About the pain and the joy that can be found in making a game.
Making a game: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Last week I decided to join a week-long game jam. I made this decision after I realised that I am somewhat missing the sadistic torture of working on one. This article describes the journey of the creation of my game and the success that it achieved.
The procrastination-filled first days
As every start, mine was also hope-filled and full of dreams. The theme “no way back” was right up my alley as I loved backtracking in level design. However, after some thinking, I settled on making an artsy game about addiction and how there may be “no way back” once you start.
I decided to make the player repeatedly pull a lever and then go to sleep. This worked well as a metaphor for the everyday life that many people experience in the rat race. All of a sudden, your friend calls you, telling you about some cake that makes pulling the lever much easier. Well, you try it. And then it all goes downhill.
Like so many indie game developers, I decided to go with the pixelated look right at the start. Partially to hide the game's imperfections and partially to replicate the retro-horror look that many love. If your game has imperfect visuals obscuring the player's vision in a thematic style is a good way to let their imagination fill in the blanks. After 5 days of the jam, I was horrified to realise that there were only 2 days remaining, and the only thing I have got done was the basics of the level design.
The weekend of work
Rather luckily, the last 2 days of the jam fell into a weekend where I had very few plans, so I sat down and got to work. After about 4 hours of working on the game, I realised that I have not written almost any c# code for about 6 months.
The basics of c# managed to cling to my mind, like any parasite, but the advanced stuff? Gone. And so, realising that I greatly overestimated my abilities, I had to take my game and start amputating limbs. Several mechanics were lost in this process, but it was a necessary evil if I wanted to finish in time. Then I proceeded to spend most of my weekend on it.
The final mile
You might be wondering how this poor game turned out. After being neglected and dismembered? Honestly, better than I expected. If the previous sentence made you imagine an amazing and fleshed-out game, be so kind as to take your expectations and lower them. In fact, mercilessly drown them.
Personally, I find the final 20% of the game the easiest. Similar to a run, the performance is a lot easier when you can see the finish line! So, I got the final details finished, fixed (what I thought) were all the bugs and was done. The finished product was what I perceived as an OK game. Not good enough to be great but not bad enough to be bad. The entire game went like this:
The game starts with a newsman warning about the dangers of eating cake and how it has already been banned in Europe. (A metaphor for various addiction-inducing substances, duh.) You are tasked with pulling a lever and then going to sleep over and over. All of a sudden, a friend of yours calls and tells you that he dropped off some cake at your place and that you should try it.
Once the player tastes the cake, his speed increases. This motivates him to repeat the action. Once the cake wears off, his environment completely changes and becomes much uglier (see below). The sound design also changes as I introduce a number of uncomfortable sounds, such as the TV static or the clock ticking. The player has to eat more cake to get out of this “withdrawal”. After the player eats all of the cake available, the scene blurs out.
The ending is about what you would expect after eating so much cake; you die in a hospital bed. Of course, I also designed an alternate ending. This occurs if you reach the 15 lever pulls without eating any cake, but I won’t spoil how that ending looks.
The reception
I was absolutely amazed by the amazing reception that the game got. I received second place in the game jam and over 400 downloads. Nothing compared to the ~10 000 downloads that my SteamVR environments could get, but for me a great success.
And even though this all was great, what amazed me the most was the reception of the game's message. Some people were confused and failed to understand, but they seemed to be in the minority.
In all seriousness, as you probably know, making a game is f****** hard. It can be frustrating. That is why so many games end up being left to rot and never end up released. But seeing the game's reception (unless you made something truly horrible) is worth it all! I had an amazing time working on this game and loved reading every review and watching every youtube video on it. Thank you to everyone who was there for the journey. And if you were thinking about making that dream game of yours, start today!
“The internet is super smart. If you do something that is cool, that’s actually worth people’s time, then they’ll adopt it. If you do something that’s not cool and sucks, you can spend as many marketing dollars as you want, [they] just won’t” ~ Gabe Newell
