So, a game I recently worked on’s first review just came out, and it’s less than stellar – averaged about a 50%. Seems fair, to be honest. Yeah, it’s the worst review score I’ve seen on a game I worked on, but while on other games, I thought those review scores were low, and they tended to be outliers, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is about what the game ends up getting.

So, it’s not really that the review score is a letdown – it’s about what I expected. It’s that the game is a letdown. I put a lot of effort into it, but knew that ~50-60% was the best we could hope for. Games are about both structure and content. You could have great level design in a FPS, for instance, but if the mechanic of shooting didn’t work, no one will care how good the level design was. Similarly, a great mechanic can’t make up for bland or boring content.

The game simply has weak mechanics in every respect, and the original content was also incredibly poor. While I had time to bring the content up to what I think was a decent level, for the characters I worked on, that was only maybe 1/4 of the content of one part of the game, and it still rested on weak mechanics.

*sigh*

Oh, well. It’s not like I didn’t know it was coming.