“We aimed high and ambitious and decided no shortcuts and cut corners,” said Bauer. That is something more simple and admirable. None of these things are the main reason for Owlboy’s extended prelude, though. The team set out to legitimise 2D art as something worthy and beautiful in itself, not just as a retro aesthetic Photograph: D-Pad Studios And then there was a side project, working with Norwegian musician Savant to create a game in his name, Savant - Ascent, released in 2013. Unexpected family deaths and burnout have also caused small delays over the years as well.
Instead, Owlboy’s level designer Adrian Bauer explains that the studio wasn’t officially formed until 2010 and that the custom XNA engine the team uses wasn’t particularly stable or optimised until around 2012. Sure, there was some drama, with the game’s original programmer leaving the project back in 2009, but this is not a story about huge budgets and legal papers. One factor is that Owlboy found itself in development suspension for very different reasons than those bigger titles. The question is: how did D-Pad Studios, a five-person team based in Norway, buck the trend from bloat to broke? Because Owlboy turned out to be magnificent, garnering hugely positive reviews. More recently, it was named “Best in Play” at the 2015 Game developer Conference, and was selected to be showcased at PAX West this past September.īut this is where the comparison with those other much hyped titles ends. In 2010, it was named Game of the Year at the Norwegian Game Awards, and a year later its first public demo was widely praised.
Then there’s the notorious Duke Nukem Forever with its lawsuits and financial troubles, taking 15 years from first public announcement to final release – and it was awful.Īnnounced back in 2007, Owlboy flirts with those titles in terms of development longevity – released this month, the 2D platformer only narrowly avoided a decade from conception to release. The much anticipated Too Human was juggled for nine years from the original PlayStation to a Nintendo GameCube exclusive, finally surfacing as a mediocre Xbox 360 title. It took eight years to build and never quite lived up to the epic premise. Spore was Will Wright’s attempt to simulate the evolution of a life form from the microbiological stage to space-age civilisation. Many video games with famously protracted development times have one thing in common: they turned out to be huge disappointments.
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