noted internally ended up being weak points in reviews, so there was very little that we saw that surprised us.  

It’s painful to see reviews wishing something was in the game, and you had plans for it to be in the game but couldn't get it in for one reason or another. I'm curious to know what a fully-developed Zofia would have turned out like, but also I know that's not a realistic goal.

In the end, Zofia has done only decently better than my other projects, but with a significantly higher development cost/time.

6. Final thoughts

My walkaway thoughts are that these are all problems that were present early on. I can only present them clearly now that I got to process my thoughts on them. If you had asked me mid-development, I probably would have had a very different (and incorrect) answer to what I thought the problems were.

Grinding on the project didn't give me time to sit back and reflect, and if I did, it was reflecting on what I could do to adjust or fix the project.

Had we ran into only one or two of these issues, the project would have been in a much better state. The combination of all of them hindered what we had planned and made things come out a little lackluster.

A regret is that these happened on a big project. Had this been a smaller one, I could have failed faster (therefore learning quicker) without spending years only to find out the damage had already been done.

If you're out there working on that 'probably too big project' and you're gambling on a few things to turn out right on release, I have a few random tips that may or may not help:

• Keep your design pillars consistent. 
• If you're making a game to test the waters (such as trying to design something in a new genre or with a unique feature), try it with a very small, self-contained project. You'll usually know pretty quick if you've hit gold... Or realize why it may not work the way you wanted it to.
• On a bigger project you may run into sunken cost – Sometimes you have to accept that the project isn't going to be exactly what you want it to be and that's ok. Finishing a game is an accomplishment on its own.

I don't know if I will make a long-form Post Mortem going over the nitty gritty or technical issues (Such as the joys of making an Otter  we had to overcome as that would be way too much to talk about.

Anyways I hope you find parts of this insightful.