I’m going to do a bit of a recap of this year’s highlights this week. Nothing too in depth or intense, just a quick fly-over so everything is written down in the one place.
This time last year, I had learned a little bit of programming and worked out how to play around in Unity a little. I’d been studying Games and Interactivity at Swinburne for two years and had made a few small game prototypes mainly for assignments.
So 2017 was a pretty big challenge. We were tasked with making a game that would be played at PAX Australia. We had 30 weeks (2 semesters of 12 weeks each and a six week break between).
We formed a group with some friends made over the last couple of years, and some new friends and got down to work.
On any honest assessment, first semester was not successful. We took a long time to come up with an idea to develop, and even longer to get any sort of working prototype. We struggled to have playable versions of our games for play testing sessions, the roles within the team were undefined and we didn’t have a clear vision for what we wanted our game to be.
Our game had a strong theme and aesthetic, and we had a great soundtrack made for us. But we were never able to make fun game play.
Now, I’m can’t really say whether we had a bad idea, or we had poor execution, or if we just ran a poor process. To be honest, there were probably elements of all three at play.
Heading into the mid-semester break, we were feeling pretty down. no-one was really satisfied with where we were as a team but at the same time, no-one really knew what we should be doing to improve.
It seems like a fairly easy decision now, looking back, but at the time this was super risky. While our game wasn’t as good as we had hoped, there was a good chunk of work that had gone into it. Starting over would put us at least 12 weeks behind the other teams, and potentially leave us with another game that was just as problematic as the one we already had.
There was a lot of discussion about whether we were doing the right thing, and there was a good argument made that if we kept working on FourShadow we could drag it into a better shape. And that may well have been true.
None the less, the decision was made to at least explore what else we could do. Knowing that we had little time, we thrashed out some quick and dirty prototypes, then worked out what we could make out of them. We selected a nifty projection mechanic as our central mechanic, and went from there.
This was about the point that I started writing this blog, so you can go back to the start and get a week-by-week breakdown of the process that we went through, but to TL:DR it, we abandoned FourShadow and started a new game – LVL2!
A team of four of us built that projection mechanic into a prototype that could be play tested at the end of the mid-year break, and that became the game that we worked on over the remainder of the year.
Beyond the decision to start over, we also got a lot better at planning and working as a team. We mapped out our entire semester, set hard due dates for development and planned for a series of play tests.
And it all paid off in the end. We had a great PAX, we met a bunch of people, there was really good buzz around the game. And the year was capped off in frankly stunning fashion with our nomination and win at the Game Awards.
So we go into the summer break with a nifty little prototype under our wings, a whole lot of international buzz, and quite a few questions about what we are going to do next.
This is going to be the final post for the year. I’ll be on the road a bit over the xmas period, so won’t have time to write. I’ll be back in January with more in the on-going saga of the development of LVL2!