Join The Community
One of the most exciting development studios at the moment has to be Strange Scaffold, which in the last two years has released a ton of games, starting with El Paso, Elsewhere, as well as the likes of Life Eater, Clickholding, I Am Your Beast, and Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3. The studio's latest game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown released last week.
Strange Scaffold boss Xalavier Nelson Jr. recently spoke to GamesRadar+ about game development. "If I had to clear up one misconception about games, it's that we often say that the longer a game was in development, clearly it's a [more] high quality game." Nelson pointed out, "we have plenty of examples of games that were developed for a decade, if not more, and did not hit" presumably in reference to the likes of Duke Nukem Forever and Too Human.
Nelson – who has worked on "over 100 games in the past nine years" – said seeing and hearing stories of development is where it started to click for him. "A lot of five-year games were games where people were trying to figure out what game they were trying to make for three or four years, even, and then had a year left to pull together that thing."
Nelson then explained why a game made in two years is a far more exciting prospect to him than one with an extremely long development time, saying, "Now, when I see a game was made in two years, it makes me usually more excited about the two-year game, because it suggests that someone somewhere knew what they were doing and focused on making that with the team." As opposed to the eight-year development cycle where "you learn through the retrospectives and development histories and exposes, oh, six years of that was people wandering in a no man's land while some guy would come in and radically change the game because he played something really cool."
Years before The Witcher 3, CDPR was just trying to survive: "How do we escape annihilation?"
