This evening was an IGDA-organized “Meet The Press” event at Google campus in Mountain View, which I attended with a few friends. It was an interesting experience because it showed a completely different side of game development, something I only get a glimpse of every so often. This is the side of game development about market share, numbers, percentages, billions, social, mobile, mid-core. For the most part I’m exposed to the indie, creative, artist, nerdy, emo, poverty-stricken side of game development. It’s good to get things from both sides, but I definitely feel more at home with the indies.
Category: Dev Journal
Progress updates on the development of my games.
Another Two Weeks, Then Another…
There’s this struggle. On one hand, you want to make the best game you can make. On the other hand, you want to actually finish the game. These are the opposing forces that make the creative process so difficult.
There are lots of indie games where I’m playing and thinking, if only they spent another two weeks, they could have bumped it up from a 3.5 to a 3.75. They stopped when they were in arm’s reach of something really polished. There’s some new stuff there, but it wasn’t given enough iteration. Not enough testing. Six months of work to get where they got, and maybe it would have been twice as good with just another two weeks.
Then again, by releasing the game they are able to start working on the next thing.
The problem is that games always seem to offer the most rewards right at the end of the project. You can finally see how things are working, and you’re making awesome strides every day. Just give it another couple weeks, think of how much better it will be!
Knowing how long to spend on the project is one of the most difficult parts of game development for me. I wish I had a formula, or some sort of answer, but I just don’t. There’s something to be said for spending another two weeks, and there’s something to be said for just releasing it even though two more weeks would have improved it.
Last Throes of Scope Creep
The bulk of the remaining work on Escape Goat is level design. Here are the goals:
- Player needs to get the first two items within five minutes, making the first region about 3 minutes total.
- Player needs to learn the play mechanics for both the goat and the mouse.
- There are 18 gadget types. They all need to be featured in puzzles, but they need to be demonstrated to the player beforehand. I’m hoping to avoid using text unless there is really no alternative.
- Rooms need to provide a range of difficulty, so you don’t have a string of consecutive easy or hard rooms.
- Rooms need to provide challenges for both platforming and puzzling. Platforming levels feature precise timing, and puzzling levels are more low-key and can be slower paced.
The current state of the game is a random collection of rooms that need to be placed in order. I added a cut-and-paste feature in my editor, so it’s easy to move rooms around, even from one level to another.
A couple days ago I came up with new gadget ideas. I allowed myself an hour this morning to program the first one: a floating bubble that keeps inertia and gets pushed to the edge of the wall. I figured it could be used to make Sokoban-style puzzles where you have to pick the right order and direction of blocks to push.
I got it working, then put together a level featuring the new gadget, and then decided it’s best to scrap it. The game doesn’t need more gadgets. A new feature means something else I have to train the player on. And with 18 working gadgets already, there are endless combinations I can use.
I’m glad I took the time to explore it, because maybe it would have been groundbreaking and awesome–you never know with these things. And it was only an hour. I’m also glad I’m willing to let it go. And after this exercise, I really know now that nothing more needs to be added.
Escape Goat Quick Progress Update
We’re getting there. What’s left?
- Level design for most of the second half of the game
- Complete versions of songs
- Final sound effects
- A bug that kills the player in certain weird but unexpected circumstances…can’t have that
- Editor tweaks
- (The ability to share levels? We’ll see how this one works)
Need something to tie you over?