A Learning Experience

There’s no real easy way to say this so we’re just going to rip the band-off: The Scooby game has been cancelled. 

After a tumultuous development cycle made up of numerous harsh road bumps, the direction for the game had to take a sharp turn in order for us to wind up with anything usable. However, the response from our initial play testers made it abundantly clear that people’s expectations for the game were too far removed from what we were looking to deliver. Even among our testers, those expectations negatively colored players’ opinions to such a great degree that we have chosen it best to use the game’s development solely as a harsh learning experience – one from which we did in fact learn a great deal. 

We were never expecting to make a large Scooby game with a continuous development process. That was never the goal. We were simply seeking to make something small and very appropriate for Newgrounds, like Bend or Break.

Also, our company goals and direction has seen a distinct shift since we began the Scooby project – one that the Scooby game doesn’t quite fit into. It’s become the case that the game has been holding up progress on other items we believe our fans and patrons would be much more interested in. 

Being such a small team, we have to carefully choose where we divert our limited resources. We were stuck with a choice. Spend even more time and resources to get something somewhat usable out of the Scooby endeavor or take the loss and divert resources towards projects that our fans will be much more excited about. In that context, at least for us, it was a simple decision to make. 

The good news is that we learned a lot from the experience that will help us create better games in a timelier manner moving forward. Our preproduction and employee vetting processes have immensely improved, and Locke – who will be our lead programmer on all projects moving forward – created some coding techniques and snippets that our future titles will certainly benefit from. 

We aren’t going to leave our patrons out in the lurch with nothing after all of this time though. We will be handing out a Scooby game asset pack with all of the art and assets that were created for the game. It will initially be made available to our $10+ patrons, as per usual, but will be given out to the rest of our patrons two weeks later as an apology for dashing your hopes. (Maybe some of you will see a few of the issues that led us to this moment upon reviewing the asset pack too.)

Our deepest apologies to any and all let down by this news. All we can do is learn from this experience and be better in the future, which is exactly what we intend to do. 

Thanks for reading,

    - Gunsmoke Games