[Editor's note: After William Pugh's critical and commercial success as a designer of The Stanley Parable alongside Davey Wreden, he made the choice to funnel his earnings from that game into producing free games with his new company Crows Crows Crows. We approached about doing a Deep Dive on that process, but he surprised us with something that was a little more sui generis...]
Dear Gamasutra reader:
Before this article gets underway, please understand that I was budgeted exactly ONE segment of the article for undiluted on-brand messaging and self promotion. I have tactically decided to place that segment in the middle of this article and I have called it THE UNPROFESSIONAL RANT ZONE. If Gamasutra allows it, I hope for each line to be a different text colour.
If this article was a sandwich, the bread would be the serious information for people who know nothing about me and the cheese would be the #JustMyOpinion. You should eat the sandwich like a sandwich and not peel open the layers and just eat the buttery cheese like a weirdo. (That image makes me feel physically sick, so let's get down to it.)
<iframe title="Embedded content" height="360px" width="100%" data-testid="iframe" loading="lazy" scrolling="auto" class="optanon-category-C0004 ot-vscat-C0004 " src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eB4B1fwgjps?enablejsapi=1&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamedeveloper.com" data-gtm-yt-inspected-91172384_163="true" id="342575320" data-gtm-yt-inspected-91172384_165="true" data-gtm-yt-inspected-113="true"></iframe>I'm William Pugh, I'm 22 years old and I'm the founder of indie game studio Crows Crows Crows. I co-created/designed The Stanley Parable (2013 version - not the mod) when I was 19. After that released, I found myself with a lot of time on my hands and a lot of money, so I decided to start paying various contractors to work with me on developing games. I'd always used the Source engine so I decided that it'd be a good time to diversify my skills some more and learn Unity. After about a year of working with various contractors, a “core team” emerged and we decided to brand ourselves as a company called Crows Crows Crows.
I was in a unique position because I had the funding to do pretty much whatever I wanted and I had the industry recognition from The Stanley Parable, but I had very little experience running a team of people or making a game outside of the framework of an engine that was very quickly becoming depreciated. The Source engine had historically been very poorly supported by Valve and it was clear that I needed to learn new skills or I would become trapped by my own speciality.
The problem this presented was I was a complete beginner in Unity and working with a team that I had no real business running. I knew that if I exported the job of production & development to even more contractors I would essentially be paying people to make games for me, and I had no interest in being an armchair director. Davey Wreden had also done the vast majority of writing on The Stanley Parable, so I needed to develop that skill too. I knew if I worked on one project for 3 years that despite the talents of Dominik Johann, Sean O'Dowd & my contractors-turned-collaborators, it would likely be mediocre and horribly marred by my inexperience and crushed by the expectations of The Stanley Parable.
The Temple of No, a free twine game Pugh and his team sent out to their email list.
After taking our first project to a festival in 2014, I nearly quit the industry altogether. Our game had excellent aspects to it but it was broadly flawed, and it would have definitely disappointed those who had the perception of me as one of the minds behind the IGF winning, BAFTA nominated Stanley Parable. The walls were closing in -- if I was to capitalise on the success of my first game & not fade into obscurity, I would have to release something soon, whilst TSP was still floating around in the public conscious, but if I flipped back to the Source engine & attempted to replicate TSP's process too closely I'd be pushing the problems down the line and trapping myself in the long term.
I also often experienced the issue of being confused with Davey Wreden (the writer & original creator who made the first Stanley Parable mod) - differentiating myself from him was also a high personal priority that needed to be sorted out sooner rather than later. Managing the team during this point was incredibly stressful as I was continuing to pay them monthly wages without having a clear internal direction. For the six months following the festival, we focused entirely on a new project, and if I didn't have the TSP money we would've surely failed & disbanded.
These were the things that needed to be overcome in order for us/me to succeed:
We needed to gain experience & get better at making games before we could sell our work.
We needed to announce the company & establish a platform to collect/retain/communicate with the hundreds of thousands of people who liked my previous game but didn't know who I was (in order for us to have a successful launch).
Every year we spent secretly developing would be a year removed from the launch of The Stanley Parable (and therefore weaken my core selling point).
We needed to defy people's (very high) expectations considering so far 100% of the games (ONE) I had released were critically acclaimed.
For an ordinary studio that relied on a steady stream of income, this would've been impossible. But I knew this is what I wanted to do, so I was okay continuing to pour personal money into the company. The personal risk was obviously very high, but so was the reward - we weren't beholden to a publisher, so once we started making money it would all flow back to us. Also, due to my extraordinarily high levels of INDIE FAME, I'd manage to entice incredibly talented individuals to either work or collaborate with us (Jack de Quidt, Justin Roiland, Kevin Patterson, and Samantha Kalman to name a few).
Dr Langeskov, The Tiger & the Terribly Cursed Emerald: a Whirlwind Heist
This was preferable to my initial approach of holding contractors at arms length, and focusing on a smaller team allowed us to remain flexible and relatively affordable in the long term. It also largely removed the need for middle management and it allowed me to learn more/be more involved in the different disciplines - it also allowed me to retain a largely intimate amount of control of the technical process rather than me dictating entirely via meetings and management.
This process came into swing largely in April 2015. We had a lot of equipment stolen during a festival in Germany and we sold a collection of jammed out games via IndieGoGo to recover the funds for us (and many of our friends). We jammed out two concepts for the collection and within that month of crunch I learned three things:
Shipping a project teaches you 90% of the lessons you learn during the process of making a game. If you restart halfway through you only improve by 10%.
The small team was flexible and capable of finishing a game far quicker than I previously expected.
Our workflow was tested and sharpened by this process - our ideology was re-focused to finding the core of an interesting idea and expressing that in the shortest amount of time possible.
However because of the horrific press-communications (done out of house) nobody really saw what we had made in this month. This was a blessing in disguise because one of the games we developed was an early prototype of Dr Langeskov, The Tiger & The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist. It was a 15 minute game written by one of our earliest collaborators (Jack de Quidt). It was good but not great so I decided to pull focus from our larger project to spend a few more months polishing it in mind to release it on Steam.
However even after polishing the game - doubling it's playtime and replacing the voice actor with comedian Simon Amstell several large issues remained:
It was largely reminiscent of The Stanley Parable (employing the same conceit and “gameplay”).
It was very short. It's price point would have to be minuscule in order for it to be proportional to the playtime.
No tags.
