Wacky Duels Post-Mortem - First game made in creating a game a month for a year challenge
We are setting out to create a game a month for a year. Here is the post-mortem of our first game.
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Wacky Duels Post-Mortem - First game made in creating a game a month for a year challenge
The Game
Wacky duels is the first game we are making in our game a month for a year challenge!
Wacky Duels is a dueling arcade game with a very unpredictable AI, bouncy bullets, flying barrels, forty-six single player levels and with twenty-two levels to choose from to duel your friends in same screen multiplayer! The game will be launching on the Android platforms!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.LazyGoblins.WackyDuels&hl=en
Background
Lazy Goblins
Cody Caro - Game Programmer/Game Designer/Level Designer/Artist
Johnny Woods - Game Programmer/Game Designer/Level Designer
Michael Norris - Music and Sound Designer
We all went to the Art Institute for Game Art & Design. After graduating Johnny Woods and I, Cody Caro, wanted a way to be able to improve our skills, learn as much as we can and to improve/build upon our portfolio. That is why we have decided to take on the challenge of creating a game a month for a year from start to publish. Michael Norris is still at the Art Institute but we brought him on because he is always down to work on projects and improve his skills as well is a great music and sound designer.
Tooling
We decided to use the Unity Engine since we were most comfortable with working inside of it with C# and also for its collaboration feature. For the art, I used Pyxel Edit.
Location
At the moment our team is a bit spread out. I am in the LA area, Johnny is in Boston and Mike is in Sacramento. The way we collaboration was utilizing Unity's new collaboration feature which allows you to upload and share progress you make inside of the engine.
Brainstorming
Brainstorming was done in about an hour on the phone between me and Johnny. We wanted to keep the idea simple since we gave ourselves a month time limit and it was our first project after graduation.
In order to keep the game simple, we decided to go with a more action oriented game. The first idea that came to mind was basically a Contra style infinite runner. Then Johnny suggested we try to make a multiplayer game with Bluetooth, which led to the idea of a western dueling type of game. This idea later became Wacky Duels.
What Went Well
One of the top things that I personally thought went well was the death sequence. I wanted to make it feel good for the player to kill the enemy, but I also wanted to make it dramatic so that when the player got killed they instead of getting frustrated get a little laugh out of it.
Another part that came out good were the levels that Johnny and I created. We created 46 levels for single player and I believe we did a good job keeping things interesting with the level design even though we really only had 3 major obstacle assets. (static stone blocks, moving stone blocks and barrels that players could shoot in order to try and launch them at the other player or AI)
The music and sound design for the game were other points that were pretty spot on. The way the music transitioned between the countdown into the gameplay music went really well along with the timing of the death sounds with the actual death animation.
What Didn’t Go Well
One thing that we ran into was trying to figure out how to achieve same screen multiplayer since Bluetooth would have taken too long to implement. It took us a couple of days to figure out.
A problem with the actual game was that the player was on the right side of the screen while their target was on the left. This caused confusion for some players initially because on mobile games it is usually the player is on the left while their target or goal is on the right.
The controls for the player also served as a problem to people as the aiming wheel was a bit tiny which lead to it being harder for the player to control where they shot.
Another downfall I believe we had was that we only had 3 major obstacles for the 46 levels and even though I believe we did a good job with the level design with what we had it may have been better if we had the time to add a couple more in there and introduced them over time to keep the player interested and engaged.
Things to improve
We both want to comment and organize our code better moving forward. Since we have a month for each project we kinda dive into it and once one problem is figured out we move to the next and because of this, the code can get a bit unorganized. I guess it is good that we communicate on a daily basis but we still want to work on better organizing code.
We also want to be more organized with our scheduling and have task laid out for each person to be done by a certain date. With this months project, we are using Trello now as a todo list which has helped a lot.
Along with being more organized with scheduling we wanted to make small milestones for eachother so we can keep up pace with one another and to try to minimize crunch as much as possible.
We also want to give us more time for polish in the game and give ourselves a couple of days to play test, fix any bugs or add anything we thing that would improve player experience.
What’s Next
Right now we are halfway into the development of game number 2 and have already encountered some issues and learned a lot. The game is on track to be done and released on April 30th.
You can follow us on our journey via twitter @LazyGoblins also if you have any questions please feel free to ask!
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