I’ve killed my first Blumgi Game…

Hello :)

After eleven successful games, let's talk about failure... I’ve decided to kill a long-time project I was working on with my friend Joachim Leclercq: Blumgi Chase.

We started this more than a year ago. I loved the concept and the work Joachim put into the art direction, but I never managed to make it click with the Poki audience. I restarted it multiple times, but it just wouldn’t work.

At some point, I felt very demotivated. I had no pleasure left in working on it.
Here’s a short gameplay video to show you what we built (unlisted one, just for you) . We actually pushed it quite far.

Thanks to my time in the mobile industry at Madbox, I learned that sometimes you have to kill games and jump to the next one. It’s part of the game.
Even if this one will never be published, I learned a lot from this fail, both technically and in terms of creative process.

• For the first time, I started with a pitch game design document instead of building a prototype and iterating until I was happy with the game experience , like I did for my previous games. My cool ideas on paper, just weren't fun once I implemented them.
  
• I skipped a proper pre-production step, and that was a huge mistake. I carried design issues all the way to the end and never managed to solve them.
  
• The project was completely misaligned with the audience, way too skill-demanding for Poki players.
  Playtests went terribly, no matter which control scheme I tried. Players couldn’t drive properly, kept crashing into walls, falling off cliffs, and never really understood the goal… painful to watch.
  
• I made the classic mistake of over-scoping. Because we were two on the project, I doubled the game’s scope (at least…) and quickly got lost in complexity.

You can find some graphic assets on Joachim's Behance here:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/229159163/Blumgi-Chase

After amazing holidays in Costa Rica with my family, I feel super energized again and excited about the new project I’ve just started for Poki.

I am trying to make a very qualitative game, with an original concept but designed especially for the Poki audience. Let's see where it goes!

A secret preview WIP:

See you in the next update :) I’ll probably share how my 15-year-old son taught me a game design lesson, and created the concept for my most successful Blumgi game so far... "Blumgi Merge"

Loïc