Games That Put Their Developers Through Hell

Electronic Super Joy is a difficult, beat-dropping platformer with tight controls and addictive gameplay, a masterpiece of design and implementation by developer Michael Todd. Even so, like too many of his fellow indie devs, he periodically lost faith in himself during the development process. The pressure on indie devs is real.

For all the trouble that AAA studios encounter in the course of making a game, indies must deal with even more occupational hazards. Todd has given talks (link contains mild NSFW language) about how indie devs can stay productive (and healthy) while depressed; during a talk he gave at GDC 2011, he connected indie devs' productivity to the stability of their moods, saying, "It is important for me [as a developer] to be happy and enjoying my work on a day-to-day basis."

Todd's strongest point is that developers should design games to suit their abilities, and the games that cause the most frustration for devs tend to be the titles that "do not know what they want to be," so to speak. Whether it comes from a last-minute change of art direction, an interpersonal disagreement, a sudden turn from open-world to linear gameplay midway through the project, or simply an unexpected loss of funding, this sort of project-level identity crisis can be paralyzing for designers. For his part, Todd recognizes that there is not always a simple fix for the developer's blues.

In an industry where there is never enough time to do what needs to be done and where unexpected changes can have huge ramifications, no digital artist wants to redo perfectly good assets. Unfortunately, that's exactly what Gearbox Software's employees had to do before the 2009 release of Borderlands.

In 2006, the game was almost finished, with a snazzy trailer, a surprisingly serious tone, and a semi-realistic art-style. Late in the game's production, the decision was made to revamp the art direction from semi-realistic to, well, Borderlands-style. The reason for the change varies depending upon whom you ask; some in the press have made allegations of plagiarism over similarities between the new aesthetic and that of Ben Hibon's 2006 MTV Films short Codehunters. According to Gearbox, the change was simply a way of differentiating their game from id Software's Rage and Bethesda's Fallout series.

Whomever you choose to believe, the result is the same. People had to go in and painstakingly make the necessary changes to the game's look.

If you watched Indie Game: The Movie, you can't forget the weirdness of Fez dev Phil "Fish" Poisson. According to the film, which was made before the celebrated 2012 release of Fez, he scrapped all of the game's assets on multiple occasions. (Remember the gamble Gearbox made when it changed its art style? Remember how Blizzard held on to Titan's assets after it was canceled? Scrapping assets isn't typical, but Phil Fish isn't a typical dev.) It seems he came close to quitting on a number of occasions while making Fez. Asked what he would do if he couldn't complete the game, he responded, "I will kill myself."

Fez II isn't on this list because it actually did make Fish quit. He didn't just cancel the project, either—he picked a Twitter fight with a journalist and when it didn't go his way, he ragequit the entire industry. With one final hurrah, he declared, "Fez II is canceled... This is as much as I can stomach. This isn't the result of any one thing, but the end of a long, bloody campaign..." For his part, he seems to have learned something from all of this. His current Twitter account's bio reads as a warning to all of us: "NEVER TWEET."

We can at least take comfort in the fact that Poisson didn't quit before completing Fez, which is one of the few games that prizes nonviolence and exploration over kill-count accumulation. At the time, it was the least confrontational game to come out since Animal Crossing. (The sublime Stardew Valley recently usurped that title.) The saga of Fez and its cantankerous creator remains a painfully excellent example of the gaming industry's irony, which is sometimes as just as it can be cruel.

You don't need a team of hundreds to make an amazing game. Just have a look at Broforce, Towerfall, Braid, Samurai Gunn, Risk of Rain...the list goes on. That said, if you're an aspiring independent developer, you should understand that these titles are anomalies. Sadly, the vast majority of indie games go unnoticed.

Using free assets, Obvious Turtle Games put together a mildly addictive free-to-play mobile game called Crossy Bridge, only to find out the hard way that free-to-play indie games don't market themselves. "While I hope that someday I will have a success story," writes the developer in this warning to starry-eyed noobs, "mine did not come from my first [game]."

Last updated December 2, 2016, Finally Ants is a mobile game that, according to the Google Play Store, is still in production. Tell that to the hundreds of players who have been charmed by its aesthetic and ambition. We're told that a "textbook [case] of feature-creep" turned this ordinary hex-game into a real challenge for the programmer, who has since "made peace with" the game's daunting code. For the programmer, the knowledge that people enjoy playing his game makes wrangling its code a worthwhile venture.

Lastly, we relate the ill-fated story of Happy Happy Putt Putt, a top-down mini-golf game for mobile. It was the first project for an indie dev who goes by Stralor. There isn't enough space to include Stralor's engaging account of the drama behind the game's demise—just know that at least one half of the two-man development team didn't quit.

"For me, it's a beginning," says the developer, describing an FTL-meets-HAL 9000 solo project called Destination Ares, currently in Early Access on Steam. "I still feel like I'm at the bottom of the hill, but now maybe the boulder will go somewhere when I push." Game development remains Sisyphean in its uphill challenges, but that's no reason to call it quits.