Wiped Out — A Solo Adventure in Indie Game Development
Who am I?
I'm a developer and designer who love to play and develop games. I am currently working as an iOS developer, and I'm studying at Apple Developer Academy, here's where the opportunity came to use the time and resources in it to create this game, I hope you like my adventure!
Validate your idea
Whenever you start any kind of project you must always validate it, because whenever you are making something for someone else, you can take nothing for granted, thinking that everyone thinks just like you it's the greatest trap you can fall into.
Don't get me wrong, making a game isn’t easy, and it’s even more challenging if it’s by yourself, but if you’re passionate about it, it’s hard not to do it. I’m here today to tell you about my journey in the hope to make yours a little bit easier.
There are several things you can do to increase your chances of making the best game ever. Everything starts with a good project.
My take on the validation
The baseline of your idea must start somewhere, for me I had the idea while watching a podcast, it was a podcast full of well-known streamers and they brought up a theme that I empathized with, the fact that MMORPGs are dying.
How is this a good thing you might ask, well they showed their love for MMOs while grieving that fact. In the end, all the problems could be summarized in one point: people don’t have the time to play this kind of game anymore.
There I saw the opportunity because I love party games that, unlike MMORPGs, you don’t need any experience or time to play and enjoy the game.
So if I could mix the things I love about MMOs with an easy-to-learn and fun party game, I feel that I would have a nice amount of people that would love the nostalgic feeling that it could bring. Just see how many games remasters exist out there, people love nostalgia.
I did some more research I could tie a few loose ends that I still had, but it all boiled down to a party game with MMORPG mechanics.
So this is how Wiped Out was borne.
What about the art?
Every game has some kind of art, as I'm not an artist I had to have a different take on it.
The first thing that had to do was to decide if my game was going to be 2D or 3D. As I don’t have much experience as an artist, I had two options, making a minimalist game or paying someone to do the art for me.
As I didn't want to pay anyone, I choose to do a minimalist game.
Now it was about 2D or 3D, I already had my shot at trying to make 2D art, so I knew the hassle that is making all the sprites in a game. As for 3D art, I never did it before, so I gave it a chance, and it turned out better than I expected, so it was decided that I would do my first 3D game.
It's very simple, but for what I envisioned the game to be it would be perfect, and I am quite happy with the result.
I even animated it just to see how it would appear on the screen.
The technology
I could make the game natively for Apple devices, as it would help with my job as an iOS developer, or I could do it on Unity as I had already made games with it. This decision was very hard for me because, on one hand, I could further learn about iOS development and even try to learn new technologies, on the other hand, there was Unity, the engine that I knew and loved, it would provide me with a nice and easy experience in the process.
I choose Unity because reality struck, if I spent time on making everything with Swift, I would have little to no time to test and make my game better. I could use Unity to make a mobile game, you might say. But that wouldn’t help me develop at my current job, so I decided to abandon the idea of making a mobile game altogether, and I would use just Unity to finish the game as soon as possible and make it the best I possibly could.
Game Design
The game design was left for last because everything I did until now would influence what I could do for the game mechanics.
On this part, the only problem I had was a good one, I had too many ideas. When I tried to write them down, I realized that if I were to write everything, I would have a game that I would never be able to code, so in the end, I wrote a baseline for what I wanted to do and decided that that would give me a great starting point to play test and iterate in it.
There are many formats for game design documents, if you are working by yourself my tip would be to have fun in the process and choose what works best for you, as you are the only one who must understand this document.
My final take
I still can’t tell if my game will be successful or not, but I assure you I had a lot of fun trying to figure out each step. Every day that I work on this game I grow fonder of it. Writing this made me realize everything I already did and even more excited to see the result, so this might be the final tip, logging your work can be fun!
If you want to see what this game has become I’m preparing a series of videos to tell my story and give a little more details on the process so subscribe to my channel if you want to see more!
https://www.youtube.com/@kikaws
Thank you all for reading!
