Illuvium: Zero Alpha Season 1 - Post Mortem

Illuvium: Zero Post Mortem

As Game Director, I want to address the challenging release of our first season. I fully understand your frustrations with the delays and confusion that occurred, and we need to recognise and take ownership of our mistakes and share with you what we have learned and how we plan to move forward.

Background and Vision

Before getting into the details, I’d like to take a moment to give some background to the development of Illuvium Zero as a whole. The game initially started as an idea to have a small team make a mini-game. We asked the community what they would like to see, and the majority said a city builder. This was a fantastic idea… until I sunk my teeth into it. I saw a vision of what Illuvium could be. A deeply connected world where even staking became a game. Players could have massive economic impacts, and I ran with it. But as the vision expanded, we realised that the game's complexity would need to increase. This change of scope and the lack of resources inevitably led to some of the issues we faced. My biggest failure was not understanding that integrating this game into the heart of Illuvium’s ecosystem meant it could no longer be treated as a mini-game. The tech needed to be as secure as any bank.

Team Challenges

The small team assembled to deliver the initial promise was inadequate to deliver something much bigger. We had only one person on the team capable of leading such a pivotal product, our CTO, who had hundreds of other daily tasks. Not ideal. Others were working on the project but were never hired to build something as sprawling and complex as Illuvium: Zero. We knew we needed to find a lead that could take over from Johnny, but the transition could have been smoother. We now have an excellent team leader in Julien, plus a couple more senior engineers working on the project, so the future looks bright.

Communication Lapses

I transitioned towards Illuvium: Beyond for a period, and I lost touch with the Zero community. There were instances of “surprise” releases, which caused inconvenience. We understand the importance of transparency and notice periods. This situation taught us the importance of constant clear communication with our community, and we have steps in place to ensure that communication is more distributed.

Lack of Dev Blog

As you can see, there’s a pattern forming. A lot of these issues are squarely on my shoulders. I’d love to use the excuse that I have too many things on my plate and work long hours, but none of that matters. A dev blog would have made things a lot smoother. We have our roadmap, but it doesn’t always give context. I could have elaborated more on our issues in the blog to help you understand these pain points. Instead, I had my head down, trying to get things done.

Technical Transitions

Transitioning to a server-side authority structure for the Beta was a significant challenge. We planned for this early and knew we would have to transition eventually, but this also made it easy to let the quality of the Alpha code base slip. We struggled to find the right balance here: sometimes, the quality slipped as we knew we would rewrite something and other times, we over-corrected and over-engineered a feature or fix.

Quality Assurance Challenges

One of the major hurdles we faced came in the form of game-breaking bugs post-release. This wasn't a shortcoming of our dedicated QA team but rather a consequence of intense time pressure to release the game. In our rush to meet community expectations, we missed some crucial issues. Over the past two years, this recurrence has taught us a valuable lesson: rushing to meet deadlines can lead to oversights that, ironically, cause even longer delays.

Production Oversights

Development-related decisions added to our challenges. Requirements for the marketplace were unclear, which was entirely my responsibility. We treated this as a temporary solution before moving to a live marketplace, and more consideration should have gone into the requirements before handing it to the dev team. This caused additional complications and delays.

Art Pipeline

The expansion of Illuvium Zero's vision meant our art pipeline had to be entirely reworked. The quality we strive for now is different from what we initially planned. Fortunately, our new process is streamlined, and we anticipate no further delays. On a positive note, we’ve managed to do much of the optimisation work already, and the game runs much smoother than it did.

Production and Schedule Collisions

As Illuvium Zero got delayed, it started encroaching on the timeline of our other games. Managing multiple projects simultaneously has been a challenging endeavour for our team size. However, we are now beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Many major projects are completed, and others are nearing maturity. We are learning to manage our time and resources better to prevent similar overlaps in the future.

Balancing Community Expectations

The correct dynamic must exist between the community and us as developers, and we haven’t found it yet. We are so focused on making you happy and delivering what you want that sometimes we forget to occasionally say, “No, this will take too long, and you can’t have it yet.” Once we find a healthy balance where we stop placating the loud minority and instead focus on what we do best, things will improve. I think the sub-councils will help. They will filter out the community voices, so we don’t have to worry about every comment. But this isn’t to say that we don’t appreciate the community.

Conclusion

We are committed to learning from our mistakes and pushing forward to ensure a better experience for our community. The positive is that we have already vastly improved our workflow and processes. Moving forward, we feel our estimates will be accurate, and you’ll be happy with our new processes.

Sincerely,

Aaron Warwick

Game Director

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