Hi! I’m Thomas Altenburger (a.k.a. MrHelmut), and I’ve been running Flying Oak Games (FOG) for 8 years and onward with my associate Florian Hurtaut. We are mostly known for the games NeuroVoider and ScourgeBringer.

We used to have an open development newsletter, but since we stopped it, much has happened and I never quite reported on it. Also, 8 years is a lot, and since we reached an important threshold in our career during 2021, I thought interesting to take some time and reflect on it, maybe sharing some insights along the way.

This article is very much inspired by Jake Brikett’s own 2021 review.

Why did we go silent? (a.k.a. “open development is exhausting”)

2021 has been a year during which both FOG and me went under the radar, while also being a big turning point. During the first 7 years of FOG, we were running an open development process. We basically talked about our projects publicly since their inception. NeuroVoider went through 57 semi-weekly updates, and during the development of ScourgeBringer we published 126 newsletter updates describing nearly all of our work and thought process.

Despite loving this process and interacting with the community, after the full release of ScourgeBringer we ended up being really exhausted. We had the opportunity to take a good break and reflect on the past 7 years. We came up with the conclusion that we couldn’t, and shouldn’t keep up with the open development process. There’s a few reasons to this:

• Open development is great only if it’s built at the core of your game experience. If you want this kind of process to have a positive impact on your projects, it has to involve a lot the community to keep it relevant and working. If the community doesn’t have regular incentives to keep engaging, the open development will be nothing more than a blog which will loose traction after a few months because players and press won’t (and can’t) feel connected for this long. In the end, people will get a feel that your game is already old news, or that it already had its fair share of exposure, and it will drain your energy for little to no use. Hence, open development has to be built around and for the community, with a very solid upstream/downstream communication process, incentives to play and give feedback, and with regular updates. Not every kind of games are suited to this. Rogue-likes, or early access games are, but linear story-driven games aren’t. Our next game was to be a linear experience;
• Exposing a game early in its development isn’t desirable at some point. We used to talk very early about our games mostly because at that time we were unknown and needed to grind any kind of visibility that we could. I still believe that in our context, it was the right call. It worked pretty well but at some point near the completion of ScourgeBringer, we noticed that we reached a critical mass. We were big enough to start tackling some of the most influential communication channels, but we often ended up being turned down because we were old news in regard to the couple of years of weekly updates. We reached a point at which we had to choose between scaling our open development up, or embracing a more streamlined process of production/communication. Since our next game wasn’t expected to be suited for an open development, the matter was settled rapidly. Another big factor is that scaling up the open development would have closed to us the doors of most publishers because they are not equipped for it;
• Not every teams are suited to open development. Open development is a process that you have to be willing to do, or it won’t work. You have to be able of introspection, of taking negative feedback, of accepting to cut features entirely... Not everybody on a team can withstand a permanent influx of feedback, it can have its tall on moral, and at some point there is also an arbitrage to do between how much feedback drive a design. It also takes a lot of time to everyone on the team. I would say that it’s about a full day of reporting and community discussions per week, and it requires much more community management/development work to keep growing an audience. The more a team grows, the less likely it’s resilient to the personal involvement, unless you build your entire company culture around open development, like Amplitude Studios. But that would most likely force you into sticking to games that are suitable to this process, and would pretty much lock you out of more linear and story-based games.

2021, the actual review

2021 has been special on many levels. It is the year that followed 2020 (d’uh), a year during which we released ScourgeBringer while being confined for 6 months. A year during which the industry has both thrived and totally reinvented its way to communicate too quickly. Physical events loose their attractiveness, and everybody has been running around countless online events like lost moths toward torches. Kudos to the marketing teams which were on the frontline and got burnt out.

Yet, 2020 has been a good year for us. Good enough for us to consider ourselves safe for years to come. We’re aware to be survivors, and we’ve been trying to not forget that beyond our work attitude, our success has been partly driven by luck and support from fellow developers (I know that a lot of people hate to consider luck as a factor, because that would induce a cognitive dissonance of their hardworkship, but let’s get real).

With that in mind, we launched into 2021 with the plan to try to reach new heights, while also trying to make peace with a few things.

✔ Stop making rogue-likes

We love rogue-likes and we developed quite the expertise on it, but something happened: Hades.

Hades is an excellent game, on every levels. I don’t think that there’s anything to argue about it.

Hades is cheap. Too cheap for its quality. It’s a game that instantly became the new metric value for rogue-likes. But its market placement had a meteoric impact on the rogue-like segment. All of a sudden, any rogue-like that was not remotely close to Hades, near or above its price tag, has been facing noticeable difficulties.

For us, the impact has been clear from the get go. On the very day Hades had release on Steam and onward, ScourgeBringer sold half less, and the influx of feedback that we got were almost all of the “could you make that more like Hades” type. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hold a grudge against the game or its developers. I warmly believe that the game is awesome and that Supergiant is a great team.

What I’d like to highlight here, is that this kind of events is part of what we do. We have to accept that over the course of many years, other games might shatter your beliefs. In a way, I think it’s a good reminder that the game industry is in perpetual movement and that we have to keep learning everyday. We can’t unroll the same setup over and over. We have to rethink, accept, adapt, move forward. It happens everywhere, if we were making metroidvanias, the low priced Hollow Knight would have been our Hades.

Hades and Hollow Knight are more than this to the industry. It’s a good landmark toward what I believe the whole industry is heading toward. I’ll come back to it.