We are 3 ex-AAA gamedevs who worked on Spec Ops: The Line and Dead Island 2. This is how we went indie and made All Walls Must Fall.

In late 2015, we decided to become independent developers and make a hybrid of Syndicate, Braid, XCOM and Rez, set in an alternate Berlin where the wall never fell. It was a real departure from what we'd been working on before - multi-million dollar budgets for big AAA publishers in a large development studio full of talented developers. But after losing one project too many to the powers that be, we decided that staying part of that system meant not having any control over your work. We'd like to share that experience and give some insight into how All Walls Must Fall became the game it is today.

edit: full-sized image WITH DEAD ISLAND 2 CAT: http://i.imgur.com/KsJHpJI.jpg

We'd been at YAGER for different amounts of time: David and Rafal worked on Spec Ops: The Line as well as some other projects that never saw the light of day, and contributed to the development of Dreadnought, YAGER's space shooter that's just hit Beta (check it out!). David started as an Intern in QA and did stints as a Build Engineer and Technical Artist before becoming Staff Designer on Dead Island 2. Rafal did concept, VFX, 2D and UI art on various projects, as well as stints working on Technical Art and Graphic Design. And Isaac joined YAGER in 2013, shortly afterwards becoming Senior Programmer on DI2.

We were riding high, making a game that we were passionate about, with awesome features and fun, ground-breaking coop design (in the cloud!). For some reason Isaac was sent to EGX in London in 2014 to represent the game and YAGER, giving a development session and doing press interviews for the first time in his career. But the game we were making wasn't our game.

One morning in July 2015, we were called into YAGER's biggest meeting room for an unexpected morning announcement: the contract with Deep Silver to make Dead Island 2 was no more, and we should shut down our computers and go home. Of course rather than going home, we did what Berliners do - daydrinking.

A week later we were back in the office, to hear that Yager Productions, the company that owned the contract, would be declared insolvent as a result. The government would keep it running for 3 months, but if no new work was found, the company would close and we would all be out of a job. For Isaac, this was his fourth job-loss due to project cancellations or studio shut-downs in 7 years in the industry. Despite pouring our hearts into a project for years, working overtime and crunch, and getting good press when the game was announced at E3 and shown at Gamescom, it was to be taken away from us and given to another developer.

Luckily, it's difficult to get too down during Summer in Berlin. Once the hangovers went away, we thought about what we'd like to do next. There was a Ludum Dare game jam coming up soon, so we decided to give it a shot and try out something different. None of us had ever done a game jam before, strangely enough, and the idea that we could actually ship a game in 3 days was enticing.

So we were joined by two other YAGERs, Daniel Nordlander, who was a Game Designer on Dead Island 2, and Bairbre Bent, who was a Producer on Spec Ops and moved to Narrative Design for DI2. The weekend of the jam rolled around and we piled in to Rafal's apartment for three days. The theme was: You Are The Monster. We called our jam team inbetweengames.

The game we made was The Mammoth: A Cave Painting. Rafal's awesome 2D art is showcased on a cave painting come to life; Bairbre provided some beautiful narration; Isaac made a quick boids-based flocking AI to power the human hunters; and David and Daniel crafted a short, mournful tale with some simple, tight gameplay.

Play it now and cry: http://www.inbetweengames.com/blog/mammoth/

The day after the Jam ended, we took it along to our first Talk & Play in Berlin. As well as never doing a jam before, we'd never really come to the various indie events in Berlin. It's amazing how being stuck behind a wall of NDAs and company culture can foster a pretty insular climate. We had no idea there was this growing scene of developers in Berlin, with regular events, jams, meetups and mini conferences. Talk & Play happens every 2 months and features a couple of talks, followed by lots of developers bringing all kinds of projects to play and share.

After a few weeks the votes were counted, and the game was received as well as we could hope for, coming 17th overall and 6th in the mood category. It also got some pretty unexpected press coverage. The fact that we could go from nothing, to a game, to showing off and talking about the game, was intoxicating. For some of us, there was no going back.

Our contracts with YAGER were up at the end of September. Bairbre and Daniel got offers to move onto Dreadnought, YAGER's spaceship shooter that was still in development with publisher Six Foot. But for David, Isaac and Rafal, it was time to start thinking about what they wanted to work on. A game where you had to infiltrate Berlin nightclubs and take down targets in awesome, choreographed combat driven by Rez-style gameplay got us the most excited. We called it PROJEKT DISCO.

One of our earliest working combat prototypes was called the Dancefloor of Death. You had to plan out your moves one bar of the music at a time. If you made a mistake, you could UNDO the last action and go back to before it happened. Once you were happy with the bar, you could DROP IT - the game would rewind back to the beginning of the bar and play through all 8 beats in real-time. The tiles would flash in time to the music, and pause when the game was paused.

Meanwhile, Rafal started experimenting with different visual approaches. We decided early on that we wanted to go with an isometric-style camera, reminiscent of games like Syndicate or Fallout. Meanwhile, we wanted to ensure we could showcase his awesome, 2D character art. But a fully 2D environment too wouldn't really take advantage of the Unreal Engine, which we'd chosen to stick with after years of experience. We decided to go for a 2D/3D hybrid, with 2D character sprites against a fully destructive, 3D environment.

We also decided on the broader setting - an alternate, future Berlin where the Berlin Wall never fell and the city was still divided. And we started playing around with this phrase, All Walls Must Fall. In the Winter of 2015, it was starting to seem somehow relevant.

After trying out a number of alternate titles, nothing stuck as well as All Walls Must Fall: A Tech-Noir Tactics game. We wanted something that both described the world of the game and the gameplay, and a Fallout-style tagline helped do the job. Before choosing, we tried out a number of options on lots of people, from twitter and facebook polls to taking laminated test logos down to the local watering hole after work on Friday. Getting feedback on all aspects of the game and using it to improve what we're doing is a great advantage of being independent.

The game's now in a playable, fun state, and we'll be launching a Closed Alpha in May, exclusively for backers of the Kickstarter campaign that we're running now. Check out the Kickstarter video for more about the current state of the game:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inbetweengames/all-walls-must-fall-a-tech-noir-tactics-game?ref=1nevni

As we live in Berlin, doing research on the club scene here is very easy - and spending a pleasant Sunday afternoon at a club is a lovely experience. We took a couple of team outings, and Rafal started doing character studies. Despite being set in the future, the characters of today's Berliner clubbers still seem appropriate. The observation was made that the predominant colour scheme of these environments was black, white and naked.

We wanted to start talking about the game, and doing proper open development. It was one of the aspects of being indie that really appealed - being able to talk about what we were passionate about, no holds barred. But that meant announcing it to the world. We wanted to make a good first impression, so we decided to take one key room, the Dancefloor, and get it to a "shippable" stage.

We took one of Rafal's isometric concepts and gave ourselves the task of making the game look like that. We adapted the Mammoth's flocking AI to power our dancers, and created a 3D environment in Unreal that contained a crowd of animated, 2D characters.

In April 2016 we announced All Walls Must Fall to the world, during the International Games Week in Berlin. The Mammoth's android build got us a free booth at the A. MAZE festival, courtesy of Amazon, which we hijacked to show off our combat prototype, and ran a little competition to see who could survive longest.

We got some nice coverage in the press - people remembered us as the guys who made the Mammoth. It probably helped that we made one of the baby mammoths into our company logo.

After the Games Week ended, we got straight back into development. We started working on ways of generating the club procedurally, by stitching together hand-build rooms. We called the algorithm the Disco Generator. You can read more about it on our blog:
http://www.inbetweengames.com/blog/discogenerator/

As 2016 moved forward, we moved from a pre-production mode into production, and started putting the game together. We were awarded a funding loan from the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg in the summer, which would cover development until early 2017. We also moved out of Rafal's apartment into a shared office space in Kreuzberg, with our friends from Booster Space. A few months later we got awarded an Unreal Dev Grant from Epic Games, which helped give us some extra breathing space with production.

We also took the game to gamescom and showed it to a few publishers. While we got some good feedback, for many of them it didn't seem like a great fit - we wanted to do some kind of Early Access period, as working with the players to improve the game was something we hadn't done before and really thought was a great idea. But most publishers would prefer to just ship a game and be done with it. In the end, we never got really close to closing any kind of deal.

But we carried on with the game anyway. The core gameplay had evolved quite a bit - everything still happens on the beat, and the game still pauses while you're thinking about your actions. Once you've chosen an order, the game unpauses while the game carries it out, and then pauses again. All actions are measured in beats of the music, and your actions happen simultaneously with those of the enemies and other clubbers.

The Undo mechanic is still there, and once we realised we'd basically implemented time travel, we went all out with that concept. We now pitch the game as XCOM meets Braid, as we have multiple time manipulation abilities that are part of the tactical gameplay.

It's not all about combat though - we have two other main ways of interacting with the club and fulfilling your objective: Dialogue, which is used to manipulate people, and Hacking, which is used to alter the environment. Our current dialogue system involves procedurally choosing lines based on the emotional state of the target. Based on which emotional button you push, the NPC will react in different ways and potentially change their behaviour.

As we got closer to the end of our funding, it was clear we had two choices: either release the game into Early Access right away, or try to find more funding elsewhere to continue development and get the game as great as it can be, before it's released to the public.

Kickstarter was clearly the best way forward. We've been running a friends and family test on itch.io for a few months now, and we can easily extend that to a pool of passionate backers who want to play the game while it's in development and help move it forward. We can get the funds from the campaign to run a closed alpha for a few more months, and continue development until the game's really ready for a public, Open Access release on Steam.

If you're interested in joining us for this Closed Alpha, and getting your hands on the game in May - or if you just want the game when it's finished but at a small discount from the final price - check out our Kickstarter campaign:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inbetweengames/all-walls-must-fall-a-tech-noir-tactics-game?ref=1nevni

Hopefully you've enjoyed hearing our story! And there's a lot we haven't mentioned yet, including how we added Almut, our awesome Audio Lead, to the team, and how we put together our awesome soundtrack featuring not just tracks from her but also some other awesome composers from both the Berlin scene and other videogame composers. You can check out the soundtrack here: https://soundcloud.com/inbetweengames/sets/all-walls-must-fall-original

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/AWMFGame
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/inbetweengames
Newsletter: http://ks.allwallsmustfall.com/newsletter/

Thanks,
Rafal, Isaac, David and Almut
inbetweengames

PS: in case you missed it, for the tax here's Isaac standing in front of the DI2 Cat: http://i.imgur.com/KsJHpJI.jpg