Letters & Legends - postmortem

Letters & Legends goes live on PC and Android on 26 April 2024. You will be able to buy it here on Itch.io, on Steam, on Google Play, and on the Epic Games Store just as soon they let the game out of review.

I started building Letters & Legends about 2 years ago as a way to expand my knowledge of Unity while keeping myself sane and creative under the onslaught of relatively new fatherhood. I’ve become very proud of the project, which has all been done in my free time. It’s unlikely to set the world alight in terms of sales, but soon it’ll be out there in the wild as an actual buyable product, and that’s just amazing to me.

It’s also been the perfect example of the whole 80 / 20 rule, where 20% of the work takes 80% of the time. In theory, most of the code – the important code, at least, that makes the game do what it’s supposed to – was written prior to a year ago, probably longer. Since then, I’ve been balancing it and adding new level types, and balancing some more, and adding even more stuff.

I’ve had a bunch of dedicated, wonderful friends playing the game over and over and saying things like “wouldn’t it be cool if” and “this doesn’t make sense”, and they’ve given me spectacular advice that caused me to have to question how I’d built my game. For this I love them and hate them in equal measure.

Over the next couple of weeks, my plan is to release a series of short thoughts about the game development process. I have no schedule for this content, and I’m completely open to questions as I go. Partly this is to give anyone who reads this an idea of the sheer work it takes to get a game up and running from scratch, but I think mainly it’s just about saying a little goodbye to an era of my life. Hope anyone who reads the posts enjoys them!