The Day Before Parody Game Could Take The Dev Up To 8 Years To Complete

Story Highlights

Crimson — a solo developer — has created The Day After, a parody project of The Day Before.
This project cost him over $1500 worth of assets and 300 development hours.
We interviewed David, also known as Crimson, to talk about The Day After and his future plans.

The Day Before has turned out to be an utter disaster by every stretch of the word, showing us how big of an impact false advertisement and lack of management can have on a video game project. Despite pre-launch suspicions, the released game was even worse than anyone could ever anticipate, with the title not taking long to end up in a dumpster fire situation. On the flip side, however, some have taken it into their own hands to give The Day Before a makeover in parodic fashion, and that is exactly what The Day After by Crimson is.

David, also known as Crimson, created a gameplay trailer for the parody project called The Day After. This took him around 300 hours of development and over $1500 worth of assets. Many people consider it much better than the original game, hoping to see this project becoming playable for everyone. However, that isn’t what Crimson has in mind, so we spoke with him over an email Q&A session, asking him about the parody project and what he intends to do with the assets in the future.

Read ahead for the full interview.

Could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your previous accomplishments?

David: My name is David (known as Crimson online) I’m a small independent game developer and content creator based in Toronto, Canada. I’ve been using Unreal Engine for about 9 years now, documenting and streaming the majority of my development career working on various projects (some unannounced and some canceled), and I recently released my first game into Early Access around 3 years ago named Suit for Hire.

You recently developed a parody version of The Day Before, titled ''The Day After.'' Could you tell us when did you started developing it?

David: I started development on the parody project in March of 2023, originally aimed at being restricted to 7 days but that quickly fell apart, I worked on it for 2 weeks and then encountered some PC issues requiring me to take a pause from the idea. I picked the project back up in mid-November and wrapped it up in late January.

The trailer contains a disclaimer indicating low chances of this becoming an actual game. But if enough people ask for it, are you willing to reconsider that?

David: I would love to, but unfortunately I don’t have the resources nor the experience with MMOs or Player vs Player environments, there’s a lot to take into account for both of those factors which could quickly result in yet another post-mortem story. I wholeheartedly understand why people would love for the parody project to become a thing though, I myself am a big PvP player in games, but as a developer, it’s extremely difficult to get right.

You are still working on a co-op zombie survival game. Will that use some of the assets you showcased in The Day After's gameplay trailer?

David: Definitely! I wouldn’t let $1500+ worth of assets go to waste; I’d most likely refactor and optimize a lot of it, though, to the point where it wouldn’t even look like its original self.

Returning to The Day Before, Fntastic recently tried shifting the blame to many content creators who covered the topic. What are your thoughts on that matter?

David: Shifting blame when it was clearly on themselves is a bit immature, especially when they’re trying to cover up community interaction by putting their statements on their website rather than a public space. I think they’d be in a much healthier position if they just accepted that things didn’t go the way they wanted development-wise and essentially admitted that there were issues. No matter what the statement is, it’ll always be taken with negativity. They’re sadly in that position for a while.

Since when did you follow the dev updates of The Day Before, and at what point did you believe this project was very suspicious?

David: I believe I’ve known about it since their first gameplay trailer, which I think was uploaded on other networks on YT and it was garnering a ton of attention. After that, they uploaded another piece of gameplay in a forest-type environment which is when it started to spark some questions in my head.

Being a game developer yourself, who has done a splendid job at creating a game that many consider better than The Day Before with a lower budget and shorter time, do you think Fntastic could have done a better job had they invested more passion into it?

David: I wouldn’t know what happened behind the scenes at Fntastic, I’m sure they had developers that were passionate about the project, but at the end of the day, management are the ones that call the shots, and there might’ve been a misalignment of intention between management and the development team. There’s always a way of doing a better job, but I definitely think Fntastic could’ve done better on the PR/marketing side and saved themselves a huge headache, but I speculate there must’ve been a lot more under the table that we (the public) don’t know about.

Last year, we saw many bad releases and ports, but for you personally, which one would you consider the worst and why?

David: Besides The Day Before’s poor release, I would say Redfall takes the cake. The out-of-touch decisions are baffling and make no sense for this generation’s standards, one decision being to limit the game to 30 FPS, which was more than enough to tell me that something went very wrong in the development. There are a ton of other details that I think were part of the mismanagement of the project that can easily be seen through the different videos posted online.

Could you tell us a bit more about your upcoming co-op survival game? Are there any pieces of media you have taken as an inspiration?

David: I don’t want to release too many details just yet as I’m beginning pre-production on it, but the hope is to bring back the horror aspect of zombies. Instead of cheesing zombies by forcing them into spaces where they can’t move, I’d rather make them attempt to climb over those obstructions so that the player doesn’t feel unstoppable by abusing the game’s mechanics. A few key inspirations for me are The Last of Us, The Division, I Am Legend and Escape from Tarkov. Those don’t necessarily reflect what the gameplay may be for my future co-op zombie survival, but I always love to have different pieces of media to take inspiration from.

Will you start a campaign like Kickstarter to fund your project, or will you try to do it all yourself?

David: I can’t say at the moment, crowdfunding is a very complicated process that requires a lot of trust in the creator and I don’t want to let people down especially since I would like to take my time to make this project properly.

If you ever decide to turn The Day After into a playable video game, how long do you reckon it would take for it to reach a stable and proper state?

David: If it were to follow the original premise of an ‘MMO PvPvE Zombie Survival’ and it was primarily me directing it: unfortunately a long time, mainly due to the fact that I’d have to do a lot of research into the subject and tech and most likely acquire funding from a publisher or investor(s). Easily a minimum of 6-8 years at my current level of expertise.

Is there anything else you would like to share with the readers? Something we haven't touched upon yet.

David: I hope this year brings a lot of fantastic new games (and developers), there’s no better time to get into game development than there is now with how accessible it is. That being said, this also means there may be a few bad apples within the industry that may use specific resources to their disposal to hype up an illegitimate project and profit from it. The Day After’s purpose was to remind people that there are definitely ways of doing just that and to be very cautious of where you throw your money.

The Day After is a parody project by Crimson, and it shows how even with the efforts of a solo developer, one can create a title that can compete or even be better than a large-scale project if done right. The assets used in creating this project will likely appear in Crimson’s future projects, albeit in an original form.

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