The EPIC Palworld Development Saga
Yo, yo, yo! Brothers and sisters, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, and everyone in between! I’m not sure if y’all have heard about this little indie game called Palworld. Very rarely does a game come along that makes us all collectively pause and ask, “What the…?”
With all the turmoil and layoffs plaguing the gaming industry, Palworld feels like a feel-good underdog story. It’s like David slaying the Goliath that is the AAA gaming industry with a slingshot. A game that basically took some of the best elements from Pokemon and Ark, threw them in some lab, and out of nowhere created the number one bestselling, most played game on Steam. I haven’t even touched the game! So I’m not here to talk about whether or not the game’s good or anything about the actual gameplay; it’s the development and all the mythos surrounding it that I’m into.
For those new here, I’ve spent the better part of my life now working as a full-time developer (albeit not in the gaming space). It’s these kinds of stories that really capture my imagination. And let’s be real, Palworld is not even my type of game, either. I haven’t been able to check it out, mostly out of fear that it would completely suck me in and capture whatever free time I’m able to muster up. It’s just the mythos surrounding this game’s development that is absolutely amazing.
Reportedly built on a shoestring budget that started at $10K? That’s less than what some of these studios spend on a month’s worth of communal lunches! And there’s no way in hell that that number is real. $10K by a studio that’s made three prior games with a staff of six to 25? It’s not possible! I mean, what were they feeding these guys? But I’m going to go with it because I want to believe, damn it!
Apparently, their lead 3D model artist was a middle schooler hobbyist who worked at a convenience store, applied for the job, got rejected, and later got a callback. That’s actually kind of believable. Apparently, they switched gaming engines from Unity to Unreal mid-development when they realized Unity just wouldn’t work well, and the newly hired senior engineer only knew Unreal. That’s insane! Basically, imagine you had a group of guys that only knew how to put together IKEA furniture, and then midway in building a bed frame, they realized that they needed to build it from scratch, but none of them had ever used a table saw.
Okay, that’s a horrible analogy, and I really can’t think of anything remotely better, but it’s a pretty big time-consuming deal. Halo out here set itself back a couple of years seemingly making a similar switch, which we have yet to see the fruits of, but I digress. These guys somehow made an entire game not using source control like Git, which, for those not familiar, is something that programmers use; it just makes coding with the team easy. Instead, these guys had a giant bin of USBs that they backed up code to daily and shared with each other. Like, this is some primitive programming, programming 101, first-year introductory level at Humber College stuff!
The reason they even added guns and went that direction of “Pokemon with guns” is because Americans love guns! That’s insane! And yeah, Americans do kind of love guns, so it makes perfect sense. The total team ended up being around 25 people including Discord mods, which isn’t a lot, but it’s totally viable, I guess. Again, I have no idea just how much or any of this is true. A lot of this was taken from translated posts made on 4chan and then posted on Reddit, where users translated an interview the developer gave in Japan. I’m sure that interview and many others like him will be popping up all over the Internet soon enough.
And it’s not that this game hasn’t been caught up in a whirlwind of controversy either. Accusations that these guys used AI or flipped a bunch of assets from other games, none of which, as far as I know, have been found to be true, and some have actually been found to be fabricated. I mean, Pokemon fans and AAA game dev burner accounts just apparently hate this game, and I’m not even going to dive into any of that because, like I said, it’s the mythos that I love here, and I’m sure reality soon enough is going to chip away at all of it. Like, we all know these things are going to get chipped away at by the fact checkers and the “actually” guys on the Internet. But yo, like that kid at that wrestling convention, I just want to believe, damn it! It’s still real to me, damn it!
I mean, thank you, man. In a world where billion-dollar executives and suits make horrible decisions surrounding the games we love, it’s these indie rags-to-riches stories that I love to hear. I don’t know if you guys remember this game called Splitgate a few years ago. Similarly, it captured my heart a few years back. Even if the game’s minute of fame was a blip, what they did with the resources they had still astounds me. And I’m not saying Palworld’s lifespan is going to be limited or that it’s only a matter of time before the giant hammer of the ever-zealous Nintendo and Pokemon legal teams are going to come crashing down on them. Truth is, with all the misery that seems to be attached to these massive AAA titles shipping in horrible states, laying off staff, and record profits, it’s just kind of nice to know that, regardless of budgets, it’s still possible for small teams with tight budgets to compete.
Anyways, I’m curious what you guys think. Have you guys been playing Palworld? Do you like Palworld? What do you think of the dev story? Do you believe the dev story? By all means, leave a comment, hit that like button, and be sure to subscribe. Till the next one, peace!
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