A bit over three months has passed since the Phobos Down release, so it's a good time for a look back.

The plan

I set out to make a perfect twin-stick shooter for myself. Something with a strict focus on satisfying shooting action with minimal distractions. As an older gamer with slow reflexes, I also wanted to make it relatively slow-paced so that I'd have time to plan ahead and strategize instead of continuously struggling to avoid failure. Visually, I wanted it to be minimal and as clear as possible.

Technical decisions made in the very beginning:

• Use procedural generation for missions and game content. Set up things so that newly added content is automatically taken into use without having to manually modify all existing content. In practice, this means that all enemies, devices, and other items have a set of parameters that define when and where they can appear, and the algorithm handles the rest.
• Use minimal ultra-low-poly art style with procedural animation because that is something I can do well enough myself.
• Use strict color coding to make things as readable as possible on screen.
• Restrict user inputs to two analog joysticks with one digital button on each. The idea was to keep things simple and leave the door open for ports to various limited platforms like touchscreen devices.
• Utilize the destructible height map terrain that I had created earlier.

As usual, I didn't make any detailed game design upfront. I had a rough game idea written down and a list of initial tasks the needed to be done. I added more tasks on the list as the project went on and tried to keep the list in priority order so that the most important things got implemented first.

The progress

Here are some screenshots over the years that show the development progress:

The initial scope for the project was very tight, as I only wanted to implement the most essential features. I was hoping to finish the game in a year. It took four years, just like my previous game. I see a pattern here.

I could have called it ready almost a year earlier, but I wanted to keep polishing it and adding the last minor details. In the end, I didn't have to cut any meaningful content.

I had always planned to support various platforms and during the development I had implemented an experimental touchscreen control, so a mobile version was almost there already. After the PC version release, I thought about making a free mobile version as a promotional tool and another chance to get some people playing the game. Since Google forced me to do another zero-change update to Polychoron on Google Play, I decided to release a quickly made mobile version of Phobos Down too. I'm not sure if this was a good idea, because now I have to maintain that version too.

The good

Godot engine is great, and building a game in it is really fun. I will definitely stick with this game engine. Now that this project is done, I can finally upgrade to the latest version.

Building the physical arcade cabinet was a good idea. Taking it to local demo events got a lot of attention, and I got to see people playing it live. This was the best source of actual gameplay feedback. The arcade cabinet has been publicly available in NOOB arcade bar in Tampere since the release, and currently more people are playing it than the PC versions combined. It also brings a tiny bit of traffic to the game pages.

The bad

Promoting a hobbyist game without some insane hook is hopeless. I feel like all the time and effort spent on it was wasted. I guess the reason is simple: Phobos Down looks quite generic, and there are literally thousands of better looking and more interesting games competing for the attention. I don't really know what to do differently in the future. Perhaps I'll just stop trying. After all, I make games for fun, and marketing and promotional work is very much not fun. I will keep posting about the development progress on social media, but that's it.

Steam Early Access was not worth the trouble. During ten months in Early Access, I got one feedback post, and that was from a person already giving a lot of valuable feedback here on Itch.io. I will keep my future games on Itch.io during development, and if they somehow get popular here, set up a Steam page but skip the Early Access.

Final thoughts

At the moment, I have mixed feelings about this project. I'm very happy with the game itself. The core gameplay is fun and exactly the way I envisioned it. My only real financial goal was met: I earned back the $100 Steam fee. However, I can't help feeling disappointed with how the game got immediately lost in the sea of thousands of other games. Of course, that was no surprise, because there never were more than a handful of people really excited about the game, and Steam wishlist count at launch was very low.

In the end, the most important thing is that Phobos Down is now ready! I will continue to maintain it and fix bugs but I'm not working on any new features.

Spring sale

Phobos Down is currently available at 30% discount here and on Steam,