Project 01 Changed: Knowing When to Change Direction

Project 01 changed.

Not a mechanic.

Not the art style.

Not the UI.

The game.

Completely.

So that’s fun.

This wasn’t the plan

For roughly eight months, we’ve been seriously working on the game we’ve referred to publicly as Project 01.

Designing it.

Programming it.

Making art for it.

Breaking it.

Fixing it.

Breaking it in more sophisticated ways.

Writing enough documentation about it that Future Us will either be extremely grateful or deeply concerned.

It was the game.

The first Syscall Studios game.

And now it isn’t.

We’re changing direction.

Nothing exploded

This would probably be easier to explain if something had gone catastrophically wrong.

It didn’t.

The game works.

We still like the idea.

We still want to make it.

There wasn’t some dramatic moment where we stared at the screen and realized:

Oh.

This is terrible.

And this wasn’t really a case of runaway scope creep either.

We didn’t spend eight months continuously adding features until Project 01 somehow became our attempt to simulate the entire known universe.

We are not making GTA 6.

Nobody added a fully functioning municipal tax system.

Yet.

What changed was our understanding of the scope that was already there.

There’s a big difference between designing a game on paper and actually building enough of it to understand what making the whole thing properly will require.

A feature that sounds relatively straightforward in a design document eventually becomes:

Art.

Animation.

Interface.

Audio.

Edge cases.

Save data.

Content.

Testing.

The other project

The funny part is that we’re not moving to something new.

We’re moving back to something old.

Before the current Project 01, there was another project.

We worked on it for around six months.

There was code.

There were systems.

There were designs.

There were experiments.

There were, naturally, several things held together through methods we will generously describe as:

Prototype engineering.

Eventually we put it aside.

Not because we hated it.

Not because it fundamentally didn’t work.

We just moved on to something else.

For a while, that was that.

Except apparently six months of working on something leaves a fairly persistent little process running in the background of your brain.

Because we kept coming back to it.

Not necessarily to work on it.

Just to talk about it.

A design problem in Project 01 would remind us of something from the old project.

A system we’d build would make us think about how differently it could be used there.

An idea would come up.

Then another.

Every so often we’d open an old document.

Very normal behavior for a project we’ve definitely moved on from.

Then we made the mistake of looking at it seriously

At some point, we stopped treating the old project as an interesting thing from the past and started evaluating it like an actual production again.

What would it take to finish?

What were the expensive parts?

What could be systemic?

What needed bespoke content?

What had we learned since the last time we touched it?

What would we do differently now?

And, somewhat inconveniently, the answers were good.

Really good.

A lot of the things we’ve learned over the last eight months actually make us better equipped to build it now than we were when we stopped.

We’ve learned more about architecture.

More about scope.

More about art production.

More about what needs to be data-driven.

More about which systems are worth making flexible.

And significantly more about the difference between:

This would be cool.

and:

We can actually make this.

That second category has become much more interesting lately.

Practical is not a dirty word

There’s a version of creative decision-making where “practical” sounds depressing.

Like choosing a project because it’s practical means choosing the less interesting one.

We don’t think that’s true.

This isn’t really about making a smaller game.

And it definitely isn’t about making a less ambitious one.

It’s about where that ambition lives.

Every game has a production shape.

One game might depend heavily on hundreds of bespoke environments.

Another might need enormous amounts of animation.

Another might live or die based on authored narrative.

Another can put a much larger percentage of its complexity into reusable systems interacting with each other.

None of those approaches is inherently better.

But they require very different studios to make efficiently.

And we’re starting to understand what kind of studio Syscall actually is.

We like systems.

Simulation.

Reusable rules.

Things interacting.

Building something once and then discovering ten interesting situations that fall out of it.

Unfortunately, this appears to be a recurring condition.

The project we’re returning to leans much harder into those strengths.

That doesn’t mean it’s tiny.

It doesn’t mean it’s easy.

It doesn’t mean we’re suddenly making Pong because we became frightened by a production schedule.

It means more of its difficulty exists in areas where a small, technically focused team can get a lot of leverage from the work it does.

That’s a very different thing.

The current Project 01 could absolutely be made.

We just think we’ll be better at making it after we’ve shipped something else first.

Eight months is a lot of work

There is, obviously, one slightly uncomfortable part of this.

We’ve spent eight months on the current Project 01.

That’s not nothing.

There is code that may never ship.

Art that may never ship.

Design work that now belongs to a game we’re no longer actively building.

Systems we spent days getting right.

Problems we solved that we didn’t technically need to solve yet.

The tiny sunk-cost goblin living in every project manager’s brain has opinions about this.

It says:

But look how much work we’ve already done.

Which is true.

Very observant goblin.

The problem is that another eight months doesn’t make the previous eight more valuable.

If we’re going to make this decision eventually, doing it later mostly means spending more time before making it.

And we’d much rather put the current Project 01 aside while we still like it than grind it down until we resent the thing.

It deserves better than becoming:

The game we had to finish because we started it first.

The work wasn’t wasted

This is the part that sounds suspiciously like something people say to make themselves feel better.

But it’s also true.

The studio that started Project 01 eight months ago and the studio making this decision now are not quite the same.

We know more.

We’ve built things.

We’ve thrown things away.

We’ve learned which abstractions actually help.

We’ve learned which abstractions are just programmers discovering a more academically interesting way to avoid making the game.

We’ve developed an art direction.

We’ve thought much harder about production.

We’ve gotten better at recognizing when temporary code is becoming permanent architecture.

We’ve developed stronger opinions about what we want a Syscall Studios game to feel like.

The old Project 01 caused a lot of that.

Those lessons don’t disappear because the executable changes.

Some of them are already finding their way into what comes next.

And the six months we spent on the project we’re returning to weren’t wasted either.

We’re not starting from a blank Unity project and a paragraph in a notes app.

There are ideas there that have already been tested.

Systems we’ve already thought through once.

Problems we’ve already encountered.

Things we know we want to keep.

Things we now know we absolutely do not.

We’re getting to approach an old project with a much better understanding of how we actually want to build games.

That’s a pretty useful place to start.

So what happens now?

For the moment?

We’re still not announcing the game.

Sorry.

We know.

This is becoming a bit.

But Project 01 now refers to a different project internally.

A project we’ve actually known for quite a while.

One that already has history here.

One we’re approaching very differently the second time around.

And one that, after spending a lot of time looking at what it would actually take to build both games properly, makes much more sense as our first release.

The game we’ve been working on for the last eight months isn’t cancelled.

It’s going back on the shelf.

We’ll come back to it.

Hopefully with more experience, more resources, and a shipped game behind us.

For now, we’re returning to something familiar.

for the first time in a while, we’re reopening old systems instead of starting from an empty project.

a lot of what was there still makes sense, although six months away from something gives you a pretty good list of things you’d do differently.

it also happens to be the kind of game where an ordinary place can look very different once the sun goes down.

right now, that’s probably as specific as we’re going to get.

but there are plenty of old systems to revisit.

old assumptions to question.

underneath all of it is a project we’re genuinely excited to come back to.

not everything from six months ago is going to survive the trip.

developing it again is going to be interesting.

A frankly irresponsible number of design documents still need updating.

And quite a lot of work lies ahead.

Project 01 changed.

Syscall Studios didn’t.

More soon.