Developing Games - A story and question

Hi all,

In November I released my first game, Balloon Defence, for Android. A couple weeks ago I released it for iOSas well (after getting access to a Mac and finally sorting out the build).

The game is, deliberately, very simple. I had spent a good many months working on a much more complex game (inspired by the old Hero Quest board game), which was going well. However that was going to take a (very) long time to actually complete, meaning I wouldn’t be ready to release it and would have no experience of the whole process of app development. I had done some programming before (mostly VBA modules for Excel, as required for a previous job), but had never done any full application development.

So I sat down to come up with a simple game, and once deciding on Balloon Defence I had a working prototype in no time at all. I then spent a couple of months (I work and study, so app development doesn’t get as much time as I’d like and things move a little slowly sometimes) figuring out everything else; menus/options, artwork, instructions, sound effects, achievements, social popup, fine-tuning the difficulty, building the app, releasing to the play store / app store, etc.

I feel that the experience of working an entire app through from scratch to release is far more valuable than any experience I would have gained by continuing with my initial, (much) more ambitious game. I still fully intend to return to my previous game, but now have a series of simpler apps to complete first - mostly games, though there are a few productivity apps in there too. The next app I am working on (which isn’t too far away from release, hopefully) is again very simple, though is level-based (not endless) so I am having to design multiple levels. It requires multi-touch, which Balloon Defence didn’t, so that was a new thing to learn for this app, and for some reason I set myself the goal of having no artwork, and instead creating it entirely in code. (I will have launch images and probably a few menu items, but definitely nothing relating to gameplay.)

My question is, how other developers (especially when you were just starting out) chose which projects to undertake. Did you consider how many new elements/techniques/tools you’d need specifically, or just start with something that ‘seemed simple’? Or did you just launch straight into a complex project, and if so, did it work out for you, or are you still going?

I look forward to any responses!

Cheers,

Simon

Hi Simon. It’s an interesting question… one that was actually talked about on this week’s Corona Geek. Charles will likely post the show notes in a couple of days.

Developers get ideas for games from many different sources. For instance, one of the ideas came as the developer watched cars circling a lot looking for parking spaces and saw a puzzle game that could be built on that. Others will find art they like and build a game based on the art. Or perhaps the are an artist and art they’ve created inspires the idea. An example yesterday, I saw an artist showing off some concept characters, no game intended, but one of the characters got me thinking about a game around that character.

Sometimes games are story driven like Angry Birds. I can’t speak for Rovio, but I would bet that game started out with an artist sketching out cartoon birds and a conversation about who would be a great protagonist for the birds… How about pigs? Not so much “lets build a game of launching an object via catapult into a structure and let the physics engine to the work”.  But that’s also a perfectly valid way to get to a game. I would be willing to be that “Pop the lock” came out of the game play idea and then art was styled around it.

Sometimes someone might come across a tool like Spine which helps with Animation and build a game around using that technique. 

Almost all games will start with a simple premise, but they will quickly scale to their requirements. Thinking up: “Let me build a role-playing/dungeon crawl game” is simple. But 2 seconds after the thought, you know it’s going to be a big, time-consuming, art-heavy, programming heavy project and if that’s what you want to build you spec out the huge project and break it into tasks and go from there.

Sometimes a simple idea will grow into a larger scale project. This was me with my first Corona SDK project. After a couple of ideas that were not going pan out (being way too simple, like one game took 5 minutes to complete with little replay value), I was frustrated so I decided one day I just wanted to blow things up. I found a ship, some rocks and an explosion sprite sequence and an explosion and blaster sound and whipped up a space shooter in an after noon.  I could use tilt to steer the ship. I could tap the screen to send out bullets/blasts. I could hit rocks and play the explosion sprite and sound. I was happy. I was blowing things up and I had reached personal happiness. I really didn’t plan on releasing it but a few days later after blowing more stuff up, I thought I could make a real game out of it. I found a friend to make me nicer art. I added aliens, bosses, levels, score keeping, lives, pickups, timed effects, leaderboards, achievements, ratings, settings, credits and what was an afternoon’s work turned in to 3-4 months adding the rest, testing, tuning and so on.

Most of my projects start with an idea. But in some cases, like the game I’m building now, it started out with “I want to make a game, let me go find art and see what I can build with it.” 

Rob

Hi Simon. It’s an interesting question… one that was actually talked about on this week’s Corona Geek. Charles will likely post the show notes in a couple of days.

Developers get ideas for games from many different sources. For instance, one of the ideas came as the developer watched cars circling a lot looking for parking spaces and saw a puzzle game that could be built on that. Others will find art they like and build a game based on the art. Or perhaps the are an artist and art they’ve created inspires the idea. An example yesterday, I saw an artist showing off some concept characters, no game intended, but one of the characters got me thinking about a game around that character.

Sometimes games are story driven like Angry Birds. I can’t speak for Rovio, but I would bet that game started out with an artist sketching out cartoon birds and a conversation about who would be a great protagonist for the birds… How about pigs? Not so much “lets build a game of launching an object via catapult into a structure and let the physics engine to the work”.  But that’s also a perfectly valid way to get to a game. I would be willing to be that “Pop the lock” came out of the game play idea and then art was styled around it.

Sometimes someone might come across a tool like Spine which helps with Animation and build a game around using that technique. 

Almost all games will start with a simple premise, but they will quickly scale to their requirements. Thinking up: “Let me build a role-playing/dungeon crawl game” is simple. But 2 seconds after the thought, you know it’s going to be a big, time-consuming, art-heavy, programming heavy project and if that’s what you want to build you spec out the huge project and break it into tasks and go from there.

Sometimes a simple idea will grow into a larger scale project. This was me with my first Corona SDK project. After a couple of ideas that were not going pan out (being way too simple, like one game took 5 minutes to complete with little replay value), I was frustrated so I decided one day I just wanted to blow things up. I found a ship, some rocks and an explosion sprite sequence and an explosion and blaster sound and whipped up a space shooter in an after noon.  I could use tilt to steer the ship. I could tap the screen to send out bullets/blasts. I could hit rocks and play the explosion sprite and sound. I was happy. I was blowing things up and I had reached personal happiness. I really didn’t plan on releasing it but a few days later after blowing more stuff up, I thought I could make a real game out of it. I found a friend to make me nicer art. I added aliens, bosses, levels, score keeping, lives, pickups, timed effects, leaderboards, achievements, ratings, settings, credits and what was an afternoon’s work turned in to 3-4 months adding the rest, testing, tuning and so on.

Most of my projects start with an idea. But in some cases, like the game I’m building now, it started out with “I want to make a game, let me go find art and see what I can build with it.” 

Rob