Crikey, remember Suicide Squad: Killing the Justice League? It was truly a disaster. It was also a public mess, where there were seemingly a few attempts to save the game, but none that could have distracted it from its inherent flaws. But for Axel Rydby, the game’s co-director, and Johnny Armstrong, deputy design director, the behind-the-scenes events were enough to drive them away from the games industry altogether.
Talk to BloombergRydby explained that upon joining Rocksteady in 2018, Suicide Squad seemed promising even though it was a live service game, a marked departure from the studio’s previous output. And even if the leaders of Warner Bros. repeatedly showed up to Rocksteady to talk about how much money they could make from it, they and Rocksteady apparently agreed that it should be a generous game so that no one had to feel like they had to “buy a bunch of crap to enjoy the game.”
And then all these repeated delays happened, with more and more meetings focused on the game’s replayability and how to recoup the budget. “That’s when I started to feel like I wasn’t making games anymore,” Rydby explained. “I was following a spreadsheet, an elusive marketing analysis spreadsheet that no one could present clearly. I kind of felt like that wasn’t the games industry I wanted to work in.”
After the release of Suicide Squad, which was met with poor reviews and worse sales, Rydby felt if there was still any joy left for him to feel in making games. Armstrong felt much the same way, and when Warner decided to leave Suicide Squad, he said he “felt like everything had drained out of me. I said, ‘I can’t do this again. I don’t know if I’m done with the industry, but I’m done.’ I felt myself falling apart at the seams.”
This obviously seems like an incredibly difficult place to be, but it’s not that bad. A few months after leaving Rocksteady, the two caught up and eventually came up with the idea of making a game together. That’s exactly what they did too, and it’s called Secret of Circadia, a city-builder/deckbuilder/roguelite about the dangers of AI and reclaiming nature. The duo is I’m currently launching a Kickstarter for the game. Also! It might be worth spending the equivalent of a coffee, if only to restore the confidence of a few developers who seemed to be struggling to get by.
