2 days have passed since Deception release

We would like to "conclude" our situation. What we did good, and what we did just unforgivably wrong.

First. I want to say sorry to all people who had a bad experience with the game. Surely in our team there is a "non-conflict fight" if we did good, so In this post, Me as a main programer of the game will try to explain to you the whole situation that was happening during the development of the game. And before I start. No, I have no intention of whitewashing myself here. I am not trying to explain myself with trivial things. I am just going to explain the trouble that I went through while working on "Deception"...The whole conclusion with our team's missteps and finally ending with what happens next.

1. Deception: Where we wanted to go bigger than what we could do

The development of deception began at June of 2021. Nearly 3 months after first game, Pillars of Silence.

The first game had an average opinion from YouTubers who played the game, but terrible ones from most of other players, and ourselves as well. We decided to not waste our time and start working on the second part of the game. THE STORY 2: Deception.

We wanted to make something better. Reach a bigger level. And maybe we did. But we wanted to reach even bigger. Which wasn't a good idea.

At early stages of development, we started to make locations, and then mechanics for the game.

We kept the game in secret. So people would get surprised when the game reaches a good state. I spent a whole year and a half to prepare for the "big reveal moment". But we haven't realized that after time has passed. The mechanics are still the same with the same code and state where it was on our very bad experience level. I was also working on another project so I learned many new and useful stuff to make things stable. But for some reason I never got an occasion to make Deception game code more stable.

It's mostly my fault at this point and all the critics that will be given that the game is not polished is a fair point and gave me a lot to think. But I also need to talk about one problem that turned our situation into an even worse state.

2. Ransomware attack:

At first. The game was supposed to come out on April. The game was a bit diffrent since then, for sure. All of our mistakes that we did were still in the game. But there was no health system, no throwable items, no AI hearing etc.

But my PC got hacked, the reason is unknown to me since I am not the type of guy who clicks suspicious links or websites that could download some type of the virus. Anyway, The PC with our project had all their files encrypted and we had to restart the whole PC to its fabric state. And we had everything: Models, music, animations but not the project itself. We had only the build from August 2022. It forced us to delay the game for a whole half a year to redo all the stuff that we lost.

During this I decided to add most of mechanics that are probably the reason of the game feel unpolished. (AI hearing system, throwable items and AI not killing you instantly) I would eventually like to

go back and make the code more stable. After the hack though we weren't even thinking about this, and we were just focusing on remaking the stuff that we lost without upgrading the rest of the game code which is our mistake as well.

3. Playtesting and next mistakes

We found some people and asked them if they could playtest the game.

Most of them were just reporting bugs but, one of them actually gave us his opinion on the game and when stuff needs serious rework/polishing.

Me as a programmer AND one of 2 game directors refused to do it since "we have no time now to do it now since we wanted to hurry up with the game's release"

After this half year of redoing stuff we broke many things that we didn't notice and playtesters were getting too many playtest builds than necessary. Some bugs required few playtest builds to be finally fixed since of how our code terrible was because of 2021/2022 code was still in use.

The other director was mostly offline during this since he was very busy with private life in those days, so I was the only one who could decide about things. Since I didn't want to take the whole responsibility of changing things too much. I refused to upgrade and rework things that surely needed it. As sewers sections or other aspects of the game. Probably if not our "lack" of time that was just in our heads we would look at things differently.

4. Our future

As I said before. This whole post wasn't made to make our situation better. It is as terrible as it looks.

We learned a lot through this whole development. Probably in the next year when we reveal our next project, most people here will see us as these developers who spent 2 years to release an unpolished game and ruined their reputation (Well... we probably deserve it)

But we are not giving up and we want to use the knowledge we got through these 2 years to make something better. We already have some plans but we probably won't even start coding anything this year. We don't want to cause the same thing will happen as we did with Deception where we started coding just 3 months after release. Instead we will take our time to think not only about the coding. But also we will spend that time to think what we want to achieve, How we're gonna do it, we got more experience to make things better. And create the project when we will be fully ready to cook up something again.

Me as a programmer. And the one who screwed up mostly in here letting the project to be in the state that there is, will take a half break to recharge. I will still work on some stuff for our next project but I am not going to do it as active as I was doing it so far, but once the break is over, I will continue working on the next project fully and ready + I want to make the update for Deception to make the code more stable and clean. Even if it will be after the consequences, and the game will be remembered as a disappointment for many of you. I owe you that.

Once again we're sorry and we will try to make things right next time

~False Animatronics