Switching Gears

by Brian, UpRoom Games Founder

It’s probably an understatement to say it’s been a while since our last blog post. However, this one has been a long time coming and is almost certainly overdue. For the foreseeable future, we will be stopping development on Project Beta. This is a disappointment, but definitely the correct decision moving forward. Project Beta was born from a labor of love centered around dynamic climbing, and that is almost certainly something we will return to in the future. However, it will not be within Project Beta

So how did we make this difficult decision?

Ultimately there were many reasons, but there are a few that stand out.

First of all, and most importantly, the game wasn’t particularly fun. This is a hard truth to admit, especially as a designer. Certain aspects of the game were fun (climbing most notably) but as an overall experience it was lacking. This is not a position you want to find yourself in as a developer a couple of years into a project.

Secondly, the scope of work remaining in the current design was very large. This itself is not a reason to halt development, however it certainly indicated a fair amount of scope creep and potentially a need to redesign large parts of the game not only for the fun factor, but for feasibility.

Finally, we constantly encountered issues using the High Definition Render Pipeline in Unity. For a very long time, we hoped many of these issues would be resolved in future updates to the engine and pipeline. Unfortunately, the pain points and workarounds we continue to encounter have not been addressed, leading to large amounts of developer investment on things that were not accounted for in the time budget.

With these issues looming and the large amount of dev time already invested, it became a question of rethinking the concept for Project Beta from scratch, or moving on to a different project. After deliberating for quite a while, we made the difficult decision to move on. The sad truth is that the game will likely remain unfinished. However, there is potentially some good news for other developers out there. Due to the attention our climbing system has received, we are looking into the possibility of breaking the system out for distribution as an asset for Unity. However, this is not a simple task and is by no means a guarantee. The system as it stands is very much not user friendly, with a complex and sparsely commented code base. Furthermore, the current iteration relies on some third party software components (Final IK) and animations that would either need to be replaced with custom components or licensed in some way, which is another monster entirely and could take quite some time.

So what comes next?

Fortunately, we have not been idle since our last blog post, and in fact have been working on a project we are extremely excited and passionate about. About a year ago we decided to evaluate the Godot engine for future development as an alternative to Unity. We have fallen in love with the engine and it has freed us creatively to spend much more time on gameplay design and much, much less time on technical issues. 

We’re very excited to reveal more about the upcoming project soon!