Games made in 2 years are more exciting than games made in 8 years, indie boss says, because "6 years of that" is often "no man's land while some guy would come in and radically change the game because he played something really cool"

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."

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