I’m kind of ashamed to even talk about Nameless. I don’t want to delve too much into my thoughts on it because honestly there’s not really much to say that’s positive. Please understand that I rushed development because it wasn’t worth investing more time into it because people were not interested at all in it. I know it’s disappointing to anyone who was eager to play an incredible game, as was I. But I just lost all morale when it became clear that people were not interested when I tried to crowdfund it in the past (it didn’t reach it’s goal).

I will still try and put it on sale when appropriate and just hope that people understand that it is inherently risky for them to play a game like it as I don’t think many will really enjoy it. You might think that I should just “fix” the game and all of the problems will go away. But to “fix” the game would basically involve throwing out 2 years of work and redoing everything.

I feel that in today’s day and age of highly polished, high expectation software development, a lot of those highly awarded games start to become a bit “artificial” and “factory made”. I say this in how you can compare a real painting to a digital painting. One is very real and tangible and has mistakes, while the other is robotic and cleaned up. I say this because, Nameless is like a real painting, it was not made to be perfect and is a very “human” game.

I just want to say I’m sorry to the people that were eager to play this game, hoping that it would have been the next best crowdfunded game but were disappointed by the final result. I feel that development was extremely mentally draining and morale was pretty low (albeit similar though a bit worse than Frog Hop’s development).

I feel that Nameless truly suffered from comparing itself too much and didn’t really have a clear identity (which is funny because the main character kind of represents this). It simply tried too hard to be like Earthbound, Undertale, Hotline Miami, but in actuality achieved a result that did not represent any of those. In some ways, Nameless resulted in a reflection of myself (More so by the feelings that are felt in the game were what I was experiencing). I wish I didn’t try to outshine those games. Undertale was obsessed with itself to the point where it knew it had a huge following coming and would hide secrets knowing people would find them. In Nameless I worked hard to try and implement easter eggs and all sorts of endings to try and match it. But frankly it ended up being pointless because there wasn’t really anyone there to play it and explore it all. But, uh…I’m not gonna talk much more about that.

A sequel would be incredibly unlikely, so unlikely that it will never happen ever. But because it’s fun to come up with game ideas, if it ever did make a sequel, I probably would make it:

• Drastically more focused on being consistently light hearted and funny, no more edgy, weird sensitive topics.
• Removal of moral decisions (because frankly killing and sparing was not interesting at all, period).
• Just make a shooter with deeper mechanics and abilities, maybe upgrades.
• Remove gimmicks like the mini-games, money system and store.
• No more 4th wall breaking gimmick nonsense, that stuff gets old fast and wasn’t at all interesting.
• Would probably be shorter, arcadier, bite sized fun game without all the pointless dialogue (but would keep the funny dialogue).
• Much less story focused, but still have some kind of simplified narrative.

Thank you for reading through this, I know it was a bit heavy and depressing. I sometimes feel anxious with my current game Ato , but at the same time I feel I’ve learned a lot from the past to make my current project Ato at least a little bit better than last time.

I know I’m not one of those people in the web articles where I’m a legendary 5 year old game developer who makes his 1st game that looks like ori and the blind forest that sells millions of copies and gets all sorts of awards. Nameless is not perfect, please understand that it is very much like a real painting, presented as it is in its flawed and real state by a human being who is still learning to get better at creating games…

…Just know that Ato would never have existed if Nameless never got fully completed.

I am not going to promise anything with Ato, I can’t even guarantee anything until it’s done. Just know that when it reaches beta, I will need all the help I can get.

Thanks for reading,

-Brandon