===== RELEASE DATE: APRIL 1ST =====
Considering that weve never built a game before, I thought itd be fun to share with you guys our step-by-step progress; what went into development and some of the challenges we had to face being the newbs that we are. Hope this article helps you in your development as well!
The ultimate goal was to complete the game precisely in 1 month (yeahh that didnt happen). Weve been working on the game for a bit over 5 weeks now and are just about ready to wrap things up. If all goes well (keeping my fingers crossed), well have it submitted to the App Store shortly and count on having it officially released by end of March/early April.
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Go Go Giraffe is based on a simple idea of physics, just like youd control a motorcycle and go off of ramps. We use tilt for balance and control of the giraffe and the angle of its neck (pretty entertaining to watch). Then, with simple forward, jump, and tilt controls, youll feel like a boss plowing and sweeping everything, anything, and anyone while busting out crazy stunts mid-air at the same time. Only a Giraffe can pull this off!
VIDEO: GO GO GIRAFFE IN ACTION
We tried to keep the main objective of the game fairly simple - try not to die! But aside from that, the other goals are to: go wild doing as many back flips as you can while feeding the giraffes obsession with ice-cream and finishing as fast as possible.
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So, with that being said, heres a raw and uncensored overview of what happened behind the scenes at Strapped to a Meteor. Enjoy!
Monday morning, week #1
The first week we got together, things were a little rough. We werent sure where to start or what to expect. Finally, someone had to step up and fulfill a leaders roll get Red Bull!
And so we were off to a great start. We begin with collecting ideas (some call it, brainstorming), and spent the next 2 days doing just that. Sitting in a room for 2 straight days busting our brains and forcing ourselves to think of ideas wouldnt have done anyone any good. We find it more productive to have for instance 4, 30 minute brainstorm meetings throughout the day rather than 1, 2 hour conference.
Considering our position, we of course, werent looking to change the world and revolutionize gaming (but who knows, perhaps with our second game). Our focus was to introduce something fresh and humorous to an existing idea and with that thought in mind, Go Go Giraffe was born. I guess the idea of this crazy clumsy giraffe with a gigantic wobbly neck struggling to balance itself, appeared funny to us which is why we chose it thats all.
The rest of the week (the next 3 days) we spent doing the research necessary to make sure it was feasible to complete the game within the amount of time we had. Sketching concepts and prototyping, looking up references, and prepping the platform to try and not lose the momentum once we were rolling. In other words, predicting any major problems that may occur and creating solutions in advance.
We thought we had everything figured out; rewards system, levels, physics, feel and mood of the game, enemies, etc. Little did we know that a massive bag of crap was about to fall out of the sky, split open and spill all over our desks (not literally, but almost). Point is: we didnt spend nearly as much time as we should have outlining gameplay prior to building anything. Preparation is good, more preparation is better; weve learned that much.
Monday morning, week #2
Feeling good from the previous week, we began with sketching the assets such as; worlds, enemies, and rewards. After this, we moved on to UI wireframes and basic framework of the game. The first unanswered question that came up fairly quickly was, wait, is there a story line? Perhaps something that should have been figured out during our 3-day research and preparation, right? I think this was the beginning of our realization of just how unprepared we really were LOL.
We quickly set up another brainstorm session to figure out who this giraffe character really was and how the hell it got to the North Pole.
After answering these vital questions, we were back to our sketch books. We had a little over 100 different versions of our giraffe, enemies and in some cases world scene selections to pick from and chose the ones we liked most.
The whole idea of a giraffe and cold weather may seem a bit controversial but it worked for us; we really enjoyed the irony in it. Its not like giraffes like ice-cream either (perhaps they do Im not really sure).
Overall, our entire week 2 was spent really trying to shape the feel and the mood we were looking for in that game. Honestly though, being our first game project, I think we played real safe using typical color schemes. Well make sure to do something a little different in our next game
Monday morning, week #3
It was a holiday, we took the day off!
Tuesday morning, week #3
Right about now we began to realize this games a little bigger than we thought! Having it finished within the next two weeks would be impossible with our given resources. In other words, we overestimated our abilities
. We met up again to evaluate our biggest time killers and how to improve on them. Turns out, it was a matter of unplugging our N64 (jk). On a serious note, having such a strict timeline kept us really focused, but it was also beginning to frustrate us which forced us to extend our due date.Having a lot of the basic framework figured out by now, we rolled up our sleeves even further and began painting the worlds, designing actual UI elements, building level structures and gluing it all together with code. Whenever possible, wed invite our friends over to give input on level designs (youd be amazed how creative those that arent around you all day can be).
For each world, we would design a variety of over 40 different layouts, and at the end we would pick our favorite 12 levels. You see, the amount of time that goes into actually designing a level isnt much at all; the most time thats taken in this process is not only in designing a level that works (this should be obvious), but while doing so, keeping the level fresh, and exciting.
Im a bit embarrassed to say that we sort of forgot to play the levels as they were being built (because were idiots LMAO). In our defense though, the giraffe wasnt quite ready to travel anyway. Which obviously created a problem when we played our first stripped version of Go Go Giraffe we quickly realized that we had to rethink some of our levels.
Rob (our designer and animator), on the other hand, was plowing away designing every element of the game. It wasnt too difficult to create our main character since we already knew what it would look like. I guess it was just a matter of picking the look (how dumb and goofy) that we liked most.
Monday morning, week #4
This is where it all got interesting! A few levels are in, the giraffe is running and ice-cream is everywhere were playing the game! You know how sometimes it may seem like all the terrible things only happen to you? Well, they happened to us, too! It turns out that our physics were a little too real. I mean with the gigantic neck and constant up and down hills, things just werent looking good. The gameplay was awkward and difficult to control which frustrated us as developers. As a result of that, we had to scrap and entirely rethink the mechanics of the giraffe Dan was pissed! He spent most of week 4 rethinking and fixing our crazy giraffe LOL.
Of course I didnt just sit around I helped by playing the game, forward and sometimes, backwards!
While Im doing the most difficult important job in the world, Rob is working on animation sequences for the characters, Roland is refining the levels and Surge is taking care of audio. It may not seem like it (not that youd know at this point), but there are over 30 unique sound effects in Go Go Giraffe. From main menu soundtracks to bump sounds all picked from hundreds of different options (and yes, we purchased them all).
But it wasnt until we could play a full-on level from start to finish with every piece of the puzzle in place that we could tell what worked and what didnt in terms of sound effects, animation sequences, rewards, etc.
After a long week of fine-tuning, we were ready to move on to our first beta phase (which basically means, more fine-tuning). WOOHOO
Monday morning, week #5
Quite honestly, I think we were ready to move on to our second game. Things were starting to get a little repetitive. But it was up to our fearless leader to prepare a motivational speech and once again, lift our spirits up. Ok, kidding; energy drinks do a great job at lifting our spirits, too.
So now that were all caught up, enjoying the game, and putting together bug reports, we begin to realize that we werent enjoying it as much as we thought we would (yeah, I just said that). Btw, you can get discouraged real fast like that dont let it fool you; the smallest things can make the biggest impact. As it turned out, the game was just missing a bit of liveliness; it felt somewhat stiff and rigid. Our next task was to figure out a way to fix that. We begin experimenting with lots of new features, animations and effects; implementing some and getting rid of most others - in no time (well, 5 days to be exact) we turned it all around from, hmmm, somethings missing to, wow this looks and feels great! (And thats what she said).
Friday morning
Go Go Giraffe is ready to roll! Everyones pleased with the performance, looks, and of course playability of the game!
Week #6
And now for week 6; here we are, just finishing up the final phase of beta testing before submitting our first-ever-built game to App Store.
Its amazing how little refinements and tweaks can take up so much of your time but nevertheless, theyre the ones that make the game what it is. Building Go Go Giraffe was a very challenging, yet truly fun and learning experience for all of us (something you can never get out of books). Cant wait to start our second project it is going to be awesome!
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Id love to hear your feedback and first impressions. Also, feel free to ask anything, weve got absolutely nothing to hide
STRAPPED TO A METEOR CREW:
Roland leader, level design
Surge - audio, sound effects
Rob design, animation
Daniel coding
Peter QA, marketing
TOTAL HOURS INVESTED: 978
TOTAL DEVELOPMENT PERIOD: 6 weeks
PS: I didnt cover the marketing aspect of the project because I feel like it deserves a whole new chapter.
HIT US UP:
Twitter - @ImStrapped
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