Road Not Taken a personal game, created pragmatically

When it comes to making games, indie developer Spry Fox prefers to seed small ponds with big fish. From Flash portals to E-ink Kindle readers, the company has a history of releasing games like Triple Town into markets it believes to be underserved in order to nab a critical advantage: visibility. "The single biggest factor shaping indie success at the moment is, I think, whether your game is seen; whether people hear about it, know about it, buy it," Spry Fox co-founder Daniel Cook tells me during a recent Skype conversation. He's trying to explain his company's decision to partner with Sony and publish its upcoming roguelike, Road Not Taken, on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita. Road Not Taken was originally announced as a 2013 release for PC and mobile devices, but that was bumped back to "sometime in 2014" late last year, around the same time the studio confirmed the deal with Sony to bring it to PSN. Cook, a game industry veteran who left a job at Microsoft to cofound Spry Fox in 2010, claims the deal came together off the back of a few friendly conversations with Sony. To hear him tell it, the folks at Sony are very friendly to indie developers right now for the same reason that most platform holders tend to be very friendly to third-party developers during the first few years of a console's lifecycle -- they need to get more games on their machine. "It's a wonderful time to be looking at consoles -- for the moment," Cook tells me. "This is a unique time where the first generation of successful indies still have money left, and they can still self-fund. I don't know if that’s going to continue in the future -- it depends on whether there’s a second generation of successful indies." Spry Fox would seem to be one of those success stories -- Road Not Taken is entirely self-funded, the product of roughly two years' worth of work on the part of Cook and a team of developers who wound up iterating on a match-three puzzle game prototype until it evolved into a procedurally-generated roguelike about rescuing lost children.

Making games that run on human hardware

Spry Fox manages a variety of game projects in parallel using a product development process known as stage-gating, whereby the studio has internal teams working on multiple projects that are periodically evaluated ("Does this have a potential business opportunity? Is it artistically interesting?") and either reinforced or axed. It's a bit like the sort of internal game jams that many studios regularly run, though Cook

is quick to point out that Spry Fox subjects its internal projects to a more rigorous evaluation process than your typical jam. "I often say that games are code that runs on human hardware," Cook tells me. "It’s super easy to make a prototype that doesn’t actually 'run' on human hardware at all. You see this in a lot of game jam games, stuff that doesn’t work on people at all." Road Not Taken, a roguelike game about a ranger with a finite lifespan rescuing children in a foreboding, procedurally-generated forest, has survived the studio's internal gauntlet. It started out as a prototype with one designer -- Cook -- and one programmer, Cristian Soulos. The game was based on a casual puzzle game Soulos had made for his wife years earlier, one that she loved to play. "I think you were a crane, like a crane that lifts things and drops things," says Cook. "We were talking about match-three games at that point, we iterated on that and we said, 'well, what happens if you turn it into a roguelike?'" So they dropped the omniscient view of the puzzle board and zoomed in a bit, added an avatar for the player to control along with some crafting and collecting systems, and found that after three or four weeks of development the prototype still had something special; it still managed to run on "human hardware." The project was cleared to continue and more developers were brought on to Road Not Taken, including artist Brent Kobayashi. Kobayashi -- who previously served as art director at Tiny Speck on the now-defunct MMO Glitch before joining up with Spry Fox -- is the lead artist on Road Not Taken and is responsible, in Cook's words, for basically nailing what the game looks like today on his first try. With Kobayashi's rustic artwork laid atop the Road Not Taken prototype, the team began doing the hard work of finishing the game -- in Flash, with a Starling build -- and using ScaleForm to port it to PlayStation 4 and the Playstation Vita. The team has chronicled much of the game's development on its blog, from which the images and videos in this article are drawn. Now Cook is hoping to launch the roguelike puzzler this summer, while the selection of Playstation 4 games available on the PSN marketplace is still relatively sparse. "All marketplaces mature and get crowded," Cook tells me. "I don’t exactly know what the timespan on the new consoles will be, but I would guess that the sales that you get this summer will be radically different from the sales you get next summer if you don’t have promotion."

Coming to terms with the choices you make

Road Not Taken will be the first Spry Fox game to launch on a Sony console, and as a story-driven single-player experience it's also a relatively novel experience for Cook, who has previously worked on endlessly replayable puzzle games (Triple Town) and purely multiplayer titles like Realm of the Mad God. "This is a weird game for us, in that it's a piece of media that can be finished," Cook tells me. "It's a very different style of shipping than we do on our other titles, so there's immense tension and uncertainty in how people are going to react." During our conversation I press Cook about what inspired him to make Road Not Taken -- what inspires a man known for making mechanics-driven puzzle and multiplayer games, a man who got his start in the industry illustrating Epic MegaGames' classic arcade shoot-'em-up Tyrian, to design a roguelike about traversing a foreboding, snowbound forest and rescuing lost children? "It's a painful topic, so I tend not to talk about it," says Cook. But he manages to open up, anyway. "So...the game is about not being able to have kids," he says, after a brief pause. He tells me about the path he was led to believe his life would take, the path that leads past a good education, a good job, a loving marriage, and a happy family. "That's not how my life went," Cook tells me. "Most of the people I talk to, that's not how their lives have gone either. So this game is really about coming to terms with that." Much like the Robert Frost poem from which it takes its name, Cook tells me Road Not Taken is meant to be a game about finding meaning in the choices you make.