Prologue: How I made Got Light?
On January 8th, 2013, I stepped into Room 32-141 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, little knowing that the events about to occur would have a dramatic effect on the rest of my life. 32-141 is a modern lecture hall with wide tables and agreeable lighting, located in the Stata Center, one of MIT’s computer science buildings. I was an 18-year-old college freshman, today was a Tuesday, and it was the first day of the annual iOS Game Development Competition, fondly known among students as 6.670 (“six-six-seventy”).
It was during 6.670, a one-month game development course and competition, that I learned to build my first iOS game, which I codenamed Got Light? —named after the tagline I used in a piece of concept art for the game. Got Light? is a puzzle game where players use light, shadows, and color-mixing to solve each level. In my opinion, it’s quite clever and original, but I’ll leave that up for the reader to decide. It’s on the App Store, if you’re so inclined as to play it.
Got Light? went on to win the competition, accelerating me into an 18-month journey of game development successes, setbacks, uncertainty, and lessons learned.
I am writing now to put into words the multitude of things Got Light? has taught me. I feel as if I could write a book about my experiences, but instead they are outlined below, and I plan to write follow-up stories about the topics that my readers find most interesting. Please comment on which chapters you would most like to learn about, and I’ll write those first. Items in bold are those I’m most considering for my first follow-ups.
Table of Contents
- How the idea came to be
- How I almost built a different game (hint: down-scope)
- How I built a one-day Flash game prototype
- How the game graphics changed over time: a before-and-after adventure
- How I realized the central game mechanic was flawed, and how I fixed it
- How adding particle effects made me excited about life
- How I invested in music and sound effects, and was it worth the cost?
- How ignoring a work-life balance did and didn’t pay off
- How I got too attached to a name
- How a deadline is a beautiful thing
- How I decided to double the content in the last 48 hours
- How I learned that investing in building tools pays off immensely over time
- How a spiral design pattern was inadvertently used to produce Got Light?
- How I almost broke the game before the competition deadline
- How I didn’t play-test on older devices, and how that almost hurt me (hint: I got lucky)
- How winning the competition made me feel (hint: not so simple)
- How I chose a summer internship, and did I make the right choice?
- How I vastly over-scoped my final product, and how it cost me a year of my life
- How I tried to manage my priorities, and how Got Light? didn’t receive my attention for a very long time
- How I did (and almost didn’t) decide to publish my game with MakeGamesWithUs, and why it was worth it (hint: not what you expect)
- How I decided to develop purely for iPad, and how I later decided to support iPhones, too
- How I built a level-builder tool after procrastinating for months, and how the game benefited
- How I design levels
- How I improved performance (hint: one line of code was costing me 50% performance), and what still needs to be done
- How I spent way too much time polishing features that didn’t make it into the final version
- How feature-creep kept me from publishing for a ridiculous (read: sad) amount of time
- How communicating well got me hired
- How revamping the level select screen added months of development time, but why I don’t regret it
- How I improved the graphics
- How I learned that the user doesn’t care how something is implemented as long as you successfully create an illusion (hint: games are illusions)
- How I was able to apply what I was learning in the classroom to improve Got Light? (hint: 6.813 User Interface Design and Implementation)
- How I struggled to prioritize Got Light?, school, and life
- How publishing smaller projects (like Flappy Beaver) taught me about how it feels to reach an audience (hint: better than working in isolation)
- How I stayed motivated enough to work on a project for 1.5 years, Or: How the point of no return is a blessing and a curse
- How I learned I was play-testing with too many friends, and too few enemies
- How I realized my habitual self play-testing sessions weren’t catching any bugs
- How I decided to cut a feature I’d spent a long time working on
- How I learned that doing anything great requires personal sacrifices, and it’s up to you to find the right balance for your life
- How last-minute play-testing from the right people made a big difference
- How I refactored my level data code, and how it was a great idea
- How I never refactored certain other code, and how it wasn’t a great idea
- How I spent hours adding bouncy animations to my main menu, and how it was worth it, Or: How I learned to stop worrying and embrace the juice
- How I secretly seek approval when I ask for feedback, but how I know criticism is the only was to improve the game, even if it hurts
- How I tried to build a social media following, and how it’s been helping, Or: How I joined Twitter
- How crowdsourcing my name and icon design didn’t work
- How my months-long journey to record screen footage of my iPad ended abruptly
- How genuinely listening to feedback resulted in a vastly superior trailer video
- How I learned that I should work more on high-impact areas of code, and how I didn’t learn this soon enough
- How I added analytics, how they don’t help you until you release, how you really need to soft-launch your game, and how I didn’t
- How I bit-the-bullet and finally submitted the game, and how doing so made me realize everything I forgot to do
- How the App Store left me stressed and confused on my release day
- How I had a really awesome “release” day the next day
- How watching players who really “get” your game can be the best feeling in the world
- How getting noticed by the press is even harder than I expected, Or: How I learned that I am not so special, and that, yes, the rules do apply for me too
- How I learned so much from analytics post-launch (hint: if you don’t use analytics, you’re at a major disadvantage)
- How I struggle to accept Got Light’s performance on the App Store, and how I have been working day and night to try to improve it
- How the past 18 months was all worth it — definitely, 100% worth it— Even if no copies of the game ever sold, I would do it again if I could go back.
Kudos to you if you’ve made it this far without giving up. This list of anecdotal lessons is loosely chronological, but I plan to write in depth about those which most interest my readers. Please let me know if you would like to hear the story behind any of these (you can reach me at benolds@mit.edu or @BenReynoldsDev).
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more;
— Ben
