A Game That Will Never See the Light of Day

After months of work on our game “Solen” —we’ve decided it’s too risky to continue.

What was Solen?

Solen was intended to be a narrative adventure game where the player took on the role of a manager running a hotel in a haunted seaside resort. The game combined hotel management elements with investigation mechanics, as players unraveled mysteries about the spirits haunting the resort and the mysterious disappearance of the previous manager.

However, Solen didn’t always have this storyline. It went through several transformations before settling on this premise, which finally felt like it worked. The project itself was built on remnants of another abandoned project, which proved to be a fundamental mistake. This approach limited us right from the start, as we had to “recycle” elements from the earlier project and make them fit. As a result, many aspects of the game kept breaking and were patched together with makeshift solutions in an effort to create something cohesive.

In the end, despite the significant effort poured into it, we decided to shut the project down.

What We Learned

• We aimed too high. Like many new teams, we started with an overly ambitious vision. We wanted a game that combined management and investigation mechanics, but with few references for this combination, we struggled to find a formula that worked.

• We recycled what should’ve been scrapped. As I mentioned earlier, Solen was built on the foundation of another project, which we tried to recycle as much as possible. This was a major, limiting mistake that prevented us from establishing strong pillars for the game.

• We had too many systems at once. With so many interconnected mechanics, proving they all worked together required complex, time-consuming prototypes. These prototypes offered no guarantees that publishers would bite—or that the effort would ever pay off.

• We’re just two people. While we handle a wide range of tasks between us, we’re a small, part-time, unfunded team. Tackling a project of this scale simply wasn’t realistic. Our limited time and resources made it clear we needed smaller, more focused projects to work efficiently.

• We didn’t know when to stop. The more time you pour into a project, the harder it is to let go. It’s easy to convince yourself a solution is just around the corner, so you keep pushing, sinking more time and effort, and a vicious circle sets in. Walking away feels like losing everything, even though the lessons learned are invaluable, that’s why we’ve put blinders on for too long.

In Summary

While we’ve worked in studios and created games during game jams, this was our first time handling every aspect of development for a larger, commercial project, in a small two-person team. It gave us the skills and insight to approach future projects with a clearer, more realistic perspective.

What’s Next

The decision to stop wasn’t an easy one, especially for me. My narrative work on the characters and the world —everything tied to the “living” aspect of the game— made me feel like I was abandoning them. Imagining the void they would leave behind was impossible. It might sound intense, but for me, writing a world and its characters means having them live in my head constantly. It’s about imagining situations/conversations, and even discovering them as they sometimes evolve differently than I originally envisioned, which makes them feel very real to me.

The thought of never seeing them “come to life” on screen was unthinkable, and that’s when I realized the most important part of this game, for me, was them —the characters. We could scrap everything else, and I wouldn’t feel the same sense of loss. And that’s how we arrived at the ultimate decision: to scrap it all, keep the characters, and pivot to creating a visual novel.

That’s when we landed on the following idea: playing as a seasonal restaurateur in a small coastal town, who must learn the tastes of the locals to serve dishes and build connections through cooking.

We’re now prototyping this idea while working on our second project in pre-production, Gloopalaxy, ensuring steady progress across both! Which is comforting, because these are simple, shorter games, so less risky in the long term, and we’re not putting all our eggs in one basket, with just one “big” project.