Gamedev Gone Wrong: a case study - part 2 (Patreon)

Hi everyone!

This is the second part of a mini-series about what's wrong with the development of 'Ninja Attack!' from my point of view. (I'm the one developer making the game, supervised by the Frosty Pop Corps, the publisher that is commissioning the game) If you missed it, I think you should read part 1 first.

In part 1, I wrote about the design that was proposed to me for the game, which I should have simply refused.

Now we're moving on to the actual development of the game!

... Which was chaotic, mainly as a result of all the lack of planning ahead and the lack of attraction I felt towards the game, as I have explained in yersterday's post. It wasn't really like that from the start though.

I used the first week spent working on the game to try out ideas for the visuals (mainly the post-processing effect, with the colors and the textures) and implementing the base controls. The visuals were somewhat rough but they evolved smoothly into what you can see on the gif above. The base controls are the ones from the lighter design I had come up with: swipe left and right to rotate and swipe up to shoot.

Those controls worked pretty well, yet one week later I trashed them, for the sake of being more obvious. Instead, the new design had arrow-shaped buttons to press for when you want to rotate and a big central button on a slider for shooting. With those, you look at the screen and you know what to do.

This particular change came after I got news from 'Invaders... From Space!', the previous (and first) game I did for The Frosty Pop Corps which had just released. Those news weren't great. The numbers didn't look good and I was told the game would likely net a loss.

That sucked. My correspondant at The Frosty Pop Corps did try to tell me that it may not be my fault at all, that it could be the icon of the game, the fact that several big-brand games came out the same week or simply the lack of marketing. But I wasn't really convinced. Like, I don't think it was all my fault at all, but I could see the problems with the game and possibly why it would be doing so bad in the freemium market. The main reason?

I had not made a freemium game.

Well, I did make a freemium game, but I didn't think of it as a freemium product, just as a game like any game I would have done for PC. But this isn't the same, on mobile you have to convince the player to come back to your game after playing it for the first time, and not just by the actual quality of the game, you have to make a design that hooks the player and draws him back intentionaly.

My point is that I had this revelation about a fourth of the way into making the Ninja game that my design might be inappropriate for this market. (again)

I was bummed out but determined to do better with the Ninja game. I took my design notes and made new plans.

The first idea was to add a procedural quest system to fuel the player's interest in playing the game. It would probably take 3 days to implement, 3 days I could find if I was more efficient from there, I thought.

The second idea was to replace the controls of the game and go with the buttons.

There I was, iterating on the design of a game I was supposed to make in 5 weeks, 1.5 week after starting making it. Can you spot the problem yet?

And that wasn't the last design revision, far from it. It wasn't long before I was facing the ultimate problem of how I was going to do the hi-res sprites for the enemy ninjas. I have no idea how people go about making hi-res bichrome assets. I don't have the knowledge, the material nor the software for that. I gave it a shot, draw a big ninja on a big canvas in Aseprite. It took me way too long for this one sprite and it didn't look very good.

In the end, I dropped the idea of making ninja assets entirely and came-up with, you guessed it, a new design for the enemies! This one was perfect: it's all done through programmation and it exploits metaballs, a technology fairly easy to implement and that everyone always loves how it looks!

And I was actually very right in making that decision! Two days later I had the enemies fully implemented and Twitter absolutely loved it! But yet again, it was another slash at the original design which was already starting to fall apart.

Then came other problems! The original design had a compass à-la Skyrim, to show the player where enemies were. The visuals system I had built would not let me make that happen very easily, so I changed the design again. (ended up making it better tho)

The original design had two power-ups, a lightning power that would kill all the enemies and a shotgun that would destroy the ninjas' hiding places. The original design had 0 mention of how the player would get these power-ups. That got trashed, about 3/4 into development, there was too little time and too much still to do. I came up with a new power-up design that would shamelessly exploit the structure I already had for throwing shurikens.

As the development went on, The Frosty Pop Corps grew more and more insistent about making the game more readable and that was yet another army of tiny slashes at the game's design.

As I write this the game is almost done, there's almost no time left from the development period that was planned and still a few very important things to do. And The Frosty Pop Corps are asking me to make more changes to the game.

I'm sick of this project. I think you got that by now. A lot of my projects that go wrong do so because I didn't plan ahead properly, it's really something I struggle with on projects that span throughout more than a month.

But this case is different. Even though the original design was admittedly way too shallow, it was strong enough to be built upon for a full game. What I really hate with this project is how it keeps morphing away from the plans, how every new development asks for a bunch of new changes.

Some changes I could have foreseen if I had spent more time on the original design, some others I couldn't, because circumstances changed, The Frosty Pop Corps' requests evolved and so did my own vision of the game.

I know some gamedevs just go with the flow and see what ideas work and what ideas don't in their ever-evolving game. That's not my way of doing things. It's fine if the game evolves a little but I need to know what I'm making while I make it. If I don't, I'm lost.

I need a plan and I need a solid grip over it.

So I guess the lesson to get from this is to not go "meh, I'll figure it out when I get to it" when you don't know how to go about something in your design. When building your design, especially one you don't really want to work on so much, you need to take extra-care to not lay traps for your future self.

The second lesson I feel I should get from this is: 'Have a plan B'. If your design proves to be problematic, you'll want to have options to fall back onto. Coming up with them on the spots generally works ok, but you take the risk to part more and more from your original design, until your project starts falling apart.

Thank you for reading this second part of this Gamedev Gone Wrong case study. Hopefully it'll end up as the longest part of them all. (I wrote a bit more than I thought I would)

Tune in tomorrow for part three where once again I'll complain about Unity and where I'll write some more about my general workflow for this project!

Take care!

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