9 years development?

[TonySneedprano]

Was this game stuck in development hell? Why did it take 9 years?

[Dorito Gremlin™]

it wasnt? its an indie game. with only a couple devs that did everything themselves. not to mention good pixel art takes time to do, and took even longer to animate well, and they changed how it worked to make it better at least once.

[TonySneedprano]

Okay, that's good to know, I was worried it had a troubled production because that's usually the case with games with a long development cycle.

[Ryan Fenton]

'Development hell' is a thing that exists because business-oriented office settings have a kind of entropy to them. Everyone has to constantly justify their presence in new ways, and everything has to have a 'champion' or else it falls off the map. No philosophy or art lives too long without vigorous defense inside most 'serious' offices.

That's why sponsorship and grants for culture exist in many nations, and why lots of folks decide to step away from pure business for a portion of their life to create thing they just want to see in the world, without having to defend a long process from the short-sighted goals that dominate so much.

Creating something really big, new, and/or good tends to require a LOT of little failures and revisions, a process we used to call 'research and development'. Going through that and producing something remarkable afterward is a special kind of triumph.

We each spend 15-20-ish years learning enough to take part in our early professions. Nothing wrong with spending 9 to learn to make the game you really want to see made, I'd say.

[Alphacranberries]

The story, as I have heard it, is that this was a fairly ambitious undertaking to begin with. As a result it had a long development time but somewhere along the line, they changed major portions of the game requiring major recoding. Eventually, the game was really close to release (a few years ago) but when they started getting feed back on their early build, they made a choice. It wasn't the game they wanted it to be. Not entirely, at least, so they decided to take it back and do it right. To completely flesh out the game. In summation, the delay was due to creative choices more than anything else. They wanted the game to be something and they weren't willing to release it until it was that.

It's also worth noting that during the development time of Owlboy, they started, finished and released an entirely separate game, Savant - Ascent.

[PFC Demigo [29th ID]]

If i recall they rebuilt from Scratch again