The final chapter of our postmortem of The Path evaluates the very personal creative process and makes notes about lessons learned. It’s been quite the emotional roller-coaster for us to go over this immense production again. And there’s so many things that we haven’t even touched upon. But the text is long enough as it is. 
We feel older and wiser now. And stronger with experience. The Path is our most successful project to date. But that success came at a price. Six innocent girls found their end in the process -it was unavoidable. And grandmother is always sick.
13 thoughts on “The Path Anniversary: postmortem 5: conclusion”
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I’m going to drink a toast to this when I get home from work.
haha! you and us both. thanks for your comments.
Wow.
This postmortem is really awesome; i loved it !
Thank you for making this great game, now I’m waiting for the soundtrack ;P
Hi Guys,
Really interesting stuff; thank you for sharing. I was wondering a little while ago if you were going to do another one of these. Even though I don’t believe in telepathy my only conclusion is that you picked up my thought waves, or maybe tapped my house.
A few questions though (of which you may answer many, few all or none):
What was behind your decision to hire other artists and not an experienced programmer (that is instead of not as well as)?
What role do you guys think piracy played with The Path and do you think that it impacted on sales?
What role do you guys think the journalists played with The Path and do you think that it impacted on sales? (Even though I disagree I do wonder how much of the Path is something that begs to be talked about rather than played.)
If you had a modest budget to appeal to these non-gamers, how would you have got through to them?
You mentioned that you might not use Quest3d in the future; is that because of the time it takes to make complex projects or because of the difficulty in transferring over to the big apple.
Why do you believe The Path was so popular in Russia and in retail no less? (On one hand I was surprised but then I could easily see the visual appeal and the deep similarities in their folk lore, which tends not to be diluted and Disnified)
Thank you Monty. I’ll try to answer your questions briefly. Even though there’s a lot to be said about each of them.
We didn’t just hire artists to fill positions. We hired Laura, Jarboe, Kris and Marian because we wanted their art to be part of our game. If we had encountered an equally inspiring programmer, we might have hired her.
We prefer to believe that people who pirated the game would not have bought it anyway. And since pirating an indie game means as much as telling the independent developer, and the future of the medium by extension, that you don’t care, we refuse to care about the pirates. They are not our audience.
The interest of journalists and bloggers spread the word on the game. And since The Path reached a much bigger audience than any other project of ours, that was less publicized, we can only assume that they played a big part.
That’s the problem: a “modest” budget would not suffice. I think we would need massive advertising (à la Nintendo). Because the audience is so scattered.
An alternative might be to approach them in a medium that they are comfortable with and then sneak in the game.
Actually, thanks to its visual programming interface, Quest3D allows us to make more complex games, not less, in a given time frame (or as such, even -given our limited programming skills). But yes, the cross-platform abilities of Unity are the main reason why we are using that now (not just Mac but also consoles). Sadly, the scripting interface of Unity also means that our new projects will have to be simpler (than what we could achieve through visual programming). But maybe that’s inspiring.
We’re not extremely familiar with the region. But we have the impression that people in Eastern Europe and Russia are more open to artistic experiments. They tend to be well read, intelligent people with a hunger for imaginative art. At least a part of them is. There’s probably historic reasons for this.
What a tortuous way! It must have been scary and exalting, as The Path itself is.
I was very surprise to read that in the middle-end of The Path’s development you though it as a “commercial” “horror” game. I understood why of course. Marketing means accessibilitty.
The Path is maybe easier to define than Fatale (great) for exemple. Nevertheless I believe it stands in a very blurred place where are also hiding sempiternal tales and collective inconscious.
I’m neighter a hardcore nor a casual gamer. I just love art and I will continue to follow yours dearly. Thank you for this moving experience and this very interesting reading.
Marian Bantjes’s collaboration is just fabulous. Very coherent with the game. Besides her work seams to have a lot to do with Tale of Tales. Will you work together again in a near future?
We are not the kind of artists who take pleasure in obscurity. We think the world is plenty mysterious as it is. So we want to talk about the world as we see it. We want people to enjoy our work, so we try to design it in a way that makes that easier. Some content lends itself better to that than other. But if you spend enough time on a project, I think you can make just about anything more accessible. Which introduces a neat paradox: the more effort you put into a project, the wider its appeal becomes, but also the more expensive the production becomes and the more necessary the wider appeal (to increase sales in order to recover production costs). Sometimes it feels like we could run after that carrot on a stick forever.
We hope we can work with Miss Bantjes again in the future. We’ll see.
Sorry. Looking back at it that first question came off as being a little condesending. I litterally couldn’t imagine The Path without the work of either of those three. But without the retrospect of what I know now I was just curious the thinking process in those days.
Yeah, programmers don’t tend to be the most inspiring people, but they do add a certain backbone to the whole thing.
Who knows if even a Nintendo budget would do the job, but agree with you on sneeking it to them.
We do a lot of programming ourselves. Obviously. Games like The Path don’t magically materialize. Real programmers would certainly have improved the performance of the game, reduced the number of technical errors, and possibly even the production time. But there’s no way of knowing how they could have impacted the game otherwise. We like to think that our “bric-à-brac” amateurish approach perhaps generates all sorts of interesting things, if only because we don’t know how do program “properly”.
I hope that in the future there will be more tools that allow people to program “improperly”. Because programming at its core is a creative thing. And we shouldn’t be bogged down by so much technological requirements. We should be able to just paint processes.
We’re not extremely familiar with the region. But we have the impression that people in Eastern Europe and Russia are more open to artistic experiments. They tend to be well read, intelligent people with a hunger for imaginative art. At least a part of them is.
Why thank you!
Not you, vladdamad, obviously! 😉
This could be an interesting development in Unity that might float your boat.
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=31132&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
Thank you for pointing this out, Monty!
If Unity gets a visual programming language that can replace their current scripting interface, we’d be very happy artists. Let’s hope this really happens!