The making of Blue Pond
A wide and deep story about how one ends up doing the things he loves, despite himself
8:15 pm: the status of Blue Pond on iTunes Connect is “waiting for review”. It’s the last email I read before I close my laptop and leave the office.
I grab my bike and ride home through the cold Turin night. I’m not really listening to the latest Pink Floyd album in my hears. I’m excited in a strange way. Like I’m going to get something I waited for so long. And I begin to remember.
I was about 4 or 5 years old when my father bought our first computer. It was a Commodore 64. At that time, it was already an obsolete piece of technology. With it came hundred of second-hand cassettes found through an ad on a local newspaper. Hard to believe now: games were written on magnetic tapes. It had to load for as much as 30 minutes before it could launch one.
But still it was something magic to me. And the game me and my brother liked the most was a very rare gem: who knows why it was there among the others. Gianna, aka The Great Giana Sisters. A true masterpiece. And a fraud. Gianna was an obvious copycat of Super Mario Bros, where Mario had been changed into Giana, but most of the levels were pretty much unchanged. Later, we got Super Mario Bros as well, but we always thought that Gianna was better.
A couple of years later my father bought a 18" disk burner so that we could copy the games from cassettes to disks and play without waiting for hours. There was a little function, I remember, that allowed to make changes to the games during this process, including changing the characters sprites.
Now, opening the door of my cold little flat, I realise that this was probably the first time I discovered that one could modify those games. That one could even MAKE one. It wasn’t magic. It was just a matter of knowing how to do it.
I don’t remember if we ever managed to change a Commodore game, but a few years later came our first PC and with it many more possibilities.
At that time my mother was teaching to junior classes. She was the super-advanced and up-to-date kind of teacher, and used to prepare and project lessons with hyper-texts. Hyper-texts, at least what it meant in that time, were simple programs made of a bunch of static pages linked through them with buttons. I couldn’t think of anything better. I quickly learned the basic functions of the hypertext-maker program, called Amico, and worked several months with my brother to our first game: Big The Worm. It was the adventure of a little worm composed of a straight black line and an ellipse as head. Each page was a riddle with several possible solutions, and the player had to choose the right button to go ahead. Otherwise back from the start. Which became very annoying when the game reached hundreds of pages, including complex labyrints and even alternative plots and totally absurd and random riddles, the kind you would have found in Monkey Island.
We never finished it and it was wiped out with a reset of the PC when it finally stopped working.
But my Graal was found some years ahead in a little modest program called The Game Factory (I’m finding out now it still exists), the name says it all. My first titles, all 2d shoot-and-run platforms, none of wich was ever released outside of my family, included Tarta Gnam (a turtle that had to eat shrimps and avoid the bad ones), Lemming (a running squirrel, chasing and shooting sunflower seeds), Tarta Rasta (sequel of Tarta Gnam, were the turtle had developed dreads and an addiction to weed), and my personal masterpiece The Anti-Poop Dog: a gunned dog that had to collect bones and shoot cats along 5 levels which included a skate park and the bottom of the sea. My little sister loved it.
Some attempt with RPGs were less fortunate: the amount of effort involved was too much for my short attention spans.
Despite all this, my studies and interests brought me to completely different directions. Literature, cinema, finally design. Even in my spare time, I had never been a good gamer, and for a long time I stopped playing any kind of game, seeing it just as a waste of time.
Then came mobile gaming, and titles like Angry Birds, Candy Crush, Flappy Bird. Casual little games similar to what I could have built as a kid, yet having planetary success.
I begun to play again on my smartphone, and soon a weird forgotten urge was knocking to the back of my head. Why not trying again?
A quick search brought me to a new piece of software for the development of cross-platform mobile games, all very simplified and without too heavy coding. There went my evenings.
10:00 pm: I had dinner and I’m sitting at my desk. Suddently, a new email from Apple tells me that the status of Blue Pond is “pending developer release”. This means I only have to press a button and it will propagate to the App Store. I’m extremely excited, but I’ll finish my story first.
There’s not much left to say. After a couple of failed attempts, always caused by my short attention — and commitment — problem, I had an idea which didn’t sound too bad, and was very easy to make. A little fish you have to feed. Many fishes that want to steal your food. One goal: keep it alive as much as possible. In a couple of weeks of night work Blue Pond was born.
I wrote this story before releasing it because honestly, I’m quite selfish, and the fact people will download it or not doesn’t matter so much. I had my family trying it, like when I was a kid, my girlfriend loving it because of course she loves everything I do, and some friends who wouldn’t give me my phone back when I let them try the beta. That’s already a great recognition.
But the best, the only true recognition is knowing that the little kid inside me finally had what he was looking for. It is knowing that no matter how long and hard you try to hide a passion, it will sooner or later come back to you. There have been some days, lately, in which I have been working all day — and I love my job — but my mind was always drawn to the game. Like it was giving me an amount of personal satisfaction that nothing else could reach.
Still, I’m not sure wether I want to become a game developer or not. The passion will probably leave me, and maybe come back in a few years like all my passions do. What I learned is just that there is no way to avoid them, and following them is the best thing I can do.
11.49 pm: *click*
Find Blue Pond on iTunes, Google Play and Amazon Appstore.
