Retrospective: the Five Separate Games We SHOULD Have Made
The Day We Fought Space is a game that we’ve packed a LOT into. Too much, one might even argue. I know that “limit your scope” is a piece of advice every indie developer hears at least three times a day, but how often do you get to hear from a developer who didn’t manage to pull it off? Most of the people who get to talk at GDC, or the people with big followings on their newsletters or social media accounts are the people who have already mastered the skill of scope limitation.
And so I invite you, in a moment of humility, honesty, and vulnerability, to invite you to gaze upon The Day We Fought Space as a cautionary tale of over-development.
Lightning Round Recap: Why Large Scope Bad
I don’t want to dwell too much on the why of small scope design, because there’s no shortage of full essays and talks (and probably even entire books) devoted to the topic, but I do want to hit a few key points that we’ll be referring back to throughout.
Small scope helps you finish your game. For obvious reasons.
Small scope helps you promote your game. The less obvious benefit comes from how a simple game is easier to talk about, because your key features and your talking points aren’t competing with each other.
Scope creep is not linear. Your first Big Idea can stand alone. Your second Big Idea has to stand on its own and play nicely with your first idea — and it grows geometrically from there. Expect a game with five Big Ideas to take fifteen times as much effort as a game with just one Big Idea.
The Third Option
All too often, discussions about scope focus on two main options: keep a feature, or cut a feature. I don’t hear a lot of “where are they now” talks that follow the features that got cut. The alternative that I wish I had stopped to give more weight to early in development is “what if we spin this feature into its own separate game?”
The iconic melee weapons in The Day We Fought Space started as a tech test of a wrecking ball that was, at the time, not intended to be part of the final game. The thing was, though… everyone who saw it LOVED it. I had to choose between cutting a feature that was resonating with the audience and increasing scope, and I chose increasing scope.
And looking back, I can identify this and a handful of other moments where I really wish I had split The Day We Fought Space into separate games.
And so, let’s explore five points where the timeline could have branched off, and we could have wound up with a handful of different games, all focused around one or two Big Ideas, easy to promote, and easier to finish on a sensible timeline.
The Day We Fought Space Origins, an Infinite Shooter with Touch Controls
In our timeline
Our very first concept of the game outlined five main points:
Touchscreen-first control scheme
Infinite, procedurally-generated levels
A space opera storyline spanning 12 planets and a cast of fully-voiced characters
A basic progression system for replay value
A linked social minigame for extra engagement and even more replay value
Of these five ideas, only the first would survive the entire development process without heavy modification. The middle point — the story and our ambitions to have a large number of planets to visit, are what really starts to stretch out development times in the early days
In an alternate timeline
What could we have done? We could have stuck with our first two points and left it at that, once we realized how things were starting to sprawl with our lofty level count, and made an infinite shooter that took place only on Vesta. We could feature Equinox, and maybe her robot buddy ABEL, in little side bits here and there to give a taste of the larger world we had imagined, maybe add in a teensy bit of progression for spice. But the clear focus would be on those first two Big Ideas. Yes, that’s two Big Ideas at once, but they’re two that wound up playing pretty nice with each other, so I think we could have gotten away with it. The game would have been a bit jankier back then, but compared to the fare of the time I think it would have worked, at least to get something out there.
The Day We Fought Space: Wrecking Crew, a side-scrolling wreck ‘em up
In our timeline
At this point in the story — about 20% of the way from inception to launch, though we didn’t know this at the time — we’re still primarily working on fleshing out the levels. More backgrounds, enough enemy variety to fill up a dozen worlds. We’ve been showing the game to friends, and we’ve been showing the game off at local conventions, and one enemy is stealing the show: a little lifter ship, carrying a stone, that drops its cargo on the ship below it if you shoot it down. A well-timed shot starts a full-on cascade. There’s no physics happening at this point — as far as the game engine is concerned, the ship is just firing a stone-shaped bullet straight down — so it doesn’t feel quite right, but it gets us thinking: remember that janky bug from one of our very first prototype where all the ships were colliding with each other? What if we brought THAT nonsense back, and leaned into it? That’ll really make this game unique!
We were already using Box2D for collision detection, so it was just a matter of turning the physics back on, right? That doesn’t seem that unreasonable. For the purposes of testing the physics, I made a ship that had a wrecking ball attached, to knock around enemy ships and make sure they could do basic things like maintain a desired speed and orientation when given a shove. What really opened up the floodgates, though, was when I let the wrecking ball ship be selectable in a couple of our convention demos, and… oh no, it’s popular!
We don’t want to just ignore the positive feedback we got about the wrecking ball ship, so I get to work expanding the basic progression system into a more thorough customization system, as well as taking on the challenge of making sure all of our levels can be played with melee OR missile weapons.
In an alternate timeline
What could we have done? Well, at this point there was more than enough promise in the wrecking ball and the physics stuff to spin off into its own game. Maybe we’d have wound up turning physics on in the original, without leaning heavily into it, just for the purpose of giving a little bit of juicy crunchy feel to some of the hits and explosions — or maybe not.
But since the original story was seeming like it was too big for the game anyways, making a spin-off might have been the perfect way to get more of the story and show off some of the planets that got cut from the original. We could set aside the procedurally-generated infinite bit, and focus on some hand-crafted set pieces designed to really let the chain reaction destruction shine through if you hit your targets well. We’d probably bring three planets out. Good old Mars, windy Venus, and zero-gravity Comet Borrelly, all with different physics environments to get used to, each with maybe 8 to 12 short sub-levels, plus a gauntlet mode for each world. And it wouldn’t have been a big stretch to introduce the rest of our cast of melee weapons into the mix at this point, but without excessive customization options.
The Day We Fought Space: Drone Designer, a game about testing drones
In our timeline
So. We’re about 60% of the way from concept to launch at this point.
The good news is, with a fully-operational physics engine, I’m having a blast coming up with wonky new weapons. I’m kinda getting carried away with my love for games with expansive and customizable arsenals.
The bad news is, we’re still building all this on the same basic codebase that was designed to be used for a quick little infinite shmup. The engine is beefy and up for the challenge, but some of the structures we’re using are getting bent and contorted into weird shapes to support all of the new promises of customization, and hardly a week goes by where I don’t look at something in the engine and think “well it would be great had I done THAT differently, but at this point, it would be a huge project to change it, and we need to get this game DONE.”
Parallel to all of this? We’ve started working with a legit PR person, we’ve been taking our game to bigger conventions, and based on some of the feedback we’re getting from fans and from around the industry, we’re pivoting on the art style for the enemies, to really lean into the comic book inking and coloring style that we were using in our promo materials and our menu screens.
Because of all of these factors, we’ve stalled out at four planets, and we STILL haven’t let go of some of the more ambitious goals from earlier. We have just given up on the social minigame, but we haven’t really scaled back our plans for the story. We’ve at least reduced the total number of planets from 12 down to “probably 6 to 8,” which wound up being twice the space to fight that we would actually launch with.
Not to mention, the iOS gaming landscape is increasingly favoring games that aren’t quite like ours, and we can’t change course on that because everything’s written in native iOS code.
Bottom line is… we could REALLY benefit from a reset right about now.
In an alternate timeline
What could we have done?
This one is a bit tricky. Of all the Big Ideas we had, ship customization is one that I got SUPER GIDDY about, and I don’t think there is any timeline where this entry was a quick and easy one. We could have used this time to switch from XCode and iOS-native development to Unity, finally gone cross-platform placated the throngs of people asking for an Android or PC or maybe even Switch ports, and let it overlap with the extra time it would take to revamp the art style.
So a third entry focused on ship design would have wound up looking the closest to the game we wound up making, just… with more direct intention instead of retrofitting the narrative and the other parts of the game to support it. With fewer new Big Ideas to promote, we could have done better with our messaging about this being a game about making your own ships.
The Day We Fought Space: Heroes’ Ascent, the epic space opera
In our timeline
We are now 80% of the way to launch, and some severe cuts are happening because we’re getting antsy about how long things are taking. There have been other life things going on, so we don’t want to beat ourselves up about it, but really, it’s time to get things moving. I’m just about to (FINALLY) hand off the producer hat to someone who can wear it much better than I ever could, but there’s one BIG feature that I’m really struggling with: the story section. The problem is, we’ve spent so much of this time not even sure how many levels we’re going to have, and at no iteration in this game’s development have you been forced into anything remotely resembling a neat linear progression. And a lot of the dialogue that HAS been written just isn’t going to fit into the short mid-level quips that an action game like this demands.
And so… we took a chainsaw to our plans for the stories. The characters would remain, they’d still give you a bit of guidance through the menu screens, although none of the actual character arcs and plot points would really make an appearance. (Oh yeah… by the way, we’ve at this point gone DOWN from four levels to three, because of how the levels played with the other aspects of the game, like the upgrade and progression system, and so we could spend more time getting the three levels we DID keep in base game fully polished and converted from their original infinite runner concept to their more traditional structure. We had always planned to launch the Comet in the expansion, but we’ve pretty much given up on anything past level four ever getting made).
This… this hurt. It hurt enough that, when it was time for the Comet Expansion, we carved out extra time to work on getting some of the story back. But it was the right call for launch.
In an alternate timeline
What could we have done? Where our hypothetical The Day We Fought Space: Drone Designer would have been best served as an open-ended playground, with another game we could have gone deep into the story. Whereas (in our timeline) some of the playtesters reported not being particularly invested in the characters and plot even after the Comet expansion, an entry that leaned heavily into the story elements, even as far as being a VN/action hybrid. I could see storylines branching based on your performance in the level, and ship powers unlocking based on your choices in the story segments. With a more linear, or even a more choose-your-own-adventure-style progression, and a different gameplay loop than the fly -> upgrade -> fly again that we settled on, we could dive deeper into the character’s backstories and motivations.
The Day We Fought Space: The Complete Saga, the kitchen sink omnibus
In our timeline
Eventually, despite everything, we ship The Day We Fought Space. We even release a pretty major expansion the following year! Don’t get me wrong: for all of the constructive criticisms that I’ve leveled at the game here, I still love it. I’m a bit sad that so few people will ever experience it, and that fewer still were likely able to push past the janky launch onboarding glitches, or return to the game after the Comet expansion fleshed out the missing bits, and experience its full depth. But ultimately, that responsibility lands on my own shoulders.
It’s a weirdo of a game, for sure, but there’s a curious beauty in an object that, by all rights, should just not exist. Too often, this industry pushes teams along one of two paths: learn quickly, or collaps. Somehow, we missed that particular fork in the road completely and wandered off somewhere not a lot of people get the chance to visit.
In an alternate timeline
This would be the least likely of all the hypothetical titles to exist in another timeline, but it’s still interesting to think about how it could have happened.
The most likely scenario, I suppose, would be if the franchise got a ton of popularity. Maybe fans of the first couple entries in the series wanted a port to a new system, and rather than just doing a straight-up remake we wound up making some sort of omnibus collector’s edition that unified the existing chapters, plus some extra bonus challenges.
But a far more likely outcome would be that, in the course of everything, we’d have come up with some completely different abandoned concept to spin off into its own game.
Bonus Entry: The Day Space Fought Back
In a future timeline…?
See, the nice thing about learning is that it’s never too late to do.
Keen readers might notice that one of our original five Big Ideas got cut completely from The Day We Fought Space, and didn’t even make it into one of the alternate universe spinoffs: that social minigame bit.
What this minigame would have done was told the story of the Resistance on Earth that was happening concurrently with the battles in space. We never even prototyped it, and the only tiny vestige of it that survived into the final product shows up in the random ship name generator. I don’t have a lot of confidence that the minigame in its original conception would have been particularly engaging, but there are elements of it that I think could be really cool Cool enough, perhaps, for a spinoff? We’ll have to see — I’m not making any promises, and it definitely isn’t the project we’re working on next, but I’m not taking it completely off the table forever, either.