Two Students and an Online Hotel — Creating an iOS Game Prototype in 3 weeks
March 2020: due to a global pandemic, everybody is going to be shut home for at least one month.
But at least we got something to do; a new challenge was starting in our (now remote) Apple Developer Academy. Giuseppe and I decided to use in the best way the next three weeks to create a game. But what kind of game?
Our goal was to make something new, but yet close to our passion, RPG games. Definitely not another “Temple Run”-like game, that many people choose as their first approach to game developing.
We talked about the games that we play, but most importantly, about the ones that we played years ago. Along with Minecraft and Castlevania, from which we also took inspiration, we remembered about a milestone of gaming in 2010: Habbo Hotel. A game where you could explore new places, talk with new people and decorate your rooms, living in a giant and free online hotel. Sadly, as free-to-players, we didn’t enjoy Habbo’s experience at its best, since we had no in-game currency and then no furniture to decorate our rooms with, but we decided to create a similar, yet different in many aspects, gaming experience.
Once decided the genre, other ideas about many different aspects of the project came up really fast. We wanted a stunning theme, and we decided to settle the game on many floating island (like Castle in the Sky, from Miyazaki), so that we could also provide the player a personal island where to build his own house and craft new facilities. The main island, the biggest of the floating archipelago, is occupied by the “capital”, Gaedania, a town with many gothic and victorian traits (just as the name, inspired from Castlevania), that also gives the project his name. In Gaedania there are a large amount of activities to keep you occupied. Our goal was a life simulator after all, where if you want to eat you’ve got to work! But don’t worry, it is going to be funnier than working in real life. Here every job is represented by a minigame, and since it is a social game, working with friends is better than working alone! Item and coins earned from the activities change according to the number of people playing, the level of their skill and also a random factor, like throwing dices in Dungeons & Dragons.
So you can chat with your friends, work with them, build your island and visit theirs, but this interaction wasn’t enough for us. Therefore we though of another way to bring players together: politics. With a Monthly meeting, player are going to be able to elect their representatives, 3 to be exact, with this triumvirate having life or death decision on every player! Nah, I was just joking.. also if permadeath is not something we want to exclude from our project. Turning serious again, the triumvirate will be able to decide what kind of event is going to come to Gaedania the next month, and thus get a slightly power on the course of the economy. They will also have a direct contact with the developers, sometimes perceived as far and unattainable. We are here, and we always going to be players before developers!
The biggest problem that we faced, although, was the Game Art. Both of us were unexperienced in that field, relying on professional designer that worked with us during other projects, but this time we were alone. A great aid was given us by “ansimuz”, a Pixel Artist that made some of his works (Castlevania themed, exactly what we were looking for!) free to use. But we also had to create sprites and animation ourselves, and that was really much more difficult than expected.
Many of this ideas, sadly, are just on paper right now. Our lack of experience, time and work force made our MVP (Minimum Viable Product) really small. To avoid wasting all of our time (and money!) on a server, we only developed a local wifi connection, that along with the chat, the main city and two jobs (cooking and fishing) forms our first game creating experience.
Gaedania Town is still Work In Progress, but we want to offer you a new mobile gaming experience. It is a game developed during the quarantine due to coronavirus, in March 2020. We also developed a Game Design Document, that you can see here.
