When I set up Cape Guy (October 2014), the main goal was to allow me to make my own games. It took a while to get here but I have now released Ski Three. It’s a fairly simple free-to-play casual game but it’s one which I designed, developed and released from scratch and I’m super proud of that.
So You Made a Game, How Hard Can it be?
Good question, thanks for asking! It’s not always obvious how much effort went into developing a game just from playing the end product, so I’d like to spend a few posts discussing the things I had to do/learn to create Ski Three and get it into peoples’ hands. Here’s a general brain-dump of what I’ve been up to. I’ll be posting in more detail about some of these things in the near future:
- Decide what the general scope of the project was
- How long could it take?
- What budget would it have?
- What type of game is it?
- Who is the game aimed at?
- Design the game (a few times!)
- Pick a game idea which could potentially fit within the scope of the project
- Take that idea and develop it into a viable game design
- … and make it fun :-/
- Develop a prototype for the game showing the core gameplay
- Contract and collaborate with an artist to create the game’s visuals
- Integrate all the provided artwork into the game
- Learn some technical art skills to perform adjustments to the assets
- Contract and collaborate with a composer to create the music
- Develop the game
- Setup the tile-based board and its interactions
- Setup the tiles
- Setup the tree physics
- Procedurally generate the board
- Never generate matches on the board
- Make it get harder over time
- Setup the player
- Path Finding (using A*)
- Blended animated poses
- Showing the player’s path (with a particle system)
- Handling player path teleports gracefully
- Match streaks (risk & reward – player speeds up vs. score multiplier)
- Setup the gameplay
- Tile swapping input
- Detect pattern matches
- Scoring
- Camera
- Setup the game’s day-night cycle
- Shadows working on mobile
- procedural environment map for colour scheme changes
- moving sun & moon lights (mobile -> never both at once)
- Setup the music
- Implement never-ending music :-0!
- Setup the UI
- Make it work at different aspect ratios. ie. iPhone (9:16) vs iPad (3:4)
- Setup the online leaderboard backend
- including time relevant leaderboards
- Setup game analytics
- worth it just for the fun real time graphs/maps
- Setup game’s monetisation elements
- Implement in-game currency
- Give extra currency for doing well
- Setup in-game adverts
- Setup an in-app purchase
- Setup the main menu/start screen
- Setup the pause and settings menus
- Setup the credits screen
- Setup the end game ‘how you did’ screen (also generating seemingly human written results rather than just the numbers)
- Setup the tutorial
- Integrate platform leaderboards and achievements
- Integrate Game Center (iOS)
- Integrate Google Play Social (Android)
- Optimisations
- Caching tiles for re-use
- Caching particle effects for re-use
- Making path finding asynchronous
- Setup (automatic and manual) quality settings for running on different hardware
- Setup the tile-based board and its interactions
- Schedule my time to hit a launch window
- also working around the contractors content drops
- Apply for Video Games Tax Relief
- Run a beta test
- then interpret and integrate the feedback
- Get Ski Three onto the App Store
- Both for beta testing and release
- Requires assets and build uploads
- Get Ski Three onto the Google Play Store
- Both for beta testing and release
- Requires assets and build uploads
- Learn how to publicise the game (WIP)
- Working with a PR company
- Be the guest on a a radio show!
- Shamelessly steal this blog post’s title from One Life Left 🙂
I think that’s quite a lot of stuff. Much of it is quite time consuming or requires specialist knowledge (a lot of which I didn’t have at the start of the project). And that’s just for a fairly simple game.
Ski Three took approximately 6 person-months to develop (plus ~2.5 person-months contracted out for the visual art and music). I think that’s pretty good going for getting all this stuff done!
Interestingly it only took me about 4 weeks to create an initial design and prototype of the game, which had all the basic elements of the gameplay in-place. You can design out some of the remaining time consuming aspects from your final game but that needs to be considered carefully.
If you take one thing away from reading this blog post, let it be the big difference in effort required between creating a working prototype for a game and releasing a polished game (with all the standard features that users expect integrated).