Prototyping For The Win!

A few days ago someone asked me if I was crazy. Ok, so I actually hear that a lot, and not just in the last few weeks after I decided to drop everything to make my game. This person in particular was referring to how long I said I’d take to make Strike Squadron Caracara and release it. My plan (which remains the same) is to have it on sale before Steam’s apocalyptic end of the year sales.

Aside from that meaning I need to get a game that doesn’t exist Greenlit (fingers crossed), the major part is building this game, creating content and test it enough to be an actual product people wouldn’t want to kill me for.

There are a thousand reasons why I can tell you this is completely feasible. I can begin by mentioning I worked as lead designer for a hidden objects game for Facebook that went from concept to release in 3 months, already with 60 or so levels, but we had a large team back then (even though game design, level and writing were done by one other guy and myself).

I could talk about game jams. I mean, ‘cmon, every year thousands of games come out from a 48 hours run and I see many of them turning into something larger with the correct amount of content.

But I’ll focus on prototype.

I think I mentioned before (maybe it was in an article in Portuguese, can’t remember) that I bought Scirra Construct 2 to prototype. I used it both for my paid work and for fun. It was over 2 years ago when I made the first prototype of a “2D space sim”. You can play it here (arrows to move, spacebar to shoot). All art is placeholder, taken from the internet (sorry, I can’t remember where I got them!). Though I made the player’s fighter myself!

It was just that, one very short mission on a very small level, but it already had all the basics, including a “branching” system (the messages change depending on the status of the freighter and the space station). It took me an afternoon to learn Construct and build that.

Sometime back them I had a HD crash and ended up losing that prototype’s code.

Around mid-2014 I decided to make a new prototype using Star Citizen art to build a “fan game”. This time I went a bit further, making 2 longer missions, adding regenerating shields, missiles, mines, large ships with turrets, etc. Took me about a week working at night. People who played it at Star Citizen’s forums loved it. It made me want to go a bit further. You can play it here (same controls, plus Enter for missiles). The problem was art.

Here is another important lesson: learn how far you can reach with your project. I’d love to make a 3D space sim with a co-op branching campaign, but I know that would be way bigger than what I can make in 4 months. I also knew that, despite having worked as an illustration 10 years bac, before entering the Game Industry, I couldn’t make this game’s art in a way I felt it deserved.

My first instinct was to contact a studio I worked for a while back. I created much of one of their IPs and I knew they had tons of art I could use. What if we negotiated a partnership for this project? I made yet another prototype during the weekend using what art of their IP I could find on the internet and my own experience creating it to make not only a new mission, but also a branching dialogue briefing before the mission, integrating what I designed priorly for my first solo game (I’ll talk about it in another occasion!). You can play that prototype here, same controls (Text in Portuguese. Sorry!).

While this proposal never got beyond the first couple of meetings, the comments I got from those who player both prototypes made me realize I had a strong product in my hands. One I should invest into.

And now we get to about a month ago and that article about the Midlife Game Designer’s Crisis.

My first month working on the project for real was about rebuilding the game based on the prototypes and everything I learned from them. How to make ship movement? How to build the AI? How to make the AI move and not look robotic? There was space to learn more, too. Showing the game to a few people I realized ships were too small and I’d need to drastically increase their size. That affected level design, which was something I was not fully happy with (and I talked about in this other article).

The thing is having prototyped this game in different formats from scratch (each time taking a week or less to do so) allowed me to build the actual game a lot faster. I already knew what worked and what didn’t because I tried before. After that it was about adding small features to it, like special equipment (EMP bombs, Stealth devices, modular capships, etc).

I plan to have the game feature-complete by the end of the month, already including all art (I hired an artist to do what I couldn’t!). I planned a demo mission to show off on indie events down here in São Paulo while I work on the rest of the game. That demo’s objective is gathering more feedback before building the whole game. The focus now is on content (balance and level design).

Let’s hope all of that works out in the end!