What went wrong
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What went right
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Simulator
Everybody in casual gaming hates simulators. So do
I.
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No specialcasing
During development I tweaked the game engine a
lot, but in the end I didn’t have to make many hacks. This bodes well for the
upcoming games. For me, the biggest part of making this game is developing my
game engine.
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Interactivity
The interactivity in the game is really poor. I
had foreseen a much better experience when playing, but I was way too
optimistic. From my first test levels it didn’t improve at all. That partly
had to do with level modelling being a bit cumbersome in Maya. Maybe I have
to make a level editor soon. Everyone else has one.
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Bug free
Well, at least not that many boogs when doing this simple
games. Especially the tooling improved this time around. And as I’m planning
to make a few of simple games now, this should be good news.
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Overall look
The overall graphics look like shit. There’s no
design, so it all looks like kitsch a 10-year-old would proudly produce. But
I didn’t want this game to look like kitsch produced in the kindergarten. I
tried to make it work on the iPhone 3GS by reducing poly count and texture
sizes, but eventually it just came out ugly on the fast platforms and slow on
the ‘ol 3GS.
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Portability
This time I made it for the PC, ported it over
once to the iPad in the beginning then made all the development on PC before
finally converting to iOS. I also release the game for free for Win/Mac. Apart
from C++11 porting (which was quite hard and took me 20 hours of intensive
work) the rest of the porting probably took less time. This is good news as I
expect most consoles start allowing home-brew development soon.
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Controls
The controls are not only the controls. The
controls are also the avatar inertia, the feeling, the steering; indirect
things that are not so easy to pinpoint. So while the controls are ok per se,
they are also pretty bad. The helicopter inertia is way too big. It’s too
difficult to steer. If people wanted to fly real helicopters, they’d go do
that instead. So control-wise it’s alright, but steering-wise it’s a disaster.
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Controls
The controls are alright.
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Instancing
In my tooling, I just had game object classes, no instances. That is to say, each instance of a game object I
created in a level was exactly the same. Each car. Each helicopter. Each
turret was exactly the same. The only way to remove the most rudimentary similarities
(like color) was to hard-hack. Not good. But in some upcoming games I’ll
generate content I think. It’s more fun, and I can postpone fixing the
tooling. Which is hard as the game engines’ resource pipeline is a mess to
change.
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Opens the door to the
future
Now it’s time for me to shine. After a
well-deserved break, I’ll produce several game titles in a pretty short amount of time. I’m hoping at least
one or two of those will be good.
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Ventures of an ex indie game developer