It's Game Developers Conference week, and you know what that means: Developers giving humbling talks about the difficult job of making games and offering advice to avoid the pitfalls that beset even the top-selling greats. One such talk this year was Arrowhead CCO Johan Pilestedt's panel "Helldivers 2: Capturing Lightning in a Bottle" reflecting on the co-op shooter's wildly successful launch last year.
Helldivers 2 was a breakout hit, but as Pilestedt recalled, it was also a long and difficult production delayed by poor planning. Ironically, the original idea for the sequel was to avoid the sort of overcomplicated production cycles Arrowhead had experienced in the days before Helldivers.
"We were throwing around some ideas, and then we got a little cautious because we've been burned before by making games that are a little bit too complicated for what we're capable of, and then having to crunch. It takes so much energy," Pilestedt said.
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"So we said, 'This will be easy. We can probably do it in four years.'"
As we all know, it did not take four years. According to Pilestedt, the final tally was seven years, 11 months, and 26 days. What took so long? Pilestedt chalked it up to multiple factors, like the challenge of growing a studio while also making a game, but he identified one early mistake that set Helldivers 2 back significantly: skipping pre-production.
"We already knew where the game was going to go and headed straight into production—it was a really, really, really bad idea," Pilestedt said. "Always do your homework before you start spending millions and millions and millions of dollars in making a game."
We hear the word "pre-production" thrown around a lot in relation to game development, but the principle applies to any work. It's always better to know what you want to make—not just in theory, but the specific shape of it—before investing a lot of time, effort, and money. Skipping pre-production is like buying a whole grocery cart's worth of ingredients to make roast chicken, then deciding halfway through cooking that you actually want steak. Time wasted, and millions of dollars of chicken breast tossed in the bin.
Of course, games often change course during development even after going through pre-production, but the idea is to lock in scope and minimize tectonic shifts in creative direction. That's easier said than done when gamers' tastes change with the wind, but that gets to the heart of another point Pilestedt made during his talk: Developers need to take more risks and worry less about chasing trends.
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