Orb Warp, Post-Mortem
I haven't posted about Orb Warp, but here is a quick rundown. Over the holiday break a goal of mine was to create a Mobile Game and release it on the google play store, I recommend downloading it from here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Jason.OrbWarp
Playing it, may help make this post-mortem more relevant. Otherwise just check out the page and the screenshots.
Over this blog post I’m going to cover what I feel was most beneficial to me growing as a game developer. I hope that you gain something from this post that you can put into practice, so that it will assist in your growth as a game developer.
Topics that I will cover;
The motivation?
Why mobile?
Development Process, short story
Releasing Orb Warp (brief paragraph)
The Motivation?
Currently my motivation to create and develop games is for a chance to distract people from any challenges or troubles they currently face. Even if it’s only 30 seconds, that’s 30 seconds of someone's life I’ve (hopefully) made better.
Why mobile?
I enjoy mobile games, and I like that anyone with a touch screen mobile/tablet is able to have access to games. Games shouldn’t just be for “Hardcore Gamers”, they should be for everyone.
With ‘why mobile’ and ‘the motivation’ in mind, I knew I could create a mobile game that would deliver a 30 second distraction from people's lives, and perhaps reach a greater audience with the accessibility of a android device.
The Development Process, short story.
With any knew game Idea it is so exciting to start writing on paper, whiteboard or however you roughly plan yours ideas out. And it can be way too easy to get carried away increasing your scope overtime. This was a problem I ran into.I had a grand plan to make the game a 2 player penalty kick off game where one player kicked the ball by swiping in the direction and the other player controlling the Keeper. Also I had to obviously add a Main Menu, an options menu and a pause menu.
It was clearly not a good idea.
After around 40 hrs into the project I hit a wall, I just didn’t want to work on it anymore. I took a step back for a week and occasionally just thought about the project. Over that week I spoke to a friend about how Basketball Arcade machines work. They work by the player shooting hoops and scoring points, if after set amount of time they don’t reach a certain score they don’t get to go to the next round, they need to start again. With that information I had a look at my project and decided I would scrap the 2 player idea and go for a one player game where you needed to stop the ball by catching it.
Currently the idea at this point was: A one player game, where the player needs to catch a set amount of balls within a time limit. If they catch enough balls they unlock the next level, and they will continue until they reach level 5. Over the levels the difficulty would increase. Also I still obviously needed to add a Main menu, an options menu and pause menu.
The plan was solid, nothing could go wrong.
80+hours into the project I got the game into alpha. It was functioning the way I wanted so I got people to test it. I got friends and family most of which don’t play games very often which was perfect for who I was targeting towards. They were disappointing results, As once players played one level they didn’t see any point going onto the next, there was no challenge or rewarding aspect. This sucked, and it made me think about the game idea once again. What was I going to do? I just put 80+hours into this game and it sucks!
After a few days break from working on the project, I came back and looked at the idea again. It was time to do something I was stupidly holding off from doing. What I was holding off from doing was cutting back the idea. Around this point I had probably placed a rough estimate of 90-100 hrs of development time into this game, but I decided to cut around 80% of the game.
Some simple maths 100hrs x 0.8 (80%) equals 80 hrs of work I had possibly wasted in development of this game. It sounds horrible, but honestly I learnt a lesson which I keep learning/practising and that’s Scope.
That 80% of the game that was cut was the following:
Main Menu
Options Menu
Levels
Countdown Timer
A bunch of UI
Second Art Style
Scrapped/rewrote scripts
These changes carried with them a lot of benefits, two main ones being, less stress to get it done and easier to polish. I’m well aware their will be people reading this thinking “yep, smaller games make it easier to finish and polish, and I could have told you to cut back those ideas to make them smaller” I myself have said this to people before. But with most things in life you’ll never know until you do it yourself or continually practice the skills to get better at it.
110+hours into the game development I had reached a point where I could polish the game, this took a couple of scripts, such as a mute button and triggers for a particle effect. Some small animations and selecting a font to use. It was time to release the game.
Releasing Orb Warp.
I released Orb Warp on Jan 30th 2018, at the time of writing this post Feb 2nd 2018, it has had 19 installations. It may be a small number but I’m proud of it, I couldn’t stand in front of 19 people and entertain them all at the same time, so it’s a big deal to me. The way I got these players was via a Twitter post, Facebook post and telling friends/family. Overall I’m happy with how it all went and see myself creating more mobile games in the future, growing upon what I already know.
Sorry for the short ‘releasing Orb Warp’ section. I just don’t want to go into releasing a game in to much detail here, but I may write another post specifically addressing about releasing a game to the google play store.
THANKS
If you’ve read this far thank you for your time, and hopefully you learnt something about me or yourself by reading this blog.
