A Look-back at Puzzling Places in 2020

What. A. Year. Rarely since we started realities.io in 2016 did a year turn out so different from what we had planned out at the start. Time to take a look back and reflect how we ended up developing Puzzling Places!

Covid hit Europe right as we were getting ready for a number of big scanning projects for some external clients. But with more and more borders closing, one project after another ended up being delayed or cancelled altogether. As we moved into working remotely in our  home offices, we suddenly had a lot of time at our hands with no clear perspective when things would open up again - so we decided to pull a prototype out of the drawer that we’ve played with in 2019 and develop it into a prototype for SideQuest.

Happy Little Accident

As so many things in this world, Puzzling Places was born out of one of those happy little accidents. Sometime in mid 2019, we were importing one of our 3D scans into Unreal just to find all its pieces (we are cutting large scans into pieces to optimize performance) completely jumbled up due to a pipeline bug. Looking a bit puzzled at the mess in front of us, our Graphics Programmer Shahriar joked we should just ship it like that and let the users put it together, like a jigsaw puzzle. Silence as we looked at each other, our eyes growing bigger - we should actually try this! So over the next few weeks, Shahriar took the lead, throwing together a first prototype in Unity for desktop VR - and it turned out even more fun than we hoped! However, other things (aka client projects) came along and we had to put the prototype in the drawer for now.

The Prototype

To not get completely carried away, we set ourselves three targets:

• Switch from Unity to Unreal. While Unity was great for prototyping, we felt Unreal with its possibility to dive all the way down into the engine code if necessary, was the way to go for a more unusual project like what we had in mind.
• Develop for the Quest instead of PC VR. After establishing that we could bring our photogrammetry models to run smoothly on the Quest, the pick-up-and-play experience of an untethered all in one headset felt like a much better fit than PC VR.
• Limit the Prototype development to a “game jam” of 4 weeks and then release what we have to Sidequest to find out if this game is only fun for photogrammetry weirdos like us or if other people enjoy this as well.

And off we went, the weird vacuum of the first lockdown allowed four of us to completely dive into Puzzling Places with no other projects on the radar - and it felt glorious. Four weeks of game jamming with tons of iterations, experiments and MacGyver solutions - like our Director of Photogrammetry Azad being stuck in France with only his laptop, recording all SFX with his binaural mic beatboxing and banging together kitchen utensils while having to work around the construction noises in the apartment next door.

After 4 weeks we were getting super close, so we decided to add a few extra days to round things off and finally, on April 28th, we launched the Puzzling Places [Prototype] on Sidequest - and were blown away by the response. Download numbers kept rising, players were writing amazing reviews, a ton of excitement on Reddit and social media and even articles on Road to VR and Upload VR. And on top of that, physical puzzles were selling out, most of our other projects were still on hold and more and more reviews started to ask for more content - it felt like the universe was giving us a nudge. So when the dust settled we decided to take the jump and turn the Puzzling Places Prototype into a full game!

The Patreon Campaign

To be honest, initially we were super unsure whether starting a Patreon campaign would be worth the additional effort in the end. Yes, there were quite a lot of reviews asking for more puzzles, but looking around, there weren’t too many successful (non-porn) Patreon Campaigns to be found in gaming, especially not in VR. In the end we decided to give it a try. Maybe we could get 20-50 Patrons and prove that people liked Puzzling Places enough to put down a few bucks - which would come in handy when trying to get the game into the highly curated Oculus Store. Also we would have a small community to give us feedback on the latest builds and make sure we don’t mess up things along the way.

Boy were we wrong! A bit over a month after launching the Patreon at the end of June and already surpassed our target of 50 Patrons. At the time of writing this, we released over 30 puzzles and have more than 300 amazing Patrons supporting the development of Puzzling Places. That is far beyond what we dared to hope for! We are humbled and extremely thankful to each and everyone of you! Not only for your pledges but also with the detailed feedback and for being just as excited as us about VR jigsaw puzzling!

Also, thanks to your support we were able to recently bring on a dedicated sound designer for the game, further exploring how to bring puzzles alive through soundscapes - you’ll hear more of his work soon!

Funding, Exclusivity & Creative Control

Of all the challenges of making an indie game, funding is probably one of the toughest ones. We’ve started funding Puzzling Places out of our own (i.e. realities.io) pockets - but those were limited and even the (unexpectedly) amazing Patreon support wouldn’t be enough to enable us to finish the game. So over the summer, we got busy trying to secure additional funding. We’ll spare you the details of that particular roller coaster rides between government grants and partnership deals (most of it we are probably not allowed to talk about anyway). What we can say however, is that we managed to secure enough funding to enable us to release the game. We are still on a budget and have had to take on some additional client work that will require us to spend some of our time on things outside Puzzling Places. But we managed to remain in complete creative control, control of the timeline and without any exclusivity deals - and that’s something we are extremely happy with!

Thank you!

Thanks again to everyone who supported us this year with their reviews, comments, pledges, or just by downloading and playing Puzzling Places. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you. We hope we could bring you a few relaxed and peaceful hours of puzzling during these tumultuous times!

So far for the recap, but what about what's up next for Puzzling Places? We’ll follow up with an additional post early next year after our kickoff to share more with you about what’s to come in 2021, so stay tuned!

But for now, Happy New Year from the realities.io team and see you in 2021!