Welcome Back

We’re back, baby.

It’s been a while - our last blog post (on blogger!) was exactly seven years ago, celebrating the upcoming PlayStation 4 launch of our first title - XING: The Land Beyond.

It’s real! Look at those numbers! I don’t even know how one rates PS4 games!

A lot has changed since then, and a lot has changed with White Lotus. After shipping XING on PlayStation I began work on a new title we were going to pitch at… GDC 2020. We instead took an opportunity to help a friend with their recently funded project. Koriel and I worked with this friend for two years before returning quietly to WLI. Koriel stepped away from active development two years ago to pursue her other passions. We’ve since added two new individuals - Taylor, and more recently Rebecca, bringing our current team size right back to three.

What’s up

I’ve been thinking a lot lately. Thinking about my career, the state of the world, the future of White Lotus.

Back when we started WLI back in 2013 I was intensely concerned with appearing professional and legitimate. After all, we were just three kids fresh out of undergrad trying to start a business. Big deal, right? We needed to convince people, including ourselves, that we were the real deal - both as entrepreneurs and game developers. This was the era of Steam Greenlight and Kickstarter, and of PlayStation 3 and big publishers. There were only around 2000 games on Steam back then, and to be among them felt reserved only to those who could convince Steam they were accomplished and put together¹. Sure, internally we were a scrappy lil band of budding game devs, but externally? We were White Lotus Interactive LLC! We make games! We pay taxes! All we needed to do was ship a game.

And we did. XING came out on Steam four long years later in 2017, at the height of VR mania. I remember being rather disappointed with the initial reception² (we never even got a metacritic score due to the low number of reviews!), but now that I’m looking back we really did quite well. By the time we shipped, 5000 more games were added to the Steam catalog, and the industry had started noticing how the massive influx of games was affecting the markets.

I felt like we had to do something to stand out - was our marketing bad? That was a common theme in gamedev communities at the time. I’ve never been much of a social person online and never really understood how to, I dunno, push product? We tried Facebook and Reddit ads. We made mixed reality images. I think our low point might have been paying a YouTuber well over a thousands bucks to play our game in a singular video - we had heard influencers were the way of the future, right? None of these provided any provable ROI, and maybe more importantly, I didn’t feel good trying any of these things.

So I went heads down and got to work porting the game to PlayStation.

In 2019 we shipped XING on PlayStation 4 / PS VR and finally went green on the project. I alone handled the porting process and learned a hell of a lot about shipping on console. It remains my favorite version of the game - perhaps due to my own effort, but maybe because it represents a bit of a time capsule. Who knows what will happen with digital PS4 games down the road, but hey, you can still play it today on a PS5.³

We were able to pay back our debts. We fulfilled our contract to Sony. I updated the game a few times for bug fixes, and then, we were done.

2020 - 2023

I will chronicle the early days of “Game 2” in great detail once we officially announce it, but in short I started on it independently while working on the PS4 port of XING, was ready to upgrade it to a full “White Lotus” production at GDC 2020. Then the pandemic hit. Koriel and I fortuitously were granted an opportunity to work with our friend and fellow game developer Jason at his studio, and we graciously accepted. I learned a ton about creating with a (slightly) larger team and working under a publisher, as well as really getting to hone in on my technical art skills. I’ll probably write about this experience on my own blog once the dust has settled.

After about three years Koriel and I left Iridium - the game we worked on, as of the time of writing, has yet to receive an official release date but I suspect it is soon. A mostly new team took over where we left off so it will be interesting to see what they all came up with!

One of the reasons for my departure from Iridium, likely surprising no one who worked with me, was that I wanted to return to my own project - the prodigal⁴ son “Game 2” that never got a fair chance. We restarted development in earnest at the start of 2023.

Game 2

I know many of you will skip down here to see if we are, you know, actually announcing anything. The answer is… not yet. We are cooking. We’ve been cooking for the past three years.

In 2023 White Lotus welcomed Taylor onto the team full time. Koriel helped us lay some groundwork early into this restart, and ultimately left the active development team to pursue her passions. Last year we brought Rebecca on, and we are planning on recruiting maybe one more individual to help us out moving forward. We’ve made awesome progress so far and I’m really proud of our tiny little production.

The here and now

I need to figure out a way to start revealing our work - this leads directly into the “marketing” problem, and that’s where things get messy. Rebuilding this website and restarting the blog are the start of that effort.

This time around we are gonna do things a bit differently. I no longer feel any pressure to prove myself to this industry. I want to embrace the opportunity being independent grants.