The end is nigh

This is kind of a postmortem, but mostly this is my feeling on the experience while developing Qolb during 2.5 years, a few weeks before the release.

August 2017. I was making games as a hobby for a year now, and started to be better at that. This is when I started Qolb as a simple experimentation.

It only started as an experimentation

I started with an insight: If Hyper Light Drifter was made with Game Maker Studio, it means that I am able to do something like this with this engine. I started a small week of experimentation about combat controls; Dash, oriented attacks, movement. It started to feel like Hyper Light Drifter. With a few placeholder art I made it even started to look like it (even now it's too much).

Now that I have something nice to control, why should I leave it? I started to think about what was supposed to be an experience like this...

Then, there was the first air of "Bonnibel Bubblegum", an episode of Adventure Time. I love the show, and this episode was a huge inspiration for the game. Mostly a scene, where young PB travels deserted lands riding a yak, when she discovered an abandonned gas station. It inspired the "searching in trash" mechanic, and the gas station you can encounter, that are a guarded haven.

Months passed

I kept working on the game. At this time I called it "Projet Tide", because of the big wave following you. I started to add new zones, new characters, to write lore, to compose musics. It started to take shape and I was happy with it, but I didn't know where it will bring me. I didn't think of a scope for the project. It is probably the biggest error you can make while making an indie project, even more if it's one of your first projects.

But then I had a goal. It was my 2nd year as a computer science student, and the more I developed games (during game jams or my spare time), the more I found I was good and I was really loving developing those things. I heard of this school, the ENJMIN, the best public school for video game development in France. I was only a 2nd year student and I needed to be 3rd year to try the entry test, a really hard one, a lot of people wants to enter the school, with only 12 students in the programming cursus. I knew that having a big project to show could be a great opportunity for me to show my passion to the school, so I decided that Qolb will be my portfolio for the school. I worked hard during this year to add a lot of content and polish the game enough to complete around 2/3 of the content I wanted, in addition of the work I needed to do for my University.

Then arrived the 3rd year, and the 2nd semester, full of work. I decided to stop the development. It was really complete but I needed to focus on my study to finish my school projects and look for an internship. I wanted to find an internship in video game programming, but infortunately I didn't have the opportunity to do so. I found a really nice internship in a research lab in Italy, and had to work for the ENJMIN entry test in the same time.

And I succeeded. I am now in the 1st year of this school. I don't know if Qolb helped, but it was one of the key elements that brought me to make gamedev not only a passion but to plan to make it my job. At this time, I didn't know what to do with the project. I achieved what it meant for me.

The revival and rescope

Qolb had two serious problems:

• It was too big; even if I did 2/3rd of the project, I knew the last third would be a struggle. I had a new range of new projects to work on, with talented people in my school, I didn't want to continue working on a project alone.
• It was developed with Game Maker Studio. Even if it was a great tool to start gamedev, it is really limited for big architecture; it doesn't give basic Object Oriented Programming features for example. But most importantly I was improving with Unity, and didn't want to work all my spare time with an engine that will not help me to progress further.

Because of those problems, I decided not to finish Qolb as it was intended to be finished. But it would be a shame if I totally cancelled the development and never released the game. I then decided to imagine Qolb in a smaller scope and to finish the project with some key elements driving this end of development :

• Not a single new feature. I have enough for a nice experience.
• Cutting existing features that don't fit. Even if it's hard to cut something from your game, Qolb really needed it. One of the first feature I developed was some vehicles. It remained a total chaos in the experience, destroying the balancing of the game, creating a lot of bugs.
• Only polishing important stuff. I can't do everything. I tried to polish more with things that are funny for me to do; I composed a lot of new musics, drew new cinematics, added some lore. But I didn't want to have to go deep in the code because 2 years of development and the non-object architecture made it really difficult to dive in.

Those key elements made it to this day. The game is almost finished. I had some beta testers that helped me to track a few bugs and to do better UX. It will be released in a few weeks/months. I'm working on it in my spare time, as I always did. I'm really happy it is finally over. Perfectionnism is the worst thing in such a development. You start by being in love of everything you do, but as the development continue, you start to hate every choice of design, every asset, every line of code.

Even if Qolb is not perfect, it has a lot of interesting things in it. And most importantly, I loved working on it, and it brought me really far in my game development journey. I hope you will like it the way I liked working on it.