There’s often more to be learned in failure than success, so knowing how to turn a game development misadventure into something worthwhile is an important skill for any creator to have.

That’s why the developers of Citystream, Game Oven, and Videoball took to the stage at GDC 2017 to speak candidly about their own projects that, for whatever reason, fell short of a successful launch. 

The 2017 Failure Workshop collects the experiences of Michael Molinari, Adriaan de Jongh, and Tim Rogers as they detail the development, struggles, and eventual takeaways of their recent failed creations.

Molinari’s project, an interactive Twitch game called Citystream, shut down after just two months. The team had originally prepared the game engine to handle thousands of simultaneous players only to have player counts peak at around 100. Creating a game exclusively played on one Twitch channel came with its own set of balance and monetization struggles.

“Citystream was a fun experiment that certainly taught us a lot about dealing with emergent multiplayer ecosystems, but the time pressure combined with too many design and UX flaws prevented it from taking off as we had hoped. We still believe to this day that all major issues with the game are solvable, especially after having experienced them fall apart after the course of a couple months.” 

For more from Molinari, in addition to comments from de Jongh on Game Oven and Rogers on Videoball, take a look at the full workshop for free over on the official GDC YouTube channel. 

About the GDC Vault

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