Last week, an information post appeared on the Steam website Quantum Castlea 2015 asymmetric cyberspace game and the first game released by independent developer Fat Bomb Studios. The news was grim: while Quantum Lock was a “huge milestone,” the studio stated that it “was created at a time when we didn’t understand version control software.” Fat Bomb was delisting Quantum Lock because the source code had been lost in the years since its release.
Without the source code, there is no way to fix any issues, bugs, or — worst of all — potential security holes that players might discover in Quantum Lock. “We no longer have access to the source code and can no longer make any fixes or changes to the game,” Fat Bomb said in Closing Notice“For this reason, we have decided to prevent anyone from purchasing a copy of the game.”
Aaron Leaton, co-founder of Fat Bomb Studios, was looking for inspiration when he returned to creating his studio’s first game after an eight-year hiatus.
“The game peaked at 10 concurrent users, which were most likely my friends who I convinced to test our game,” Leaton told PC Gamer in an email. “We fixed all the issues we ran into and had no external bug reports. So we walked away from the game and didn’t look back until this month when I opened it up to gather some reference material for a possible new map in our new game, Light Bearers 2.”
After returning from eight years of game development, Leaton said he discovered “so many problems that seem obvious to me now.” The problem? He couldn’t solve them. “At the time we were developing Quantum Lock, we didn’t have a set routine for backing up our data, other than putting things on a portable hard drive,” Leaton said. In the years since Quantum Lock was released, that portable demanding drive has been lost. Leaton’s explanation was candid: “We lacked both the knowledge and the resources to be able to store our data on a local server or in the cloud.”
Today, Fat Bomb’s version control solution has evolved to include a local Perforce server and additional backups in two separate locations. Leaton called the loss of Quantum Lock a victim of the “paradox of not knowing what we don’t know.”
Since Quantum Lock was permanently beyond repair, Leaton made the prudent decision to pull it from Steam to stop people from buying the compromised product. “I didn’t want any of our other game players to get sidetracked and disappointed,” Leaton said.
Apparently it made money a bit of frustration from self-described “dedicated collectors” who were dismayed by a game on Steam that they couldn’t add to their libraries, even if almost no one had previously played it. “I didn’t expect any kind of backlash to the shutdown,” Leaton said.
When asked if he had any advice for other indie developers about to release their first games, Leaton said it was a trick question, saying that today’s game development landscape has so many resources available to draw from that “they would be unrecognizable” to the version of him who was developing Quantum Lock in 2015. For Leaton, experience is key.
“Your first game will probably be a flop,” Leaton said. “Nobody is good at anything at first, except geniuses. Game development is a skill that you develop over time, through a lot of failure.”
The second most vital thing? “Use Google Drive for backups,” Leaton said.
Another asymmetric multiplayer game by Fat Bomb, Lightbringer 2is scheduled for release in delayed 2024.
