Back in late 2023, I made the decision to indefinitely postpone the development of Autopanic. It is because I finally realized that my understanding of my own game hasn’t caught up with the development schedule I had in mind yet.
You see, Autopanic is a practice project overgrown into a full game scope that rivals the industry’s best. This means that every aspect of the game is undercooked due to both my lack of ability and lack of time (‘cause I still need to feed myself somehow), so I need a new plan to fix this. I need to Fail Fast.
Fail Fast 🔗
Fail Fast is a commonly given suggestion to new game developers, for me who can no longer call himself a newbie I totally stand by the sentiment behind said suggestion. So it goes about something like this:
Instead of making your big dream game upfront, make a lot of small games first. They will fail but that’s fine. You’ll learn how to make that dream game along the way.
Making game is hard, but Finishing a game is exponentially harder. If one intend to make that one big dream game first try they’ll most certainly spend way too long on it, such is the case of Autopanic. Along the way most projects will be abandoned, and even when it delivered the developers mostly got burnt so hard that a lot of them just don’t make another game.
Over the months, I still got random messages out of nowhere from players who played the demo of Autopanic and find it to be the coolest thing they’ve ever played. This solidifies my belief that Autopanic is indeed according to my own theory a one of a kind game the world has yet to see, so I really want to make it real. And in order for me to not kill myself during the process of delivering Autopanic, I need my version of Fail Fast.
Autopanic’s design consists of multiple big bold assumptions, if I’m gonna make it work for the final game, I need to first validate those assumptions. I have that one Survivor-like variant of Autopanic lying around, so I feel like it’s a good starting point. I’m gonna make it a releasable game and put it out, along the way validating some of my theories.
It’ll fail, no doubt it’ll fail miserably. A game from an unknown developer, even if it is the best game in the world (which it definitely is not), no one will see it. But some will, and they’ll help me know if I’m on the right path.
I’ll put out some hotfixes to address the immediate problems, but I’ll quickly move on. If those smaller games I made is actually really good, people will rediscover them sooner or later. I’ll make another game, and another, and yet another, as much as it takes to clear all my doubts. Each one of the releases will bring me closer to realizing Autopanic in its fullest.
What now? 🔗
Autopanic got accepted to be showcase in BitSummit, so I’m gonna have a nice trip to Kyoto and hopefully meetup with some cool folks around the globe! See some of you there? Maybe?