Today we are celebrating the beautiful fails of game Dev!

Every polished and well made game is all achieved through diligence and understanding the details when creating. It’s easy as long as you are organized and focused… At least that’s what we thought!  

The truth is… none of it starts that way… 

Before Nurveil became the dreamy, atmospheric world we’re proud of today, it was a hot mess of fails. And those fails? They’re worth celebrating, because we look at them and see how far we’ve come! And we feel we need to celebrate fails because those fails bring you to perfection!

 

 

Take our early concept art. On screen, it all looked fantastic; new and original buildings, every detail had a meaning, shapes were very interesting... But before we wanted to hand those sketches over to our 3D artist, we were like hold up…. How does this make sense in sculpting? 

The buildings suddenly looked like origami gone wrong. It was a nightmare. So we scraped it and came off our high horse then went back to basics with something that can actually be doable AND something that fits our budget! 

 

 

 

Then came our adventures in rigging and animation. We thought: “How hard can it be to make the MC jump?” Answer: harder than we expected… much harder. Instead of a heroic leap, they glided across the floor like they've taken up professional ice skating. 

 

 

Enemies? Instead of running away from the MC like we wanted, they spun gracefully like a pretty ballerina in endless circles. (Yes, we were tempted to keep it as a secret attack mode.)

 

 

No violence policy from Nur where they refused to shoot the enemy and decided to run in place instead… a pacifist at best

 

 

And oh, the clipping fails from animation characters' hands merging inside their body when speaking, to clipping doors with ceilings and arcs floating above the ground. 

Then there’s scaling. In one test, we miscalculated, and instead of being the right size for props, our NPC towered so large that he looked as if he was having lunch with ants. And where our MC took a bite from Alice in Wonderland’s mushroom to become so small for his world…. 

 

 

Another funny one is our struggle to explain our idea to our 3D artist when we wanted the Sun boss character sculpted… least to say, it was a struggle, before we decided to send him a video of an actual example drawn on an apple… 

 

 

 

Not so many things are what they seem. Especially if they are sitting inside a box. Here is a classic example of how we cheat our way into believability by stretching the legs of our poor NPC to be “aesthetically pleasing” much like modern day plastic surgery except more… torturous. 

 

 

But here’s the truth: these fails are not shameful…they’re essential. Funny…but essential. 

 

Trial and error, test after test, mistake after glorious mistake, that’s how we build something worth playing. Every bug, every glitch, every “why is the character moonwalking instead of running?” moment is proof that the process is alive and moving forward.

So the next time you see Nurveil looking smooth and polished, remember: behind every seamless animation lies a graveyard of either hilarious or soul-crushing fails. And honestly? We wouldn’t trade those disasters for anything. They’re what makes the journey real, and they deserve a little celebration of their own.

Our greatest feature isn’t the graphics or gameplay, it’s surviving the fails without crying… much

 

We would love to hear and see your fails! Tag the sunnymoon project team! Or add a #devfailweek to your posts for all us to see and laugh together! 

YEAH! *cartoon fail horn*