Developer diary entry #11

This is British Wonderland bi-weekly report, the penultimate one of this year. 

What is taking so long?

My project is firmly in the category of an extreme long-haul projects by now. More than a year public on this site, two or three years of development in total, depending on how what to consider the starting point. Of course it was not three years of uninterrupted work, i could slack on it for months, working in bursts - i guess anyone can relate, calm and steady work is quite an unnatural thing.

Recently i decided to take a look at other indie long-hauls.

Stardew Valley is a famous example, five years of development. I remember playing that game once, i found the length of day so annoying i installed a mod that extends it a bit... and then something went catastrophically wrong and i had to hard-reset my entire PC. Damn.
Anyways, i bet the dev, who, as i have read, knew nothing about gamedev when he started, had a very similar experience to mine... except he was seemingly way more disciplined. And, of course, did not condemn himself to using non-pixel graphics.

Disco Elysium, as i read, it also took about four years, with "early ideas" dating back to 2001. I think i already talked about how scale of Disco Elysium's lore fascinates me, and the fact it took them almost two decades to create the game around it... Well, first they released a novel in that setting in 2013, which still was more than a decade in the works. Does not inspire confidence, innit?

INFRA was released in multiple parts over a span of three years - and god knows how how long it was "in the works" before the release. They managed to ship new parts early, but they had the base, probably had the whole story worked out and just had to spend the days modelling INSANE environments.

Voices of the Void, three years of development, still indev, rare updates - the usual. Local indie gem i have mixed feelings about. At least during the time i played it last time a year ago, the game could not decide whether it wanted to be a meme youtuber-bait game, or serious atmospheric horror game. And it was extremely janky, you could feel the code barely chugging along because the dev decided to add a shit ton of new cool features resulting in so many bugs slipping into "stable" releases, and worsening with each big update. So relatable.

Undertale was developed in about three years, but i think it was not Toby's first ever videogame project, he had a lot of music lying around, i know that at least the famous Megalovania is much older than Undertale. Still, Deltarune seems to be taking him forever.

Omori was in the oven for six proper years and a half. Gameplay-wise i cannot see how turn-based combat base could have taken more than one evening... but character design and spells, sprites, music and especially the plot - indeed.

And finally, Yume Nikki fangames, my specialty. God knows how long the original one took, probably less than a year. 2kki is a community project, so it does not count. While most of the fangames... i see the recurring pattern with them, people are full of enthusiasm for the first few months, shipping semi-regular updates. Then they get lazy, only remembering about their project after a year, on or around the anniversary date, and after that yearly updates follow. Whole cycle is usually two-three years, after that people give up on their project.

It seems like 3+ years of development is just the norm for a large indie project, not counting post-release updates. And these are the few famous ones that came to my mind. I do not even wish to think how many obscure and unknown projects are abandoned forever or are on an indefinite hiatus - that will just make me sad.