We're super excited to share a first brief look at our next game with you soon, in the Future Of Play Direct livestream during Summer Game Fest on June 8.
Tune in live on Twitch to the Twitch Gaming, IGN or GameSpot channels, or watch on YouTube!

After the game is announced we'll regularly release devlog posts here again, similar to what we did for Parkitect :)

After the last two prototypes for a town building game we were feeling a bit stuck. We liked the idea of working on that type of game but were missing inspiration for which direction we should go with it.
So, we tried something entirely different!

Garret suggested that maybe you should be able to control a character in the town builder.
We gave it a try and suddenly in a complete change of direction we were working on a 3D platformer :)

3D Platformer

Working on this was so much fun!
We built a huge playground to test all kinds of gameplay mechanics and moves.

The thing with developing management games is that they don't really feel fun to play for years. It's only towards the very end of development when all the systems, content and balancing are in place that the game actually feels good and interesting.
With an action game it's very different - moving the character and jumping around was super fun within the first day. It still takes lots and lots of tweaking and adding interesting moves, interactions and level design to turn it into something good of course, but it's a lot easier to see if something works or not.

This prototype did excite and inspire us immediately and we went much farther with it than with the others.
We came up with an interesting setting and story, ideas for the overall design and layout of the world, gameplay mechanics and had some concept art done.

And yet... we cancelled this idea as well right before moving into proper production!
This was a really tough decision though and hurt, because we did enjoy working on it and spent a lot more time on it (roughly half a year as opposed to a couple of weeks for the town builder prototypes).

What we learned

• the project felt risky because we had never worked on a platformer game before, which made it difficult to judge if we would be able to make something good and if there's a market for it. None of what we learned from Parkitect would apply to this game. In retrospect all of this was true when we started with Parkitect as well though. Also this prototype felt like a pretty good start, so we might have been a bit more scared than we should have been
• it was relatively easy for us to make the movement feel good and to come up with interesting moves and mechanics, but we had a really hard time designing interesting levels. Maybe the moves we came up with weren't that great for level design? But most likely this was due to inexperience with level design, and also because we had no good tools for level building. We tried a few different one but they were all awkward and slow to use and didn't allow us to quickly make changes and test them in-game. So what we probably should have done is spend more time on creating good level editing tools and maybe that would have fixed the other problems over time
• we noticed fairly early on that this type of game would require a lot less time to program and a lot more time for art and level design, which didn't work very well for our team composition. We would have to find more artists and new tasks for Patrick and Sebastian

Hey,
we've got a free content update for Parkitect today!

Late last year tristar from the Parkitect community suggested that we should hire him to update a bunch of old items to be recolorable, which we gladly did!
Over time the project grew a bit larger and now we've got a pretty nice update that also includes a good amount of new deco objects, two new entertainer costumes, and some wall and roof shapes to complete existing building sets.

Additionally:

• a number of objects have been updated to be resizable
• some objects have been updated to fit together more nicely
• the water color on water rides can be changed now
• running ad campaigns appear in the ongoing events list so you don't have to constantly check the ad campaign window
• the attraction overview list can be sorted by average queue time

Have fun :)

After the previous experiment with a town builder we came to the conclusion that we didn't really like it if you can place buildings wherever you want, in whatever rotation you want, without any sort of restriction.
It felt like it made it too easy to quickly plop down a bunch of buildings without putting too much thought into it.

So we gave it a second try but with everything on a grid!

Town Builder, Hex Grid Edition

We still wanted to experiment with things we had not done before, and thought a hexagonal grid might be a good fit for a town builder.

It has all of the restrictions of a grid but allows to build things in a slightly more organic looking way.

Something we haven't really touched on yet were the visual challenges for these prototypes. Both of them would require detailed, bespoke assets for buildings, resources, large amounts of land and of course the characters. Some of these we are familiar with, but others would have been a challenge for us to accomplish well.
You can see in the images we created some placeholder objects to represent buildings, and this was causing problems with scale. We weren't sure if we wanted to make these massive buildings, and thus the people would need to be tiny, or to stylize it and fudge the scales of different things.
We also had issues with art style, which would become a recurring problem for most of our prototypes except a few near the end of our experiments. While art style comes into play after a prototype a lot of the time, it can help inform a number of important decisions early on. It can be handy to have concept art or sketches to pull from, and we didn't have that for these. This leads into another problem of feeling engaged and passionate about an idea, and we weren't sure yet if we liked what we were doing, so a solid theme and setting never materialized.

In the end, due to game design issues as well as artistic issues, we decided not to move forward with this prototype either.

What we learned

• just adding a grid didn't really make the game interesting enough to inspire us to keep working on it.
  There have been enough town builders that work just like this and we were missing something unique that would make the game more interesting.
• we felt that in addition to gameplay we should think more about setting and art from the beginning as well
• committing to a multi-year big game project based on a tiny prototype is hard!