This is not another postmortem

Oct. 29, 2018

*This postmortem was originally written in Spanish and posted on GameReport, a spanish video game publication. It’s been translated by myself because we wanted it to be our story, even if our English is not perfect. Sorry in advance!

The Fall of Lazarus, a game by No Wand Studios.

This is a true story. The events depicted in this text took place in Zaragoza between 2014 and 2018. Out of convenience for the dead, the names have been left out. At the request of the survivors, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.

I don’t remember feeling any happiness when we hit the release button. Maybe relief, if there was any. It was late because we wanted the release to be at a convenient hour in the international market. That means we were way out our working hours. Laugh track. It had been a long time since we considered things like that. Noise, sunlight and a soft wind entered through the window. We were only three of us from the whole team working on the game at that time. The rest of the people had already finished, task or interest on the project speaking. We were two programmers and an artist facing the abyss. That day, before releasing The Fall of Lazarus to the world, we were still adding some posters badly translated by ourselves to the spaceship levels or polishing some unavoidable bug. We weren’t working together for the last few weeks: I was sharing a corner of David’s room table and the other programmer was working from his home. At least I was side by side with the man who came up with this all “We are No Wand Studios, an indie video game development studio” thing. The time has come. Our build was validated a few days ago because we always tried to be really cautious. Not enough, but we’ll talk about that later. With one click a year and eight months of work and even more before that would be out for people to use, enjoy or tear apart. Vertigo. Tiredness. Frustration. Enthusiasm?

I don’t remember feeling any happiness when we hit the release button. That sucks, don’t you think? What did we do wrong? Click. Here it goes. May it be the will of the people. We’ve made a fucking video game. Let’s go for a celebration drink to the nearest bar and try to conceal this fear to see how well it does. Fucking laugh, dude! We just fulfilled a dream. Smile at least! Why am I not happy?

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH

My name is Jonathan Prat, and I’m a storyteller. I studied graphic design, but I also write, draw and design narratives and mechanics for video games. I have no problem speaking in public, I’m not bad managing social networks, I can come up with creative marketing stunts and even editing our own videos. I’m what you could call a one-man band. A jack of all trades. The ultimate indie. And this would be awesome if it wasn’t a lie. An array of good-looking neon titles that illuminate the fraud. Because I’m not making a living out of it. I have a shitty job at a shitty supermarket that allows me to not die trying. My indie dev history, if there is any, starts on 2014, and I didn’t want to be a dev. I didn’t even know I could back in the day. I was fighting with the freelance way of life trying to survive the creative industry jungle. My partner and friend David Bernad is a programmer but there was a sharp producer running through his veins waiting to be awaken. Bureaucracy, planning, scheduling, resources, tasks, drive, focus, resolution. Another array of shallow titles. Almost five years after that toast where we promised to ourselves to make a video game we finally fulfilled that oath. A year ago we released our first video game. And after the storm, a really long lull where nothing happened. And we stared into the abyss. And the abyss stared back at us. How did we get here?

This text is basically a postmortem of The Fall of Lazarus, our first commercial video game, a scifi mystery adventure with exploration and puzzles revolving around themes such as self-overcoming and second chances. But you’ll also see two Windows to peek into. On one hand there is a dirty large window where you’ll learn about the chronicle of a death as foretold as surprising. A tale born as a postmortem fed with our needs that evolved into a sequence of events and numbers more therapeutic than educational. Maybe here you can find something useful, maybe only obviousness. On the other hand there is a skylight filtering the coldest darkness of the raw numbers. If you are interested only in the dark side of this decadent moon you can go right to the ‘Earth Abides’ section and take a peek to the data behind the failure. If you want the whole picture, come with me.

That said, welcome. We are No Wand Studios, or at least we were, and this i sour story.

BRAVE NEW WORLD

The idea of creating a video game development studio was born inside a head but it arose in a bar between beer jars and multicolor lights. I’ve always loved that our convoluted story started from a typical American sitcom scene. “I bet you don’t have the balls to do a video game!” Well, there were balls after all, that’s for sure.

David started our personal funeral march coming up with the idea of making a video game. Our first gatherings were at one of these Irish pub with wooden decoration, soccer streaming and beer taps everywhere. An outlandish idea needed an outlandish place. We sat there the four of us what soon became five planning our path to success in the video game industry. We had it all: two programmers, a writer and an artist. Later we added a fifth one for marketing and management purposes because we knew somebody had to sell our stuff.

The goal was clear: establish the company, have a tech demo of our first video game before march 2015 and blow the roof off of this thing. At that time we were working on a fantasy metroidvania with an art style inspired by Dust: An Elysian Tale, one of those successful indies we looked after with hope in our eyes. That renowned tree that didn’t let us see the burning forest behind it. The story of our game was based on a world and lore developed for years by the former writer of our studio so we had some work done in advance. It was perfect.

We weren’t even getting started and we already had made two mistakes. The first one should had been pretty obvious: none of us knew what we were doing. We were a bunch of enthusiastic professionals in our own fields of expertise but with zero experience in the industry we were about to dive in without hesitation. Some of us just got out of our degrees and some of us still finishing it. Some of us had a slight idea of how video game industry worked, some of us had no clue. But we embrace what we had at hand. If we were to establish a company, invest some money and work our assess off in an uncertain future the only way we had to pull that off was joining forces with acquaintances, am I right? If you ask me now, nope. It’s not the only way. Duh. And secondly there was a problem with the fact that we were living in a country with zero interest on making things easier for starting business. We established our company without having a single line of code written yet hoping we could fund our development working as a consulting and web developing company but running a business here getting into a bureaucracy hell. Do you know that The Place That Sends You Mad sketch from the Twelve Tasks of Asterix? Yeah, exactly. Just like that.

THE FOUNDATION

Our plan needed a company in order to start working for clients so we ended up having monthly payments to do and zero income. In Spain there is a type of enterprise called “cooperativa” that has some benefits for bringing in unemployed workers because it’s based on social economy but in the long term its tedious and not the standard of the business world where limited companies where the usual. When we had to explain to a woman from Valve what kind of company we had, we realized it was not a common thing outside our country. What we didn’t knew at that time was that the process of transforming our company on a limited one was going to take almost a year of bureaucracy and problems from the administration due to the pain in the ass that is the Spanish system. We wanted to go big so we rented an office. Nothing fancy, but another expense to the list. A little space where we could gather and work together. We got it in a centric street of Zaragoza and that was our first contact with the worst kind of entrepreneurship: the rent was paid on cash and at the other end of the wall our landlord tried to deceit a ONG over the phone. But it was what we could afford at the moment with the money we invested for getting the company up and running: $3.427.

Cutting straight to the point, our adventure continued with some creative differences (to put it kindly) with one of the founding partners ended up with him getting out abruptly. Later, we were forced to fire another one of us. Avoiding unnecessary details, it was not worth it. The tension and sadness of those situations were just too much. Even when we knew we were right. Living the dream was not worth none of it.

THE ROAD

We trade two partners noticing a foundational problem: when you establish a cooperativa and get some financial aid due to bringing in partners, you’re forced to keep the number of associates for a long time. And we needed that funding for starting our business, so we had no option but keep being too many people on the studio. We received $5.712 for each unemployed partner who started the company, and we had three of those. We kept generating salaries that no one could possibly charge due to the lack of money but the company needed to keep issuing payrolls in order to be cool with the administration, because if you have a company with people working in it without salaries you’re screwed. It was all legal and well done but far away from optimal.

After those turbulences we moved to a new place, a business incubator for tech companies. It wasn’t specialized in video game companies but we thought we could use its entrepreneur environment and the networking for getting some side jobs and fund our projects. We stopped working on the fantasy metroidvania when the writer who came up with the idea was fired and we started working on a Lovecraftian 2D point and click adventure that didn’t got so far either due to the lack of graphic artist we had on the team. In the meantime, we thought it could be useful to study some video games development and we started looking for some video game focused degree in order to acquire some knowledge and get to know better the industry. We came across a good looking one where they promised experienced teachers with travels to some events and even they gifted you with a laptop. It sounded great but we soon discovered one of the worst problems of video games industry in Spain: the formation bubble. Almost all the teachers had zero experience developing video games and it was a generalist and basic formation without the opportunity of specializing in none of the video game development areas you could possibly be interested on. It was a $7.997 course and it wasn’t worth it at all. It was split in two years: the first year of formation and a second one where we’d do an internship in their own video game development studio, so if you stayed long enough you’d end up paying for working for them! A game studio that we knew later it was filled with students and interns and zero professionals. A couple of months later we got out sick of those practices and we learnt that there was a problem with formation in video games the hard way. We always remember and laugh about that time when we were practicing pitching and the feedback we got from the “head teacher” for a roguelike project we were talking about was “hey, but a game like that would need a lot of variables controlled by code, right?”. We knew later that this kind of fraud it wasn’t at all unusual in Spain. Obviously, there are some great university degrees about video game development, but those are just a few of all of them.

After we got out of there without any kind of experience on the matter but at least we learnt some things about how the industry worked in Spain. We decided to start doing some game jams to get to work with each other and see how we worked together as a team, and we even did a small mobile game that took only a few months to develop and taught us a lot about developing and shipping a game. After that it was time to get serious about making a game, but we had one thing left to sort out before getting at it. The team was closed being four of us because we had to fire one last partner due to two things: we mistakenly thought we needed a certain kind of worker that we didn’t needed after all and the problems that originated. We were partners and workers in our company so we had to guarantee a certain amount of good work and also a great implication in the decisions of the company. Another bitter experience made worse by the fact we were friends with a lot of years on the record. Another stone on that roof that was separating us from madness.

We started working on The Fall of Lazarus officially on October 2th 2017. It was a weak but steady development. We had some unavoidable problems like some crunch times now and then but nothing serious. We were two programmers and an artist so we decided the project needed to be more focused on narrative and gameplay mechanics rather than illustration or 2D work. Also, we had already worked with VR in some serious games thanks to being in a business incubator and the networking we did there so developing an experience with the possibility to make a VR version out of it sounded like a great idea. Nowadays we still think it was de good choice, but maybe with another angle visually speaking.

It walked a pretty standard path I think: we went to some video game focused events like GameLab (Barcelona) or Fun & Serious (Bilbao) in order to get some feedback and we were chosen to be part of Square Enix Collective, their indie supporting platform focused on giving visibility to small projects like our own. We got a 74% of positive rating there so we decided to launch a Kickstarter in order to keep working on our visibility and get some extra funding for the outsourcing work we’d had to face to finish our project and it was a moderate success: we asked for $9700 and we raised $11.195. We knew our game was a niche oriented one and it was not going to get a lot of attention so we aimed for a realistic and humble amount of money because we thought it was better to succeed in a crowfunding campaign rather than having to cancel it. You need to know one thing: absolutely all crowdfunding need to have some of the funding already secured before launching the campaign. It can be family money, your savings or whatever you want it to be, but data says that you need around the 30% of what you’re asking for already secured in the first days of campaign if you want to pull it off. We had it but even with that we needed our campaign to be retweeted by Rami Ismail and Paul Kilduff-Taylor in order to get it to the finish line. The game was funded by 326 backers and viable: we had what we needed in order to finish it.

We launched a prototype of the game that would also serve as a prologue story titled The Fall of Lazarus: The First Passenger on June 2017 receiving good feedback and boosting us on our idea of making this game. This vertical slice was playable for the first time ever at GameLab 2017 and we forced ourselves to accomplish that deadline: we needed to introduce ourselves to the video game world in one of the most important events on Spain. This meant that we poured into the game more hours than we should, reaching the absurd number of 46 hours without sleeping and being forced to work on the train in our way to Barcelona while another one of us was doing the same in our office in Zaragoza. Even when we were at our stand, David had to patch a nasty bug out of the build coding while sitting on the stairs of the main floor while I was managing the stand where curious people started playing our space adventure.

And then, darkness. We got into the dev cave. An endless amount of hours working on an ever changing project. I remember, as an example, that time I proposed we should change the genre of our protagonist. We were working with a male lead but after a weekend of thinking I thought I wasn’t okay with how the things the protagonist had to overcome affected him as a man and the message that would send to a society struggling with diversity problems. The fact that it could be easily fixed because we hadn’t recorded any line of voice over yet was key on making this decision. In the end this decision brought hate from some players that didn’t like a female protagonist in our videogame saying that its voice was “irritating”. The fact is that the actress that worked with us is Katherine Kingsley and its one heck of a professional that has worked on big titles such us Vampys or We Happy Few.

Our first video game came out on October 2017 and well, as they say, the rest is history.

EARTH ABIDES

If you are here is because you’ve learnt about our story or because you missed it on purpose looking for the numbers, so here we go: it took twenty months to develop The Fall of Lazarus with a virtual budget of 166.717$. I said virtual because salaries are part of it but the studio owners collected none of them. From that Budget, 65.075$ were paid for real. More than 20.000$ went to paying taxes, fees and all the things spanish government makes you pay when you have a company set up here. I kid you not, it’s insane. A year after its release, we’ve earnt roughly 5.166$. 921 copies sold on Steam. 424 key activations where we are counting those that went to our backers, press people, events and that kind of stuff. Summarizing: a failed project that makes impossible to keep developing our second video game the way we were doing it until now. You can take a look to the infographic with more relevant data and curious facts about the business of the century.

I have to admit we took inspiration from the lovely and useful infographics that ustwo games made for their Monument Valley postmortems so you can imagine how humiliating was to compare data and numbers with such a great success. But that is what this is all about: putting perspective to this industry. Looking back, I think we can point out without doubt what we did right and what we did wrong and what we can learn from each decision. So, at least using the classic postmortem structure, let’s go with the bullet points:

WHAT WENT WRONG

Spain Is Different. As I told you before, we established our company too early. Sadly in Spain there is no system that allows entrepreneurs to minimize the costs of having a company legally established if you have no income. It’s irrelevant if you’re starting a small start-up or running a years old bar. This becomes a wound that never stops bleeding. Month by month. If you reduce your activity to the minimum and only rent a tiny office being two of us in the company you’ll be throwing away 1.200$ per month in a daily basis. And if you have a secondary job that allows you to try to become a dev maybe you’ll have to face some troubles filing your federal taxes due to having two salaries (although you’re not receiving one of them because is your company and you have no money but you have to have salaries to do things right legally speaking). And believe when I say that bureaucracy in Spain is a pain in the ass. It’s old fashioned, slow and painfully clumsy. If you have a company here, you’ll spend a lot of money and time going forth and back for everything.

Too Fast & Too Furious. We assembled a team too big and unexperienced not only in the video game sector but in any of them. We knew each other (some of us were even friends) but we had never worked together before that. This had two outcomes: we’d be a perfect dev machine full of lovely people or a disaster of personal proportions where realities and negative aspects of each one of us create a flimsy house of cards.

Formation bubble. If here in Spain we are experts on something it’s on creating bubbles. We are masters of seeing an opportunity, exploiting it to the limit and blowing things up leaving a wasteland full of dreams behind. Video games formation is one of them. You only need to take a look at how many university masters and degrees. A lot of generalist courses with professionals from other areas non-video game related with basic knowledge about the medium taking in thousands of excited youngsters with promises about creating their own video game. We’ve been offered to do some talks and even be teachers in an online degree when we hadn’t r

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This is not another postmortem

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