Levantera: Tale of The Winds (tuxdb.com)

Howdy everyone, Jack here. I've spent a little over a month trying to figure out how to write this announcement.

The Post-Mortem

There has been a lot of heavy weight on me to deliver something to yall and to complete this title as promised, but it seems as though at this point in time, the trajectory of completion is going to result in a final product that is nowhere near what I intended this game to be when it was conceptualized in early 2015. Myself and a small group of developers started Lasso Games as a partnership in 2015. Levantera was just a little tech demo I called "Project Tradewind" and it looked like Simon Belmont jumping around on some blocks. It looked hilariously bad and I never really intended, at that point, for it to be a commercial "product."

Shortly thereafter, a small group of friends of mine who were talented artists, musicians, and programmers all sort of volunteered to help me flesh the game out and get something going. It was a lot of fun at first, and we all collectively decided to turn it into something marketable. We started working on a Kickstarter campaign, and after reading every Twitter dev's kickstarter post-mortem we possibly could, tried to do every growth hack trick in the book to get the project funded. We asked for $25,000 to fund the title, and to this day I'm glad we fell short of that goal because there is no way that would have been enough to pay 6 of us to work full time on the project. Then, we would be in even worse shape than I am now having to come to hundreds of fans, hat in hand.

The failed kickstarter was a pretty heavy blow. About half of the team decided to move on, but 4 of us decided we would try and see the game through. This is about the time we also started working on MiniLaw: Ministry of Law, which thankfully did see its launch day on New Years, 2020, right before the world ended.

What Went Right

Working on Levantera has given Lasso Games a ton of opportunities to develop as a growing business in Appalachia. We have put on programming camps, showcased the game at expos and trade shows, and worked with local academic institutions to teach young people game development as not just a hobby but as a discipline and a marketable skillset. The game looks really cool, and mechanically is pretty fun to play. It has a lot of neat easter eggs and references, and could have been a pretty cool complete play experience. Maybe someday that will be reborn in another title, or in another game build published in this namespace. We used our time together as a team to compete and win in a couple of game jams, and even came in honorable mention in a game jam that sparked a very successful currently published title. See if you can guess which one we submitted:

The team members learned a lot about collaborative development remotely. With developers in Alaska, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West Virginia; we did remote work before it was cool, because it was necessary. We also had the opportunity to mentor a host of fledgling developers who all worked on the game, and have gone on to do bigger and better things. Levantera was always sort of a sandbox for new devs to get their hands dirty and make meaningful contributions to what was and still technically is a published commercial title. At the bottom of this post, I will credit every contributor to this project since many of you will never see the in-game credits (though they are technically accessible if you can [spoiler] make it to the "final boss" and hit him in the head one time with a wind blast [/spoiler] ) The game actually got selected by a panel of experts hired by Taco Bell for sponsorship. It was such a wild and surreal experience, and it even resulted in us auditioning for a reality TV show about game development that never came to be.

What Went Wrong

The failed kickstarter was a omen of things to come. After the campaign was concluded and the group went its separate ways, we never reached the same energy (in my opinion) that we had the final weeks leading up to the Kickstarter launch. I still am not sure what possessed us to try and finish the game from this point considering how short we were from our goal, but we certainly did go for it. Scope creep became such a constant and frequent issue that had to be resolved that at one point, we literally cut the map in half to try and get a build released. Even still, we had new features creep in after the settings were decided, new plot points injected after the story was written, and new mechanics injected after the gameplay was set and the levels were being designed, which brings me to my next point. Creative differences are always going to happen when you are working with a team of collaborators. It's almost an inevitability. What this project really suffered from though was poor direction, and that is on me. I could not effectively communicate boundaries, scope work, or write requirements well enough to give developers a clear enough goal to match my vision. Every time I thought I was suffering from some control issues, I would relinquish some of that control only to have the codebase dramatically altered in a way that would need to be fixed. Other times, I would be the one ripping the guts out, and someone else would have to clean it up. It is not an effective, fun, or rewarding way to work and it shows in the product's results. A high stress work environment and overextension were two things that my counselors told me I had to resolve immediately. Almost every team member was also working a full-time day job and several of us just wanted to release a title with the hopes that we would make enough money that we could survive off of being game developers as our full-time gig. This never came to fruition after Levantera went Early Access and after MiniLaw was fully released. In the time between 2015-2019, I would work from 9 or 10pm to nearly 2am every single week night. My sleep pattern suffered and my mental health plummetted. In 2019, I moved out of my house and into an apartment, and filed for divorce from my spouse at the time. I had hoped that drastically altering my schedule and other major life changes would help me get a foothold on my mental health, and it did in some respects, but then 2020 happened and a whole new set of problems arose for me (and pretty much everyone else on the face of the planet). The remaining work to be done to make this product anything I could consider being proud of is far too much for me to muster. I have attempted to sell the IP and have someone else finish it, but I don't think there is really any interest from any party to do that, and even if they did there's no telling how much further it would be from the vision I had 7 years ago.

The Wrap-Up

I think after 7 years it's finally time to let the project rest in peace. I don't really know exactly how I want to walk it back but I'm ready for it all to be over. I've poured so much sunk cost fallacy into the project that I can't really justify continuing to pour blood, sweat, and tears into it knowing it's probably just going to fizzle out on launch and be commercially non-viable. The amount of work it will take to get this project anywhere near what my vision was for it, from this point with all the engine overhauls and compatibility issues...it just doesn't seem feasible or worthwhile anymore. This experience (among a few others) has opened my eyes to how god-awful the socio-economic paradigm we live in truly is. It has crushed the very reasonable ask of being able to work at a decent pace on creative projects and make enough money to live. Every opportunity I had to do something with this company has resulted in either an uphill battle with the hopes of getting some crumbs at the end, or an outright crushing defeat. We've been stiffed on contract work, we have been passed over for funding by publishers, denied dev kits by console manufacturers, and the whole time governments and agencies have had their hands in both of my pockets taking the full extent of taxes and fees out of the very meager earnings we have managed to accrue, while much larger and successful businesses take easily forgiven PPP loans and have their tax and fee burdens offset. Now, the game is a Ship of Theseus which barely resembles what it was when I started on it. I just hope that it has stood to serve as an outlet for someone over the years because it stopped being that for me around April or so of 2016. At this point, the project is feeling to me like a "Synecdoche, New York" level curse and I have to allow the sunk cost fallacy to be put aside. I do feel like there is a story to tell and a gameplay experience in here somewhere, I just don't know how I'm going to go about coaxing it out of me and making something tangible out of it from here. I hope this message is well received and is paired with an understanding that I am bringing this to you from a place of authentic appreciation for each and every one of you, and for each contributor to this project over the years. I don't like this outcome, and I have hoped for the last several years that I could avoid it, but unless I take a genuine step back and earnestly evaluate what this company's place is in my life I won't be able to make any decision that makes sense for myself or anyone else involved.

Final Thoughts and Credits

I will be keeping the title on the steam store with this announcement, because I do intend on working on another project soon. I have developed a lot of skills over the last 7.5 years and I am confident that starting fresh from the planning phase I would have the tools to get a smaller title out the door in a more reasonable time frame. if you still want to support future endeavors, you are still welcome and encouraged to purchase this title, and play what it was when I was proud of it, and to get an idea of the state of mind we were in when we decided to put it out there into the world. Thank you all so much for your support over this time. I can't stress enough how much it has meant to me and how much I value your words of encouragement and financial commitments to our tiny studio effort. I'd like to offer thanks to everyone who has had a part in contributing to this title over the last 7 years: [h4]ART[/h4]