We live in a world where we see finished products. Mostly finished products. Early Access has changed the moment in a game’s development where we’re invited in to play, but usually, we’re still on a road to release. There’s a linear progression: a developer begins a project and then works on it through to launch; an idea begins and develops and ends. That’s how we think about games, about what the process of making them is. But what about the game ideas that don’t make it, what about the ideas that never get that far, the creative cul-de-sacs and dead ends? Think about how many ideas you’ve had in your life and how far each of those ideas got. How many went the distance? How many resulted in a fully formed thing? Because I believe we’re just as shaped by the ideas that don’t make it, as we are the ones that do.
Here’s a glimpse into game development we don’t normally get: A Short Hike developer Adam Robinson-Yu has released a demo for an unfinished game. A game he was making before he took a break to make A Short Hike, which unexpectedly did very well, and which he always intended to return to. And he was as good as his word: he did return to it, to Untitled Paper RPG as it’s called. But he discovered when he did that he didn’t like it any more. “The development for the RPG had become difficult,” he wrote in a development update on Itchi.io, “which was why I took a break from it in the first place.”
Immediately upon playing the demo of Untitled Paper RPG, it’s hard to see why he feels this way. The vibes of the game are, according to a new saying I’m desperate to shoehorn in somewhere, immaculate. You are a cute crocodile person in a scarf, who lives in a village of other crocodile people, and you need to collect signatures for a birthday card for your best friend (who’s a bird by the way, not a crocodile). This pushes you to meet people in the village, who are an eccentric bunch.
One crocodile in a dressing gown rants about the days of the week. “Ugh, I hate Mondays,” they say. “You know what’s worse than Mondays?” Pause. “Nothing.” I laugh. Interact with them again and they move on to Tuesday. Interact again and it’s Wednesday; “Wednesdays are the real test, they drag on and on forever and the payoff is just Thursday.” Another laugh. I highlight this because that’s the standard of the writing throughout: bright and energetic and funny, whoever you talk to.
Nintendo – that’s what it reminds me of. Specifically, Zelda Wind Waker-era Nintendo, childlike in presentation but full of wit, and innately, unavoidably, uplifting. There’s another reason for that Nintendo comparison too (there are actually two reasons for it). One: quality. It’s immediately apparent. Move your crocodile side to side screen and their paper-thin character model flips to show movement, or bump into objects in the world and they fall and roll and interact too. There’s toylike, touchable detail here. And the warmth the world projects, be it through the oranges and pinks and purples in golden evening light – a heck of a palette! – or the exaggerated expressions of characters: it’s irresistible. It feels like a finished game. Robust, entertaining, enjoyable. Also, side note: you can see how Robinson-Yu got to A Short Hike from here.
Nintendo comparison reason two: it was directly inspired by Paper Mario, the spin-off, papery, turn-based RPG. “I first started this project in 2016, after seeing the announcement for Paper Mario Color Splash,” Robinson-Yu wrote. “I was nostalgic for the old style of Paper Mario and thought – well, I make games, why not try making the game I want to see?” So, surprise surprise, this Untitled Paper RPG is a turn-based RPG. Whenever combat occurs, the game goes side-on and turn-based, and, as in Paper Mario, there are many abilities based on jumping on enemy heads.
It’s got some great ideas. Despite being turn-based, the game keeps you active in combat by having you press buttons at the moment you jump on an enemy head, or the moment they attack you, to either improve your attack or defense, or you can button-match in a rhythm action way to try and charm enemies and move them, permanently, over to your team. They then adventure with you and you level them up. I’ve not seen that before. There’s actually a lot about the flow of combat that reminds me of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, in how you need to learn enemy attack patterns to properly defend yourself, and in how the energy of combat is lifted because of it. Style, inventiveness, humour – there’s a great deal about Untitled Paper RPG to like. So why did Robinson-Yu decide to shelve it?
I call it the RPG problem, and I’ve only just coined that phrase so it may need workshopping. These games are honey traps for developers. I’ve seen it a lot. They are incredibly appealing because they’re big experiences and have a foundational impact on us, upon our taste in games, perhaps because we play them for so long they lodge so deep. So when we come around to making one, to making a game, we want to make one like them; it’s a bit like writing a book, if you’ve ever wanted to write a book – the first ideas always seem to be huge ideas. Move over Tolkien.
But RPGs are deceptive because they’re not just, and never just, one thing. They’re an epic adventure but they’re also stories about characters, and combat and magic and rules that govern them. They’re character customisation, they’re romance, maybe, and choices. They’re malleable. They span tens of hours, hundreds of hours, and they need vaults of content and a clockwork series of systems to support that. I’m playing a game called Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Stole Time at the moment and it’s a great example of these many things in action. It can be bewilderingly complex. These are the trappings of the genre, the trappings Untitled Paper RPG needs.
The demands of being an RPG outfaced Robinson-Yu. “The scope felt too big!” he wrote. Having to develop a battle system and an overworld felt like he was making two games. “I didn’t have a story!” he wrote. He had characters and some systems but no idea of where they’d go. Worse, he had more fundamental problems with what he was portraying. He wanted a friendly world, as in A Short Hike, and fighting didn’t seem to fit it, however cute it was. He also had second thoughts about the turn-based combat and the frequency of it. “I got the sense that battles just felt like an annoying obstacle to players interested in exploring,” he said. And he’s right, the battles do start to feel that way the longer into the demo you get. “In general, I started to lose the joy that I felt working on it.”
It makes me wonder how many other developers started out on similar whims to Robinson-Yu, as he called it, and then hit a wall a year or two further in. The difference here is that we’re hearing about it, and seeing it, and playing it, and I think it’s an incredibly valuable thing to let us do. It not only humanises a developer as someone making something that didn’t work out, but it also shares that experience with other developers, or prospective developers, and in doing so says, hey sometimes it’s okay to move on. It’s okay to fail.
It’s a reminder, too, that developers know more about a game’s shortcomings than we do. Far more. We rush to tell them what’s right and what’s wrong with their games upon release, as if we’re discovering these things, and in some ways I suppose we are, for ourselves, but it’s not news to them. They know. One of the best talks I’ve watched was Obsidian’s Josh Sawyer talking about why Pillars of Eternity 2 wasn’t a resounding success, which to me, as a fan of the game and the studio, was a thrilling glance at the kinds of conversations people working there must have. But Pillars 2 was a game that made it, that was finished – how many other games at Obsidian are not? I actually got the chance to metaphorically rummage through Obsidian’s box of game ideas once, and there were a lot of game ideas there, including one for Snow White RPG. How much of Obsidian’s identity is informed by what it doesn’t make as by what it does?
As for Robinson-Yu, he’s moved on. He’s started projects for an action adventure game, which he shared a screenshot of, a micro-RPG with a claymation aesthetic, and an online platforming roguelike. Fewer smaller things, it sounds like, which he can hop between when inspiration strikes him. “Somehow that worked for A Short Hike,” he said, “and sometimes that leads me astray.” As for Untitled RPG? It’s not outright cancelled but it’s unlikely he’ll go back to it. “Hope you enjoy taking a peek behind the curtain at a game part-way through an aimless development,” he wrote. Adam Robinson-Yu, I certainly did.
