Looking Back

Hello everyone,

About a month and a half ago, I was planning on writing a “we the design team are done with the first chapter yay” themed entry and talk about what happened to us throughout the design process and how we improved ourselves. And yet last night I once again said “this time we made the final changes”, and just now I remembered that the last puzzle of the chapter still needs a little bit of work. At this rate, if I kept delaying this post, I was going to have to write it on the day we release the game…

Hoping that I was able to convey the theme of the first paragraph, I’m moving on to the actual entry that I wanted to write.

Although the development of Macrotis started on January 2017, its roots go back to October of 2016. According to the decisions we made as a team then, and with the excitement of first starting a job, within three weeks we as the design team designed all the puzzles for our first two chapters on paper, and even started to implement them in Unity. But things did not go as planned. During the development process we realized that some of the mechanics we wanted in our game would not be possible to implement within the development schedule we’d given ourselves and sadly we had to shelve many of the puzzles we’d prepared for those two chapters. Months of effort we spent on those puzzles was wasted… would be a very wrong statement.

As you know, Macrotis is the first video game project for many of the people on our team. Especially as the design team, although we had designed games for years this was a very new field for us. When I look back now, I am glad that we had to give up on our first decisions. The new sections we’re designing are a lot more complex and compact compared to the giant empty sections of old. We have a much more intense and fun second chapter now. Even though it looks like half the size of the old version, when I go in and play it (and I’m happy that our dear tester friends agree with me) it feels as if it is much bigger.

As the project went forward, we also went forward and grew with it. When I look back on us, I see the excited youth of a year ago being replaced by a determined and driven youth. (Yes, we’re still young.) This strengthens my faith in our team and our project even more.

I hope when you play our game, you’ll share the same thoughts as me.

We’re entering our second entry after a rather long wait, I apologize to all of you on behalf of our team, and hoping that our next entry won’t be “yay our game is out” I wish for 2018 to bring everyone health, happiness, and success.