I want to preface this by saying that I am still on good terms with everyone in Splat Studios. There was no ill will towards them when I left the team. With that being said, I have received a lot of concerned DMs about why I left Splat Studios as abruptly as I did on such short notice.
Prison Showdown started in April of 2018 as a concept @KieranIsHome had after him, @Polarizedv and I got sucked into playing loleris’s Mad Murderer 2. We thought it would be cool to grow a community as dedicated as the diehard Mad Murderer 2 community was during its peak in 2017. As some people who have been part of a trading community can attest to, being the ones to be able to create the items that people spend weeks or months trying to collect seemed like a really cool idea. And to be honest, developing the economy for the game was a blast. We all had fun doing it.
One of the reasons I worked on this project as hard as I did for as long as I did was because it was the first large-scale, open-world project I’d ever worked on. I built my own modularized OOP framework, designed a scripted suspension system while barely knowing any calculus, and created a datastore management system that (after a week+ of data loss hell) has 0 cases of data loss. This is omitting all of the off-site infrastructure I had to design for the first time such as serial generation for the chaotic items, cross-server broadcasts, and the chaos tracker (which requires a bit more server memory than it might appear to in order to track the JobId of every player in the game). This project was not meant to be rushed, yet despite me dedicating many hours of time to it per day, it seemed like release was never getting any closer.
After the year and a half of development, Prison Showdown was released - to a massively underwhelming launch. Data management issues forced us to shut down the game about 4 or 5 times, trading duplication glitches were being exploited, and lots of bugs that our public QA sessions didn’t run into started to appear. These issues were fixed in the first week of the game being out, but by that point, I was quite frankly burnt out. I started to get upset that all of the time I put towards the game amounted to a buggy release, that I sacrificed time that I could’ve allotted elsewhere - like schoolwork or talking with people I wouldn’t be seeing for the foreseeable future as we leave for college.
But I thought about all of the work I had done, and that even though Prison Showdown wasn’t received as well as I had hoped, I learned a ton from it and working with Splat Studios. The only way to really improve is to iterate frequently and fail fast. Give each attempt your best shot and if it doesn’t work out, don’t worry! Roblox is a great platform for developers to have their work seen and exposed. If you make a couple of games that only a few people play, that’s twice as many people enjoying your creation than you would have if you stuck to the same game for the same amount of time. I hope this gives a bit of insight into the development cycle of the game and game design as a whole. Right now, Splat Studios is onboarding a new programmer (@xXVernandoXx) to fill my place that seems more than qualified for the position. This is a bit off from any post I’ve made before, but I just wanted to clear the air a bit.
Thanks for reading.
EncodedLua