What we learned crafting the Yukon Warrior iPhone game
This is the first time I’ve ever completed a project that has lasted for more than a year. We have been incredibly persistent and here’s some stuff we’ve learned creating the iPhone game Yukon Warrior.
Manage assets
Little things matter, especially over the course of a year. How will art and animations make their way into the game? At first we used google drive and then discovered it didn’t sync fast enough for us. Then we started using dropbox which worked fine but didn’t allow us to quickly implement it and try it in code. Finally we started using bitbucket. Using GIT we can immediately push tweaks into the game and test them out. Naming conventions for files really makes a difference. Establish a pattern that is known throughout the team. This article goes more into it.
Create Constraints
Constraints help guide your process and narrow your focus. Without constraints you won’t have enough direction, it will be simply overwhelming. As you progress, your constraints will become more specific.
Explore implications
Every decision you make will have tradeoffs. Its good to weigh your options and attempt to explore how you think your decisions will influence the experience. Have exploratory conversations and use sketching to explore different possibilities. Don’t be afraid to disagree and come up with alternatives. Use your established constraints as guidance.
Establish your user
Knowing who your user is will guide your decisions. This can help you seek out those users for user testing. Having a target market will also make marketing easier.
Manage the project
Trello was hugely helpful in managing our workflow and breaking down tasks. We could also divide up the labor with labels so at a glance we could see how much we were responsible for. We set achievable goals by putting x number of tasks into a “bucket” to be completed each week.
Establish a core
We did a pretty good job at establishing our core mechanics, our gameplay is pretty solid. However, we did waste time refactoring because we added some core functionality late in the game. Here’s how we plan to solve this problem:
More design documentation, more rapid prototyping, iterative testing, and exposing ourselves to gamers.
Persist
Inevitably you’re going to hit a wall with your progress and you’re going to lose some motivation. Its OK to step back and take a little break — Just make sure you come back! Its important to keep making progress, no matter how small. We feel the best when we get the most done, but its impossible to sustain.
Summary
We’ve worked out the kinks in our asset pipeline, mapped out our process, learned a ton more about cocos2d, animation, art, design and development. Our humble RareSloth team is very excited to bring joy to the world through games.
Here is the gameplay trailer for our first game, Yukon Warrior
