It all started in 2021 after I’d finished some freelance work with my previous employer…
Gritstone Games is born
Back in January of 2021 Gritstone Games was incorporated with Companies House in the United Kingdom. It had been a lifelong ambition of mine to set up a games company, I just hadn’t figured out what to make it unique. When I finally settled on a concept I’ve now labelled as Crossplay+ I at least had an end goal.
I knew at the time that it was a lofty goal – I later learned that it was the vision component of the vision-mission-values trifecta, a deliberately ambitious target that you likely never to reach but it’s your guiding light in the decisions you make. Then again, Microsoft’s original vision in 1979 was “A computer on every desk and in every home” and look what happened – they ended up having to change their lofty vision after realising it!
The question then came to how do I get to that vision which ultimately came down to proving that the concept works. Given that it would most likely require a significant budget I had to start small, lay the groundwork and grow. I am the only full time person at Gritstone so I needed to make something that would help through each project and reduce the repetitiveness of some tasks, a core library if you will.
A library is all well and good in theory but you won’t realise its usefulness until you put it into practice. For that I needed to embed it into a game and find its weaknesses – the question was then “what game?”. I needed something that:
- could be played on multiple platforms
- be multiplayer
- be simple enough for me to build
- be fun enough to attract a decent test size of players
Serendipitous Viewing
Coincidentally the Vikings TV show was available on Netflix at the time and I was hooked – there was something cathartic about the blunt and brutality of how they handled… politics (to which I was fed up about at the time). It delivered that same feeling you get when playing the 2016 version of Doom (you know you shouldn’t admit to enjoying blasting a shotgun into a demon’s face, it’s possibly unhealthy… but come on!). Not to mention the production value was amazing.
In any case there is a scene when I think the Norwegian King (Harald Finehair) comes to visit and while they’re all enjoying themselves in the long hall he starts a conversation with another protagonist. At that point a young boy also approaches and asks for a round of a game that was promised earlier. Harald smiles, agrees and plays an entire round of this game while still maintaining the conversation, probably something about the next raid.
I was stunned, enough to pause the episode. What was that game? A quick Google search revealed it to be Hnefatafl, a board game considered to be the precursor to chess. More importantly it was one of many tafl (pronounced [tavl], old Norse for table) style games that existed across northern Europe, particularly in Scandinavia and the British Isles. A bit more (fascinating) digging later and there was enough information to be able to build a full game and after the smallest effort in market analysis there was small competition (it is somewhat niche) – small enough to give it a go.
That was it, that was the game to make.
Development, Promotion and Launch
Work began in earnest in March and finished roughly six months later. There was a lot to do – not only to build the game as per the parameters set above but also to set up the relevant services, sign up to developer agreements for three separate stores (including their tax forms). Plenty of new experiences and problems to solve after a decade of working professionally in the industry – it was great! Any form of craft can become stagnant if you’re repeating the same type of work and this was generating enough interest to have me springing out of bed each morning.
I’d like to make a special shoutout to my friend and former colleague Matthew Ware who provided the artwork. We’ve worked together on multiple projects over the years and he’s been a persistently reliable source of quality work. I’ve no doubt in my mind that his work did a lot of heavy lifting when attracting new players to this game. He currently spends his time creating assets on the Unity Asset Store and Epic’s Fab (the successor to the UE Marketplace) – I highly recommend you to check them out.
I didn’t have a budget beyond what I could afford to keep myself going. I’d just moved back from Canada an d the UK was still in a quasi-lockdown so I moved into my Dad’s place which helped save a lot of pennies. So I had to be picky as how to best spend my time promoting the game.
Very early in development I received a message from Steam that they were preparing the first Next Fest and applications were open to promote new games. At the time I thought this might be a one off opportunity so I submitted the game and it was promptly accepted. The only issue was that one of the stipulations was that the game had to be released within 6 months of the promotion – now I had a deadline.
The Steam Next Fest came and went, providing some much needed coverage and wishlist numbers. I honestly can’t remember how finished the demo was at that point – I think there were several features disabled – but people seemed to like it.
Finally, in October I released the game on Steam, the Apple App Store and Google Play at the same time. As multiplayer game launches go, this was relatively smooth and I was lucky it was. I was attending my first Develop: Brighton conference the following week, trying to drum up any kind of financial support for Gritstone and its future plans. Importantly, the core tech library I had wanted to test was standing up to the usage – a couple of niggles here and there but nothing game breaking. All in all, a successful launch and test!
Ticking along in the Background
At that point I didn’t have any plans for the game save any quality of life and necessary maintenance as my attention turned towards the next step in that grandiose vision of mine. Player reviews and feedback came in, all welcomed and in most cases fair and critical. Maybe I’ll come back to this or maybe people will forget about it and move on – we’ll see.
The thing is, the game didn’t die.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s barely lived. What I can’t ignore however is the fact, despite there being no marketing effort whatsoever, new players were still finding it, installing it and playing it, across all storefronts. I know this because the backend is powered by PlayFab and I get a daily e-mail of player registrations, DAUs, MAUs, revenue generated etc.
Okay, these aren’t exactly exciting numbers but when you consider the noise in the storefronts, the competition for people’s time and again, no marketing to speak of… these kinds of numbers came in nearly every day. Did I accidentally make an ember of a potential fire? Surely not… nah.
Tick, tick, tick…
This went on for nearly three years. Over that time I was prototyping other projects, enrolled on accelerators, attending conferences, workshops, presentations and so on. I was trying to get started on the next phase of my mission and it wasn’t working. Investors and financiers simply won’t go anywhere near a micro developer (this isn’t the 80s) and I didn’t have a viable alternative product to offer to publishers.
Side note: this was during the time of blockchain games, NFTs, Metaverses and other unfulfilled promises during low interest rates and “the best time to get investment” – you can imagine my frustration during this time
Develop: Brighton 2024 was coming up in June and despite having signed up to attend I really wasn’t sure what I was going to pitch this time. I was working on another prototype at the time that I hoped would be the one but by the time the conference came round I couldn’t convince myself it was fun or good enough.
Then again, that daily e-mail. More new players from somewhere.
I looked over the reviews and feedback. Most of it was positive as indicated on the Steam store page: “Mostly positive”. What critical feedback I had received was fair: desired features, missing settings and a lack of persistent online players. Thinking back to the development process I hadn’t really put enough effort into keeping players around long enough to play each other and providing enough entertainment for when they aren’t. All of these issues are fixable, I thought.
Some context: a very popular live ops game I worked on before had a declining revenue stream. It wasn’t near the point of being shut down but the downward trend was unmistakeable. The publisher had a choice to make: either to cut their losses or double down. Thankfully, they chose the latter and the first feature I worked on there was designed to at least make the curve flatter.
Six months of hard work and a fractious launch later it had done better than expected and flattened the curve entirely – it had provided a new foundation from which to turn the tide. I was thoroughly impressed – the publisher had done good and proved a point: in certain situations, games can be recovered.
So I went to Brighton, cap in hand almost, and pitched the idea of remastering Tafl Champions to those that would listen. To my surprise, the story of this game peaked their interest – not enough to put money down but enough to offer support where possible and a desire to be updated in the future. One follow up meeting later someone said:
“Normally I’d say absolutely not to something like this… but there’s just enough…”
Armed with this knowledge I came up with a list of features, a rough plan and pitched again with more information at the same conference but in Liverpool a few months later. Again, no money but an even stronger show of support. They agreed that there was potential to make this game into something more than it is.
And now…
The road to recovery has begun. I will be working on version 2 of Tafl Champions: Ancient Chess that will address all the issues found so far and I also have plans for afterwards but that is for another time. As stated before Gritstone Games is just me and whatever freelance help I can get when possible so this will take some time.
You can help speed things up however by spreading the word, providing any feedback and, if you can, donate some funds that will lessen my need to freelance on the side. I intend to release new articles like this on a regular (maybe bi-weekly) basis to keep you updated. I hope we all get to see this through to the end!