Founder Notes — Chapter 3 We had a concept for our next mobile game, a visual direction, the first mechanics, and our own idea of how development should proceed. It looked pretty good. Then w
Founder Notes — Chapter 3
We had a concept for our next mobile game, a visual direction, the first mechanics, and our own idea of how development should proceed.
It looked pretty good.
Then we brought in an advisor and a producer with experience working on AA titles. Experienced people, it turns out, do not always join a project to confirm how well you have planned everything. Sometimes they show you how much could still be improved.
After that, a lot began to change: gameplay mechanics, visuals, the production process, and our approach to development itself. Decisions that had seemed almost final became provisional. Some elements needed more depth. Others had to go because they added work without making the game better.
We could have hired experienced people, listened to their feedback, and said:
Thank you. But we are still going to follow the presentation we prepared six months ago.
That would have been a rather expensive way to hire someone to compliment us.
So we started reviewing the product. Not all of the feedback was comfortable to hear. But hiring experience only makes sense if you are willing to let it change the work.
One distinction matters here: our advisor and producer's experience on AA titles does not turn our game into an AA game at the push of a button. Those projects have very different budgets, teams, and production cycles.
What changed was the standard we use to judge our own work.
Does the character look good enough?
Is the core gameplay loop clear?
Do players want to start another session?
Have we overloaded the game with mechanics?
Does the Web3 connection feel like someone bolted a crypto wallet onto a regular game at the last minute?
A game cannot be fully invented in a document. A document can describe the idea. Playing it is how you find out whether that idea works.
That is why the game is changing so quickly right now. At one point, I genuinely stopped trying to remember every intermediate version. Two weeks later, some of those decisions could already be different.
This does not mean development has no direction. It means we do not treat every intermediate answer as the final one.
Our goal has not changed: to build a standalone mobile game that is interesting even to people who have never heard of Zylo, tokens, or Web3.
Its connection to the ecosystem should strengthen the game, not replace it.
