The Future of 'Bubblegum Sunday' & The Making of 'Make Me Yours!' (Patreon)

So... wasn't I working on a game and all that? Yeah, I was, and I will. But some stuff happened in between that I've been wanting to talk about and now is the time to do so. It's time to be open and lay the cards on the table about what’s been going on with Bubblegum Sunday the last few months.

As you hopefully noticed, we (me & my programmer Vivien) have put out Make Me Yours! which we are very proud of. This project didn’t come out of nowhere. It was born out of necessity: Bubblegum Sunday was kicking our ass and demanded experience which we simply didn’t have. With every step I tried to take forward with the project, horrible stuff would go wrong (see old dev logs). 

At the end of May Vivi and I were totally lost in technical hell.

Specifically everything we tried to add to the project that wasn’t originally there (the dynamic camera, the full body art). Things that seemed easy to add would turn out to be technical death traps. On top of that mobile is a really hard platform to build for, since you have such a wide range of hardware to deal with. All of this combined had slowly brought me to my knees with this project. I had made promises and it was becoming obvious that I wasn’t gonna be able to keep them.

I was at my wits end. Every step forward resulted in two steps backwards. Vivi and I had long discussions trying to come up with solution after solution, until they finally offered me an alternative: “Why don’t we try something a little easier?” Then it dawned on me. The original Bubblegum Sunday had already pushed me to my technical limits, and the new one I envisioned was 10x the scale in terms of complexity and artistic demand. The reason we were failing was because I was asking too much from ourselves.

So rather than just sitting there moping about this reality, we set to work. We obviously wanted to gain experience in Unity and work on something that had relation to Bubblegum Sunday in some way. The outcome was an avatar creator. It had a similar ingredient list as BGS, except on a much less complicated scale and without “game” to worry about. Make your character and be done. 'Make Me Yours!' was born.

The design for the character came very quickly.

After a few iterations I came to the UI design we know today.

That was the starting point, sometime at the end of May. I also made it very clear that this was gonna have to be a small thing, so we decided on a 30 day budget to wrap up the project. This deadline we actually easily achieved, and within 20 days we had an early prototype up and running. Within a month, the project was done, but it was still very rough around the edges. On June 28th we put out the very first release for you to try.

After 20 days I got to try out version 0.1, the first build of Make Me Yours!

With the deadline easily met, I was very proud. I had regained confidence in ourselves as a team, and knew now that we were able to actually put something out there. Both Vivi and I still had ideas for Make Me Yours, so we both decided to give ourselves more time to work on it. We still wanted to introduce features like zooming and panning, music, some effects, etc. So we took another month to polish it to version 1.0, which was released on July 29th (with a smaller release in between). At this point, we considered the project to be done (hence 1.0).

Version 0 vs Version 1.2.3

Feedback gave us some more ideas, however, and after deliberating again, we did feel that with a little more time the project would be in its best state possible. On September 3rd (the release was planned for July 31st but we ran into undiscovered bugs at the last minute) we released what we consider to now be the project in its final form. That means all the features are done, but there is room for content to be added (in the form of sets/commissions). From start to finish, this project took us (almost) exactly three months. That brings us to today. With Vivi finalizing and cleaning up old code to make the project future proof, we are now once again face to face with the project we had to walk away from 3 months ago: Bubblegum Sunday.

So now what?

One fact remains: Bubblegum Sunday is a project that had outgrown itself. I initially had a vision but I lost sight of it in my excitement when Vivi came on board. I want to return to the core of what made the first iteration enjoyable, and build on that. Secondly, I am done making promises I may not be able to keep. From my point of view I was confident I could make a lot of this happen, but the technical side of things kept proving me wrong. From your point of view though, ultimately I did not deliver. This frustrates the hell out of me. I’ve always tried to do exactly that: deliver. For that I truly apologize.

My failure was not knowing the technical side of the things I envisioned. Just because I can imagine something, doesn’t mean it’s technically plausible, let alone achievable. That combined with severe scope creep ultimately took us out, so it’s now time for me to break the project back down and identify what is actually needed to make it successful. This means it will be different from the original as well as being different from what I had shown up to this point. But I think a smaller game that gets released is better than no game at all. With the know-how we got from MMY I truly believe we can make BGS great.

In conclusion, I want you to know that MMY was built with intention and wasn’t just randomly made. Whether or not the product is successful by itself ends up being less important than the fact that something was actually designed, created, and delivered. I hope you understand my position a little better now. Being able to take a project from 0 to finished like we did with MMY is a satisfying feeling that has put the wind back in our sails. I want to bring you BGS content in the future, but first I need to strategize a solid plan without any vagueness to it. For those that were hoping for a new build soon: I am sorry for not making it clear sooner that BGS was not going the way I planned and promised and the subsequent silence. I felt like a failure. I should have spoken out earlier but I was caught up in trying to prove that I was capable of putting something out there. So please take this to heart: I truly want to make Bubblegum Sunday, but please be patient. It will come when it comes.

As always, thank you so much for the support.

Love,

Alba

TL;DR Make Me Yours! was made because we lacked the experience to make Bubblegum Sunday. Regardless the project needs to be scaled down so we can actually develop it with the two of us. It will be our main (game dev) focus going forward but don't expect anything released soon.