“We’re still a pretty small studio, and we’re probably going to keep it like that because it allows us to make these really quick turns. Henriksson credits the studio’s ability to jump between projects and make parody games to its size. Over the course of a month, Landfall also released 9 patches and several hotfixes. Now it costs $4.99 to cover the expense of servers. “The first weekend was something like $50,000 in server fees, and we still hadn’t made a dime out of it,” Henriksson says.
The novelty and lack of a price tag meant that within days, the servers were dealing with millions of players. It was the first time the studio had needed to worry about servers, previously employing peer-to-peer, and the costs were huge.
#Totally accurate battle simulator game jam for free
Since the venture was started as a joke, purely for fun, Landfall released the game for free in the beginning, but there was a new problem: server costs. “We did that for about two months,” Henriksson recalls. Every few days the studio came close to launching Totally Accurate Battlegrounds, but the team kept finding more things to fix. Landfall decided not to release it, instead opting to iron out some of the worst bugs and add a bit more polish. “This year, we were like, ‘Let’s get some proper multiplayer in there, because it was very buggy last year, and let’s spend a month on it.’ We ended up doing it in three weeks because everyone flew out to GDC.” Holding Off It was temporarily available on Steam for free. “In 2017 we did a nine-day project with TABZ, which was a DayZ clone for funsies,” Henriksson explains. I don’t know how we’re going to deal with it next year.” It started last year with Totally Accurate Battle Zombielator*. “They’re becoming more and more ambitious,” says Henriksson. “We got three million users in 100 hours.” And then Totally Accurate Battlegrounds finally launched on Steam*. It took a little longer, Landfall’s Petter Henriksson admits. It wasn’t the first time, and in this case, the concept was a goofy parody of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds*, a three-week diversion from their main game project.
Landfall* was working on Totally Accurate Battle Simulator*, a physics-based tactics sim, when the studio answered the call of April Fools. Access more game developer news and recent updates. The original article is published by Intel® GameDev Program on VentureBeat: How Landfall juggles jokes, physics experiments, and commercial games.
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