Palworld Breaks Every Development Rule

power world an open world Adventure that seems to defy all genre Norms the game was released seemingly out of nowhere and managed to capture the hearts of over 8 million players in only the first week of its launch it now ranks as the second highest player count in Steam history even surpassing Counter Strike but the development of the game wasn't nearly as smooth as its release and the game almost never saw the light of day they even hired a part-time Convenience Store employee to fill one of their most important roles so how was is a small team able to take this big ambitious vision and turn it into one of the most talked about games on Steam in history well our Story begins in Tokyo Japan with a Mr mizobe the CEO of pocket pair the creators of power world Mr mizobe had never made a game but he was confident in himself so he contacted his Junior from University and started making fantasy mobile games together but even after making dozens of prototypes in the search for a fun and Innovative game they eventually scrapped all of them during this process Mr MOBA met the person who would then become the director of pocket pair and together the team went on to finish their prototype finally now that they had this solid prototype they decided to visit Publishers which in return for funding the development of the game they would get a cut of the game after its release Mr mizobe persisted and went to 10 different Publishers to pitch their games but they all said no all the Publishers absolutely loved the game playay so why did they say no that's the problem with a lot of companies these days they have Revenue goals to hit and they want a proven way to make money so Mr mobe realized that if the Publishers couldn't see the potential of his game then he would have to prove it for himself always making sure to keep fun the main priority but the decision to self fund the game was only the beginning of his long and tumultous journey tumultus is that a word it was then where they started to focus work on their first True commercial game over dungeon the game was built in the unity engine and was mostly using existing assets so existing art existing music it took only about half a year to complete the game and they released it on Steam in 2019 and to their surprise it did relatively well it sold over 100,000 copies which for a first commercial game that's pretty out of the ordinary pumped up they decided to work on their second title called craft Topia this was a much more ambitious game it was open world it took inspiration from his pre previous game Risk of Rain and from the now popular battle Royals he had also wanted to include some sort of automation like in factorio because he found the process of collecting materials and crafting very tedious in most games but during the development of the game he realized something he didn't need to conform to what popular games were doing to make it be fun so he decided to wing it and just put a bunch of stuff together and throw out what didn't work which is not how game companies do things at all and this kind of thinking was also in line with power world's development but it just goes to show that sometimes you don't need to conform to all the rules because when the game launched it sold over 600,000 copies on Steam so the company was hyped Mr mzobe was hyped and he realized that as long as the game was fun people would buy it and you didn't really need to conform to all of these standards and IPS and all of these shenanigans that the real life supposedly wanted he gained a lot of knowledge and connections which would eventually pave the way for the development of power world in his own words without over dungeon craftopia would not have been born and without craftopia how world would not have been born but how was Mr mobe able to go from a small team developing craftopia that heavily relied on existing assets to assembling a whole company with over 40 employees and over the next 3 years crafting a 100 unique Pals for their open world large Adventure game well the development of power world could be considered a series of Miracles and chaotic ones at that with carefully placed events and people that Mr mobel met along the way and would eventually help with the success of power world and even without one of them the game wouldn't have been born today even said that the game was the opposite of the proper game development let's set some context here in Japan for the longest time the popular game genre was RPGs or role playing games but over the years fpss and third person shooters began to to rise with the popularity of battle Royals but it was still new and as the main element of power is guns it was hard to find someone with that experience in Japan that would join their small team so Mr mizobe went where anyone else would go to search for talent Twitter or X while searching he found an unusual account that only posted videos of reloading guns the tweets were all in English but he found that the hashtags were in Japanese he decided to take a risk and DM this person asking if they had any experience in the industry hoping to hire him but Mr mizobe was met with immediate confusion as he received a reply right away he could not believe it he said are there really people like this in the world and he found out that the person was only 20 years old and was working part-time at a convenience store in Hokkaido he had learned to make the animations and use the tools himself through YouTube tutorials he had also taught himself English while playing FPS games he was very dedicated to his craft Mr mizobe sensed his talent and decided to send him a video of an early build of the game to get his feedback in only 25 minutes he received a response and an excellent one at that oozing with passion and interest Mr mizobe liked this strangeness and passion and he realized that these are the kind of peoples that take ideas from zero to 100 real quick so the previous Convenience Store employee now worked part-time for pocket pair the new employee had an immense tent Talent with sound effects and had learned to navigate a game engine all by himself in a super quick time Mr mizobe quickly realized how invaluable he was and offered him a full-time position if he moved to Tokyo so he was now a full-time employee of powerold and helping to contribute on the most important parts of the game which were the Gunplay I want to be grateful for the miracle that I was able to meet him Mr mizobe says but the new hire wasn't the only one pivotal success that led to the creation of power in fact there were more surprising twists and turns that Mr mizobe didn't expect but ended up being exactly what power needed Mr mizobe had been wearing a lot of hats as the CEO of the small po world team and had been working on making 3D models for the pals he soon realized though how timec consuming it was to make just one model as it took him one entire month he realized the game would never get done because he wanted to have over a 100 unique Pals in this world and each of them would have different SK skeletons in different shapes then each monster would need to be animated they'd need an idle animation a moving animation jumping attacking and the list goes on he calculated that if he worked on one motion per day it would take him 2,000 days to finish all of the pals which is over 5 years the company would long be bankrupt by this time but as luck would have it Mr mizobe one day received a call from a Human Resources company saying they had found a person named roh adachi he was a veteran motion designer with a lot of experience which is just what power world needed he was hired as a contract worker to start but Mr adachi quickly noticed something odd about the 3D models where's the rig he asked a rig in animation is a way to get a skeleton of a 3D model and map it into a system of interconnected bones and this helps Define how the character's bones move or react or bend in certain situations but Mr mizobe had been manually moving each bone for each frame of each animation for the pals he was working on which is a non-efficient and timeconsuming process to say the least that would take forever he had been aware of the existence of a rig before but he didn't use it for some reason and my thought is because since his previous games heavily relied on existing assets which all that work was already done for him he never really had to worry about it all their files had also been a big mess there were no naming conventions a lot of the work they had done hadn't been backed up to the cloud which is vital just in case anything goes wrong but luckily Mr adachi took over and despite his hesitation at the large amount of work that had to be done he was able to work on the animations for the characters this time with a rig so far the company had two excellent new hires one being the expert animator for shooter games and the other being an expert motion designer for the pals but they still had two vital roles they needed to fill at this point power had been in develop velopment for 1 to 2 years and just as they were ramping up they decided to switch game engines from the unity game engine to Unreal Engine 4 now switching engines is no easy task and can be a huge hit to motivation and is extremely timec consuming for one unreal uses a complete different programming language than in unity unreal uses C++ and unity uses C and C++ is not easy guys and also almost all of the assets that they had purchased in the unity game engine would be rendered us useless when they switched to Unreal it was also much more difficult to find Engineers that had knowledge in Unreal Engine 4 but most importantly none of the team had any experience with unreal so why did they decide to switch all of a sudden even Mr mizobe himself said in modern development it would be extremely rare for all members to rebuild from scratch with an engine they have no experience with there is no one who would make such decisions and at that point the project would have failed but Mr mizobe one day receiv received received an email out of the blue from an experienced engineer named Mr matani Mr matani had a lot of technical experience enough to be considered a lead engineer which is something the small company had been lacking but he only knew how to use Unreal Engine so Mr mizobe was faced with three choices one do not hire Mr matani two have Mr matani learn Unity from scratch or three bet on Mr matani and throw away all of their work to recreate pow World in Unreal Engine so Mr mizobe went with the third option and decided to take bet on him and move to Unreal Engine Mr maani was in charge of educating the entire team on how to use the engine they even had to learn a new version control system which is a way to easily back up projects on the cloud so they can also be shared with everyone on the team The Power Team was stepping into Uncharted Territory adapting to new tools and workflows but as they navigated these technical Seas another piece of the puzzle was about to fall into place this next addition to the team would Breathe life into the very heart of power world itself its Pals but before we discuss the creation of Pals we have to answer the question on everyone's Minds first how many people is Mr mizobe hiring I thought he didn't have any Publishers funding the game well he didn't the game was being completely self-funded because of the sales of the previous game craftopia look at this footage from the game just a few months after moving to Unreal Engine 4 then look at the same footage of the game a year after development did you see any big differences well you can shoot and capture enemies but that was about it Mr mizobe had realized how big of a game this was and that they needed to hire a lot more people to help with the process they would need the 3D animator Mr adachi a character artist a modeler and many more people for their ambitious title so he did what anyone would do in that occasion he just ignored all his finances this is not Financial advice he says what's the maximum budget budget the most obvious upper limit would be the limit at which the company would go bankrupt so he kept hiring until the company almost went bankrupt and he ended up hiring over 40 additional people along with Outsourcing for other smaller tasks somehow they managed to finish the game right on time before all the company's money was gone he said it is not known how much money it cost I don't even want to see it he estimated the total cost was about 1 billion yen which is about $ million us now at the launch of the game there was a lot of controversy about how the designs of the palace looked very similar to Pokémon some people calling it a ripoff but even if they did take heavy inspiration there's no denying that the pals were designed to be fun colorful playful and cute so far we've mentioned the expert in shooting animations which helps bring the guns to life in the game Mr adachi who saved the project with his great 3D animations and Mr masani who gathered all the engineers and helped organize the project but who was the one who designed the actual Pals well actually the face of power world was rejected when they first applied to the company in October 2020 they were a new graduate and had a lot of ability but the designs they had submitted didn't really fit into the style of power world but in February 2021 power world was again hiring for new artists and the same person decided to apply again Mr mizobe decided to take a chance on them and if you notice there's a common theme here where Mr mizobe is constantly taking on new chances and risks and hoping will turn out for the better and this one paid off Big Time Mr mizobe quickly realized that this person had a great talent he said they are incredibly fast at drawing it's the fastest I've ever seen they were also able to change any feedback instantly they knew English and they were great at Art most of all and it's funny because this person had been rejected by a hundred companies before finally being accepted by Mr mizobe and because of them they were able to create the dozens of Pals that we see in the game today all of these Miracles paved the way for power world which is the biggest Miracle of all a grand idea with little to no planning a patchwork team no budget management at all and it was released on Steam on Early Access only a few years after the start of its development but power world stands Out Among the Sea of Ip driven games and proven genres providing a refreshing take on how games are supposed to be challenging conventions and focusing on fun above all if you incorporate a reliable game system with good graphics and proven fun that alone will be enough to sell commercially Mr mizobe says the game combines elements of open world crafting games like Ark survival evolved and Minecraft but introduces elements of Base building automation taming and capturing they also differ in their stylized graphic looks of the pals with a realistic environment they didn't really focus on the story of the game and just decided to gear it towards creating meaningful social experiences between the players there were many others who were instrumental to the making of the game but it just goes to show how someone with a strong dream and passion and the nerve to not give up can come together Against All Odds and make something that's really magical in the words of Mr mizobe we hold our fate in our own hands and don't forget to subscribe and like if you enjoyed this video and check out my previous ones they're pretty cool

Channel: samyam

Views: 443

Keywords: samyam, samayam, samyams, palworld, pal world, palword, How Palworld Became Successful Against All Odds, palworld success, documentary, palworld documentary, educational, mini-documentary

Id: Sk6rrRfT0Io

Length: 15min 19sec (919 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2024