Tunnel Vision Games (the team behind Lightmatter) are now seeking new career opportunities

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Wikzo
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Tunnel Vision Games (the team behind Lightmatter) are now seeking new career opportunities

Unread post by Wikzo » 08 Jun 2020, 14:46

Goodbye from Tunnel Vision Games (June 2020)

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Original link: https://tunnelvisiongames.com/goodbye/

This letter marks the end of the Tunnel Vision journey. We would like to thank everybody who has helped us along the way. The intention with this letter is to provide some context for how we came to this conclusion.

Note: this decision was made before the global pandemic began. We hope everyone is staying safe!

Tunnel Vision Games was founded back in 2016 by a group of friends who met at Aalborg University, Denmark. For our 2013 semester project, we wanted to develop a first-person puzzle game about lights and shadows. To our big surprise, our small 15-minute prototype demo received quite a lot of attention both on the Internet and at various game conferences. So after graduation, we decided to pursue the concept further and make a fully-fledged game. The goal was to develop a game from start to finish and release it into the world on our own terms. It was our first game and we knew we had a high level of ambition, but we also had a strong belief in the project and ourselves. With a lot of help from friends and many industry partners, all our hard work finally paid off when we released Lightmatter on Steam, January 15th 2020.

We are super proud of the game that we made — and we are tremendously grateful for all the positive response and support from players all over the world. It has truly been delightful. Observing how people react to Virgil, James, Ellen and Lux has been a lot of fun. We are also very happy with the Lightmatter Discord community; it’s awesome to see how engaged people have been with the story, the puzzles, speedrunning, etc. We couldn’t wish for a better reception for our little indie game.

That being said, it requires a lot of time, energy and money to make a game with the scope of Lightmatter (especially as newcomers straight out of university). The last four years have been a bumpy ride for everyone at Tunnel Vision, and there have been many times where we weren’t sure if we’d make it to the finishing line. We all enjoy games and game development, but we have decided that our part of the Lightmatter journey ends with the Steam launch.

Our goal has always been to be transparent about our development process, so that’s why we are writing this letter to the community. It’s not an easy decision, but it’s something that has been on our minds for a long time. It’s with a heavy heart that the developers at Tunnel Vision Games now go their separate ways, which means that we will no longer actively be working on the game.

However, we are still exploring the possibilities for the future of Lightmatter together with our publisher Aspyr Media.

We want to give a BIG THANKS to everyone who believed in our project and has supported us along the way.

May the future shine bright!
Tunnel Vision Games

P.S. As long as there is interest, we plan to keep the Lightmatter Discord server running as always.
The members of Tunnel Vision Games are now seeking new career paths. So if you are interested in reaching out to any of us, here is our contact information and a brief overview of our main responsibilities while working on Lightmatter.

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ZeroHero
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Re: Tunnel Vision Games (the team behind Lightmatter) are now seeking new career opportunities

Unread post by ZeroHero » 08 Jun 2020, 16:32

So sorry to hear the bad news.
I hope the entire team will find new opportunities.

Well done guys!

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Re: Tunnel Vision Games (the team behind Lightmatter) are now seeking new career opportunities

Unread post by jonaz.dk » 08 Jun 2020, 22:34

Yeah it sucks! :cry:

For a first game release. You really have delivered above and beyond. Absolutely something you all can be proud of!
And now you all have an excellent portfolio piece. And leveled up your gamedev-character to new heights in the process.

Coming out like that as a team looking for new opportunities is just perfect. There is absolutely no shame in ending it like it did. It's bloody tough out there trying to make a living of games. And you made the best of it. I salute you! :cool:

And thanks a whole lot for keeping us updated here in this little pond of the internet! Until the very end. That's awesome! Much appreciated.

I wish you guys the best in the future! And a good job hunt in the near future.
Good things will come sooner or later I'm sure! :cool:

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Wikzo
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Re: Tunnel Vision Games (the team behind Lightmatter) are now seeking new career opportunities

Unread post by Wikzo » 11 Jun 2020, 10:23

Thank you! We are very proud of what we achieved and are looking forward to new opportunities! (feel free to contact any of us :) )

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Re: Tunnel Vision Games (the team behind Lightmatter) are now seeking new career opportunities

Unread post by JesperSB » 03 Jul 2020, 10:25

Hallo Guys. Sorry for the bad news.

Are You going to do a Postmortem.?


If I have to be brutally honest, It looks like Your PR sucked.

What kind of PR did you do.?
I can't find any of your groups with more than a 1000 followers...
(That means nearly only friends and families..)

And around 500 tweets in 6 years, with very few hashtags..
I have that in the 2 months I have been making my last game, and I'm just me.

Only 1 videos with more than 10K watches...

What kind of commercials did you run, and how much money did you use.?

Just a Hypnotist writing books.

My books: http://www.jespersb.com/

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Wikzo
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Re: Tunnel Vision Games (the team behind Lightmatter) are now seeking new career opportunities

Unread post by Wikzo » 03 Jul 2020, 10:42

As written in the letter, the decision had nothing to do with the succes of the game, but more about the team wanting to pursue new things in our lives. We partnered up with publisher Aspyr Media who helped us reach a big audience on Steam (we recently hit a pretty nice milestone in terms of sales, so I can assure you it hasn't only been "friends and families"). Reddit has also been super useful (many of our GIFs and trailers have been trending on various subreddits). The game currently has 800+ user reviews on Steam with a positive 91% rating. Oh, and we also have about 2.3 million views of our announcement trailer on our own channel and 70K views on IGN's channel - which we are very happy about :)

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Re: Tunnel Vision Games (the team behind Lightmatter) are now seeking new career opportunities

Unread post by JesperSB » 03 Jul 2020, 10:56

Okay, I just couldn't find anything about it, on your steam page.

But are You going to make a Postmortem.?

It really helps amateur like me, to find new stuff to improve.

Just a Hypnotist writing books.

My books: http://www.jespersb.com/

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Wikzo
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Re: Tunnel Vision Games (the team behind Lightmatter) are now seeking new career opportunities

Unread post by Wikzo » 03 Jul 2020, 11:06

It's not something I can promise. We already wrote multiple articles on Gamasutra about how the game was made. We've done an AMA on Reddit. We've had a lot of talk with the community on our Discord server. And the game itself includes 4+ hours of developer commentary :)

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JesperSB
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Re: Tunnel Vision Games (the team behind Lightmatter) are now seeking new career opportunities

Unread post by JesperSB » 03 Jul 2020, 13:02

A link to the articles.?

Just a Hypnotist writing books.

My books: http://www.jespersb.com/

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