Pavel Novak: Czech studio doubles budget for Stone Age game

Pavel Novak, a game developer, designer and university lecturer, leads the Zlín-based studio Polyperfect. Shortly before launch, he decided to rework a nearly finished game, Polylithic — a decision that nearly doubled the project's costs.

Polyperfect earns its living making 3D assets for other studios' games, but from the start it dreamed of releasing a project of its own. That dream became Polylithic, a game about a hunter-gatherer in the Stone Age. Late last year, the studio was already preparing to hand the game over to its publisher, but Novak felt something was missing. "Visually and mechanically everything worked, but it didn't have our studio's soul," he explains.

Instead of launching, the team chose to take a risk and rework the project. "To my surprise, nobody told me to go to hell. Not even the publisher," the developer recalls. The decision brought not only delay but higher costs too: where around 15,000 sales would once have covered expenses, now about 30,000 are needed — and some of those have already gone out at a discount. The extra development work nearly doubled the budget, and the game has yet to turn a profit.

Despite the rework, Polylithic was made on a very modest budget. "Thanks to a small team, evening work and colleagues who agreed to work for a share or a modest rate, I put several million crowns into the game's early version," says Polyperfect's founder. Just six developers work on the project under the studio's colours.

Around 50,000 people have already added the game to their wishlist on Steam, and Polylithic is now moving out of early access into a full release. The final version adds an infinitely generated world, multiplayer and other technical features nobody had even thought of at the start of development.

The studio's core business — making content for other companies' games — keeps running, though Novak admits that, with the rise of AI, he wouldn't recommend going into that line of work today. The team is already applying what it learned on Polylithic to a new project: a strategy game called Zlín City, devoted to the history of their home town and its industrialist, Baťa.