Documentary Follows 5 Year Dev of Secret Ponchos
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Maybe you noticed the review of Secret Ponchos that a curiously handsome and brilliant writer posted yesterday morning (me). It came to my attention that the video production company Pebble Studio put together a short documentary about the games development.
“It’s impossible to tell that it was built such a small team,” said Justin Moore of Pebble Studio. “Throughout most of the project, there were only five full time developers working themselves into exhaustion.”
If you were unaware, Secret Ponchos has been locked in development for the last five years. It has been built, rebuilt, carted out to game shows,
survived Early Access, and tied up and dragged behind an outlaws horse. Maybe I made that last one up.
“Competitive PvP is one of the most difficult genres of game to build, even for major studios.” Yousuf
Mapara, creative lead, told Pebble Studio. “But we were building our dream game – there was no room for compromise! For the first several months we didn’t even have a single programmer on the team, so we focused on what we could do: we started creating the art and music and before we knew it momentum was building.”
This 14 minute documentary follows the creative lead, Yousuf Mapara, and his team. The video displays the challenges small game studios face and tells their stories of overcoming them. From having to entirely rebuild the game to working from home while raising an infant, they went through a lot to make their game.
It’s a humbling feeling to be reminded that some of the best games available now are built by teams just like this; people chasing their dreams, working to delirium, all the while not knowing what kind of payoff they will (or won’t) see.
Did I mention that Secret Ponchos rocks and you should buy it?
