Hazard: The Journey Of Completion

This week I've had a number of discussions with people about the remaining development time on Hazard: The Journey Of Life. Some of the discussions were along the lines of "don't you want it to be the highest quality it can be?" and other discussions were along the lines of "you should release it now because otherwise you're going to keep incrementally working on it for the next 3 years and never release it."

A recent post by Tyler Glaiel on this issue rings completely true for Hazard as well, so I figured I'd take the time to explain this issue in depth. First and foremost, the game is not going to be in perpetual development, nor am I going to release anything but the quality that the game deserves, because the situation isn't black and white like that. 

Lets go back to the beginning. The development of "Hazard" technically started at the end of 2006 when I created the Dynamic Geometry system. It started out as an abstract prototype for Snake, and I somehow ended up with a cool way to build levels that were completely mutable.

Back at this stage, Hazard got its name because the game was all about being violent and having the world kill the player if they weren't skillful enough. Although Hazard existed as a multiplayer arena combat game, I was more interested in seeing what I could do with the geometry itself. I spent about 6 months working on it at this stage, which was also 6 months of learning the Unreal Engine, before I decided that I wouldn't get it all working smoothly over a network, and I put the system down. 

The game then went on a hiatus for a long time whilst I developed other concepts such as Recursive Space, Particle Characters, Roboblitz Isolated and then went off to work in industry. Throughout this time, very small incremental changes were happening to Hazard along the way, such as first implementations of the tile gun, working out a visual theme for the game, etc. None of this technically counts towards the development time, because it was very sporadic, but during this time I ended up prototyping a bunch of puzzles in isolation from each other, and sorted most of the mechanics.

During this time I moved from arena combat to a puzzle game, partly for technical reasons, but moreso because an arena combat game wasn't going to really sell the idea of what the Dynamic Geometry system could do. The game was only ever going to be a small portfolio piece, and started out as something linear, but slowly grew into something exploratory as a result of not wanting death and failure in the game at all. The concept of the holochamber came around at this stage, but was not yet implemented.

In March 2009, in my final year of university, Hazard: The Journey Of Life was born. I decided that the game had to be finished that year, or I would never get it out of my head. Development throughout 2009  year was incredibly fast. I knew I had limited time to work on the game, what with having university projects in the way as well, but I knew that if I kept spending all of my free time on it that the game would come along nicely.

Each week I was adding several new puzzles to the game and having people playtest it throughout the development. Throughout this process the game ended up taking a turn into a philosophical art game based more around choices than puzzles, as a solution to some design problems the game had in early playtests. People responded well to its uniqueness, so I continued down that path.

By August 2009, I essentially had a completed game. I entered Sense of Wonder Night and Make Something Unreal, and then put the game to the side, because it was done. Essentially, in 6 months, I had gone from having a bunch of rough prototypes to having a completed total conversion, and it was this version that got me to the Tokyo Game Show, and ended up making me a Grand Prize Winner in Make Something Unreal. Naturally, to people who knew me before I was cool (lol?), the fact that I'm now still working on the game 8 months down the road seems hard to grasp, given it was "finished" at one time. 

But here's the kicker. Although the game did only technically take 6 months to create the mod, that's because 50% of that content already existed spread around my hard disk, 30% existed in my head or on paper, and the remaining 20% developed as a result of playtests, feedback, insomnia and alcohol. Commercial viability didn't factor into it at all, because it was still just intended as a portfolio piece. Stitching completely random things together made perfect sense, and I ended up with a mod that took people around 5 - 8 hours to complete, and a bunch of people loved it. But that was nowhere near something I could sell as a commercial product. 

Since August 2009 development has had its ups and downs, because working on the game throughout my degree meant pushing my degree to the side constantly, and leaving me weeks or months behind on work. Finishing the remainder of my degree from August onwards meant doing nothing but study for a couple of months. I then had a short break, given I'd spent 5 years having no spare time anywhere because I was always working on one side project or another. From December 2009 to February 2010, I was furiously working on the development of the game again leading up to the GDC.

I made the game standalone using the UDK and created a demo build of it, coded in a whole lot of optimisations that were necessary for the game to run more smoothly, rewrote the entire dynamic geometry system which I'd been meaning to do for months, changed path structures all around the place that weren't at all right for something that now needed to be commercially viable, and spent time implementing a whole lot of polish. I basically lost March to the GDC and being sick upon returning home. I then spent several weeks redoing my entire website.

After all of that time, to someone comparing the mod to the demo, it may not seem like a whole lot of stuff has changed, but that's mostly because I've spent so much time fixing things behind the scenes. It's like watching a duck glide along a pond graciously, unaware that underneath the surface its feet are kicking wildly to get it places. Having done all of that, I've still got some optimisation to do, but I'm only now really getting towards final polish for the game.

I never intended to sell the mod, so people commenting on the commercial viability of it as a game were correct in saying that it was a bit questionable. However, that's not a fault of the design of the game, but merely the constraints of the development time it had seen. Making a commercially viable product out of it means doing a whole lot of work that wasn't necessary when it was something I was doing just for fun.

Niggling little issues like a puzzle not giving feedback, bugs with doors that allow you to push them off their hinges, the learning curve not being entirely right, etc. are the kinds of things that can really kill the feel of a game, and for Hazard, getting that feeling right is absolutely essential. I get one chance to prove that the concept of a philosophical art game about life works just as well as any other game out there, and I've already seen what happens when it's not correct.

I've had playtesters assure me that they've played beta builds of games before, and that they understand the nature of something that's a work in progress, only to then ragequit after 2 minutes of the game and list all of issues that made the game not work for them. Things like "I had no incentive for moving forwards", "The game didn't feel guided enough", "I keep hitting dead ends", etc. They'd give heaps of feedback about the game and suggest dramatic changes, but when I give them another version to play with only very few minor changes, the same people can then be happy playing through the game for an hour and a half, and wanting more.  

If everything is designed correctly, it feels great. If there's the tiniest thing wrong in the game, the entire experience feels broken, because Hazard simply doesn't work like a normal game. This is why I specifically refer to it as an art game. Not because I'm trying to argue the whole "games as art" debate, which is something different entirely, but because to me, art games refer to things that don't fit within the expectations of a normal game experience, yet.  

When I say the game still has a couple of months, it's not because I'm just slowly making small incremental changes or being undecided about how much I'm trying to achieve. I have an end point I'm working towards and I'm not adding additional scope to the game, it just takes a long time to get there when you're one person working on something with a whole lot of complexity in the design. For something that seems so simple to people, it can take hours or days of staring at the screen working out where a single path should go.

Something that seemed trivial back when it was just a mod now has a dramatic impact on the flow of the game from a commercial perspective, and it's very easy to get it wrong. The game is massive and when it's released, people shouldn't be disappointed with the end result, but that's only because I took all the time that was necessary to make it work as effectively as it deserved. 

Reposted from my blog - http://www.demruth.com/blog/