#BehindTheScenes

Janosik: Tactics was a natural consequence of my interest in a tactical-stealth genre and a direct successor of my game jam project - Golden Knife. When I've learned my lessons from the development of Golden Knife I brought on board my trusty partner Radek nad we started our next new project.

The game was basically a concise, more puzzle-oriented version of classic tactical-stealth game with the flagship SUPERHOT mechanics ("Time moves only when you move") added on top of that. Everything was set in the world of Janosik - a legendary Polish bandit hidden in Tatra Mountains fighting bad guys with his ciupaga and loyal companions. Think - Polish Robin Hood.

Similar to Neon Fall we based our game on an ECS framework with a strong commitment to write things "the right way". No spaghetti code, everything clean, generic and reusable... and it has backfired pretty quickly, because basically we skipped the whole prototyping phase and went to making production code from day one. And there was a reason for that, which I hadn't seen back then. Technically, I shifted from the development of Golden Knife to Janosik: Tactics. But mentally, I was thinking that I'm making the same game, which of course wasn't true because the gameplay of both of them was pretty different and needed testing out. Since I didn't see the difference and got confident about the mechanics from Golden Knife development, I skipped entirely the prototype phase of Janosik: Tactics and went straight to the production. This led to a painfully slow development, getting the first working prototype very late, only to realize that the game is not that fun, is too similar to SUPERHOT and we don't see anything worth doing in it.

I also find one of the main conflicts in a game really funny. Stealth games are often about making waiting exciting. And when the whole world freezes when you wait for something to happen it turns out not to be the most exciting experience in a games' history.

On a positive note, slow-motion gifs are cool.