How Deus Craft developed a shooter for six years, spent half a million dollars and closed the project

Sometimes creating a dream game leads to nothing. This is a reason to look back and understand what went wrong. In your column on App2Top.ru Dmitry Shubeikin, co-founder and director of Deus Craft, told how his company, which has always specialized in casual games, tried to make an online shooter.

Dmitry Shubeykin

Origins

Our studio appeared in 2003 in Novosibirsk. Then it was a small team of enthusiasts who just wanted to make games. We quickly found ourselves developers of casual projects.

At that time, if you wanted to create projects with a small team for a global audience and work directly with Western publishers, there was no other way. Only casual.

For a decade and a half, this has defined our history. Until 2018, we specialized in PC games in the genre of Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure (HOPA), detective or mystical quests related to the search for objects.

We were good at them. In total, we have released about 30 similar projects. We can say that we have filled our hand decently. But from a certain point on, we wanted to get out of the role that was fixed for us. The main dream was to make a full-fledged shooter.

Attempt #1

Our first steps in this direction date back to 2014. The game was originally called The Day After. The plans were to make a competitive shooter for browsers and the VKontakte social network.

We began to step on the rake right away.

We made the first playable build very quickly. This was the first key mistake. The fact is that we prepared the build on the basis of ready-made software solutions. And we did not calculate two fundamental things. Firstly, ready-made solutions led to a significant increase in the cost of operating the product in the future. Secondly, the chosen solutions were not designed to protect against cheaters, which was fundamental for us, because the project was designed for online PvP.

As a result, we decided to independently develop a realtime server for the game. This was the second key mistake. We set about creating it, initially not understanding how it is done. Plus I wanted to be cheap and functional. As a result, all possible bumps were stuffed during development.

It took us a whole year to close the task. She, by the way, slowed down the whole development. We explained the focus on working on the server to ourselves very simply at that time: we do everything well at once so that there are no problems at the stage of public testing.

As it turned out a little later, it was not necessary to polish the server for a web shooter. And in general, such a server is usually not needed to test gameplay hypotheses and conduct testing, but we didn’t know about it then.

The Day After didn’t even live up to the alpha tests. But it wasn’t about the server. At some point, browsers announced that they were starting to curtail support for certain technologies (Unity, Flash). This was the verdict for our web shooter.

Attempt #2

The dream of making a shooter did not leave us after the first failure.

In 2015, based on the collected developments for The Day After, we decided that we would make a project for mobile. We had the graphics, the concept, and the server. We continued to make it on Unity with a team of 8-10 people.

The new game is called Deathpool Online. Like The Day After, it was a multiplayer first-person shooter. A unique feature of the game was the presence of not only other players on the map, but also zombies.

In 2017, we started showing the game to publishers and audiences (as part of test runs). However, there was no monetization in the game. Worse, we didn’t understand how to build it in our game, and the players swore at the flaws. As a result, we froze this version of the game.

Attempt #3

Despite the numerous signs of fate, we were not going to give up the dream of making a shooter, and we did not plan to say goodbye to the team.

It was the summer of 2017. PUBG has just risen to the wave of popularity and we decided to take up the creation of an isometric royal battle. This time the game was intended for mobile devices. We decided to name the project Battle Instinct.

We thought that we had already filled enough bumps that we could quickly ride the then still hot trend. However, almost immediately everything went wrong, despite the experienced team and familiar technology.

The difficulties began with the prototyping stage. Even when we seemed to have decided on the direction in which we want to work, the product essentially remained in the R&D state.

There was no single concept understandable to all participants, critical bugs constantly arose, there were not enough live players at the testing stages, but there were imperfect bots that created additional problems instead of helping in testing. And again we could not decide on monetization.

A year later, as it seemed to us then, we had an almost finished game on our hands. We even launched it into a softlonch. That’s just they couldn’t cope with the endless bugs that arose at all levels — from the server to the interface and the display of models.

We didn’t give up. Moreover, for the first time we started receiving positive feedback on the game. Battle Instinct showed good results on the Asian audience, we had good reviews in the store and from bloggers. We even participated with this game in a competition from Tencent, where we took a high place.

However, we were still forced to close the project.

Why did we close the game, which came to the finish line?

We saw that we are getting something only by 2020. In other words, in six years we tried to create and launch three shooters. And this is done by one small team, which has remained almost unchanged throughout the time.

Up until the last year, she did not receive visible results. And when the results appeared, it became clear that for a full-fledged launch, it was necessary to further polish the gameplay, rebuild monetization, which did not work, and prepare future updates. In general, the future work front has only increased.

The team burned out. She could no longer work on the game, whose first lines of code appeared in 2014.

So we faced a difficult choice. We had to decide whether to close or continue development.

On one of the scales was:

• the need for a raw build to re-recruit the entire development team with PM at the head;
• the need for solid investments (it was necessary to invest more than $500 thousand in further development, which we had already invested in the development of the latest version by that time);
• the need to find a strong and reliable partner in China (and the associated risk of losing the project if the partner turns out to be insufficiently reliable);
• at that time, weak monetization;
• uncertainty about the success of the game.

On the other more often:

• the effort and money invested in the product.

As a result, with a creaking heart, we decided to close the project. This time finally, including saying goodbye to the team. It was very difficult and very painful, but we were not ready to continue working, even in a different format. This page had to be turned over.

What conclusions have we drawn?

1. If the team cannot agree on basic definitions in a few months (including the word “success”), then decisive measures must be taken to clarify everyday terms and understand the prospects of the project.
2. The roadmap does not just have to be, it must be constantly checked. We had it at some stage, but its non-necessity played a very evil role in this story.
3. The key issues are usually management and communication. When you see that something is wrong with them, direct all your efforts to solve these problems.
4. Starting a project without knowing the chosen niche is a so—so idea (on the other hand, game dev is worth it).