Preproduction should be the space where you experiment with mechanics and figure out what game you’re actually building. But if you never stop throwing out new ideas, you can get stuck exploring forever without ever locking anything down. However, finishing it with a lot of “we’ll figure out later,” and not measuring the impact of changing mechanics or levels during production, can be risky. This talk breaks down what rushing preproduction actually cost Vultures - Scavengers of Death.
Vultures - Scavengers of Death started as a text based roguelike prototype, then a small 3D vertical slice built in Godot 3. That vertical slice became our demo, and it did its job, it proved the core mechanic worked, turn based tactics that played like Resident Evil.
We got funded and started working on the game without being aware of how much everything else would actually cost: story, levels, enemy design, even the bosses. We cut preproduction short under the pressure of hitting our release commitments with the publisher. That decision followed us through the rest of production, and it showed up exactly where we couldn’t afford it, the final weeks before launch.
This talk covers three years of prototyping, pitching, and producing Vultures, told through the real production timeline of a two person studio shipping a commercial game in Godot..