Who would have thought the most calming, zen, feel-good games on your PlayStation endured an emotionally destructive development cycle? During a GDC Europe post-mortem, Journey executive producer Robin Hunicke detailed the brutal internal struggles at thatgamecompany leading up to the superb PSN exclusive’s release.
We gave ourselves permission to be human
Sony gave thatgamecompany one year to make Journey. It took three. Development began in spring 2009 with just seven developers struggling to create a co-op game that, as Hunicke put it, “sounded like crazy talk.” Journey’s ambitions started getting the better of the team, and Sony had to extend its development time. This was thatgamecompany’s first 3D game as well. The team’s first experience with cloth physics, net code, sand particles, and general animation caused not only delays, but drama within the studio as well.
Journey development was a balance of two tensions: “passionately believing that something is possible, and deeply fearing there’s not enough time, not enough money, and not enough faith to make it happen.” Stress and demoralization among its too-few artists, designers, and engineers led to an explosion of “lots of open and very harsh criticism of the game design itself,” Hunicke explained.
The small team took a step back, eventually realizing that fighting against each other was harming their fight to create something special. They started improving their daily communication, had lunch dates, and, most importantly, worked less. “We gave ourselves permission to be human,” said Hunicke, “to have lives, to sleep.” This led to additional delays, but the new “core working hours” worked out. Despite thatgamecompany’s continuous struggle to create its ideal E3 demo, Sony understood and granted Journey an extension. “We were addicted to extensions. My name is Robin and I am an extension-holic.”
By the time Journey was actually, seriously, really able to hit its 2012 release date, Hunicke and her crew were prepared to skip out on their salaries and work with “a skeleton crew.” Financial pressures “kept those of us who owned the company up at night. But we could see the summit.”
In the end, Hunicke explained, it was about letting go, both in terms of ideas that wouldn’t make it into Journey or the trust problems growing as time went on. The solution to completing Journey became, “we were nice to each other.”
Journey broke thatgamecompany, but it became the fastest-selling game on PSN, and topped charts for months to follow. It was a great success because the team’s hope and dedication to something they truly loved and felt mattered to the medium transcended internal issues. “We focused on the feeling. We knew the destination,” Hunicke said. “It was in our hearts from the very beginning.”
Mitch Dyer is an Associate Editor for IGN's Xbox 360 team. He’s also quite Canadian. Read his ramblings on Twitter and follow him on IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
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