First of all, apologies for leaving you all hanging last week. I hope you’ve managed to get through the last few days without any great stress.
Today’s hot topic: What are we going to do with Level Squared?
One question I was asked a lot over the course of Games Week was what we were planning to do with Level Squared after PAX?
All of our planning and focus had been on getting the game ready for PAX and we had given very little thought to what we wanted to do next.
No, that’s not quite true. We had deliberaly avoiding talking or thinking about what we wanted to do next.
There were a couple of reasons for this.
Getting ready for PAX was a big ask. Especially for us, seeing as we had scrapped everything and started over in July. We didn’t want to entertain any longer term thinking that could potentially open up development paths that we didn’t have the scope to explore in the limited time that we had.
We also wanted to avoid any potential avenues of argument or discontent. The decision of what to do after PAX was likly to lead to some disagreement, so it was best to keep it out of the way until PAX was over.
And lastly – there was a good chance that PAX was going to give us our answer anyway. However we felt going into the show was very likely to be changed by the public’s reaction to Level Squared.
So (most of) the team met up in the week after PAX and talked through our options. These ranged from dumping the game and never discussing it again to forming a company to create a full version of Level Squared for release on multiple platforms.
This last option isn’t quite as silly as it sounds. We had representatives from both XBox and Playstation come by the booth and leave cards telling us to get in contact if we wanted support to develop for their indie programs. So it was a live and valid option.
However – we did not decide to go that route in the end. But nor did we decide to totally abandon Level Squared either.
Our plan is to develop Level Squared into a reasonable length of game, and to put it up on itch.io as a portfolio piece that will be free to download.
There were a few factors that lead to this decision.
- Members of the team are at different stages of uni. Some are graduating this year, others have one or two years of uni to go.
- We do not have the personal finance or financial support that would allow us to work full time on Level Squared.
- No-one had much appetite for entering into the legal and accounting negotiations that would be associated with forming a company.
- I’m personally working full time already, and with part time uni study I have very little spare time to devote to this sort of project.
- We are a team of eight people. This is not a realistic number to launch a sustainable indie studio. And this way we avoid the uncomfortable situation of working out who would be essentially kicked out.
So there you have it. We’re taking a bit of a break following PAX before we get back to work. Our plan is to have something ready to go by the time uni starts back next year (early March).
Keep an eye out for our release statement then!