Here's an article focused on the development of Palworld in the words of Pocketpair's CEO, "the existence of Palworld is a miracle, more specifically 6 miracles" - their development journey is crazy, they did "everything wrong" according to industry standards and game and software development processes, and that's what's so inspiring:
https://note.com/pocketpair/n/n54f674cccc40
Main points I took from the article:
-It's the studio's sixth game.
-Just as their game Craftopia is in Unity, Palworld was also being developed in Unity. The opportunity arose to hire a tech lead with 10 years' experience, but this tech lead only knows UE and demanded UE. The game was then migrated from scratch to Unreal Engine just to please and hire this tech lead.
-The migration led to losing almost all the assets (except the 3D meshes) and losing ALL the programmed systems, they started from scratch and everyone had to re-learn everything (note: I know Unity, UE, Godot and others, but I already have 30+ years of experience with dozens of languages, including C#, C++, etc, so when I switch engines I only need to re-learn the engine-specific ones, and even then it's a pain in the ass and EVERYTHING TAKES A LONG TIME to migrate. Now, think about their case, they had to learn UE and C++ from scratch, ALL OF THEM).
-The whole of Craftopia was created using only assets of all kinds bought from the Unity Asset Store (models, animations, textures). Palworld was the first game where they created assets - until halfway through the game's development they didn't know what a "rig" (3D model skeleton) was and had never animated anything.
-The first Pal took 1 month to model, which would have taken 100 months to create the 100 Pals/creatures, and that could have been the end of the game, it would have taken too long. Finally, they hired an artist.
-They hired a 20-year-old guy who worked in a market (organizing shelves?), and as a hobbyist made videos of FPS gun movements, and this contributed to Palworld having good gun animations.
-They turned down a very young artist and a year later she insisted again and was hired. Thanks to her, they managed to create 100 Pals concepts in record time.
-The CEO was responsible for optimizing the game's C++ code himself a few days before launch.
-The studio has only ONE network person, who is responsible for the entire online part of the game, and for the 1M+ concurrent players. He's 24 years old. (I'm also proud of this because I'm also responsible for billions of pieces of data and a gigantic backend, and I'm the only one on the team in this regard - the company actually has 2 devs, me on the backend and another on the frontend) - small, lean teams are much more effective and efficient than large teams.
-The game was made without a set budget and without finances under control, the motto was "develop to release or go broke" - they used all the funds from the 600,000 copies of Craftopia sold. And in the worst case, they would "borrow money from the bank".
I haven't picked up Palworld yet, but I really liked Craftopia. I had already recognized almost all of Craftopia's assets, as I've been using Unity since 2010 and know the Asset Store well, and yet it's amazing how they've created something very original by bringing together a bunch of different systems.
Translated with
DeepL.com (free version)
