Crikey, remember Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League? That sure was a mess. It was a public mess too, one where there were seemingly some attempts to save the game, but none that could have shifted it away from its inherent flaws. But for the game’s co-director Axel Rydby and associate design director Johnny Armstrong, the behind the scenes events were enough to almost turn them off from the games industry entirely.
Speaking to Bloomberg, Rydby explained that upon joining Rocksteady in 2018, Suicide Squad seemed promising even if it was a live service game, a marked change from the studio’s previous output. And even though Warner Bros. executives would repeatedly show up at Rocksteady talking about how much money they could make from it, both it and Rocksteady were apparently in agreement that it should be a generous game so that no one would have to feel like they needed to “buy a bunch of crap to enjoy the game.”
And then all those repeated delays came, with more and more meetings focusing on making the game replayable and figuring out how the budget could be recouped. “That’s when I started feeling like I wasn’t making games anymore,” Rydby shared. “I was following a spreadsheet, some elusive marketing-analysis spreadsheet that no one could present clearly. I kind of felt like this isn’t the gaming industry I wanted to work in.”
Following the release of Suicide Squad, which was met with poor reviews and worse sales, Rydby was left feeling if he had any joy left to feel in making games. Armstrong felt much the same, and when Warner decided to move on from Suicide Squad, he said he “felt everything drained from me. I said, ‘I can’t do this again. I don’t know if I’m done with the industry, but I’m done.’ I could feel myself coming apart at the seams.”
That obviously sounds like an incredibly rough place to be in, but it’s not all bad. A few months on from the pair leaving Rocksteady, the two caught up with one another, and eventually landed on the idea of making a game together. That’s exactly what they’ve done too, and it’s called Secret of Circadia, a city-builder/deckbuilder/roguelite about the dangers of AI and nature reclaiming itself. The duo are currently running a Kickstarter for the game too! Perhaps worth punting a coffee’s worth of funds towards if only to restore some faith in a couple of devs who seemed to have a rough go of it.