Tonight Matthew, I'm Going to Make...
Just before I began working on Bird Game, I was lying in bed thinking about what I was going to work on now I'd ruled the football game out. It seemed like I was going to go and do a puzzle game, but then there are two ideas for games that would be ideal for releasing at Halloween, primarily because one is actually set then, and the other involves ghosts.
So now I have to choose which of those I am going to do, because trying to develop multiple games at the same time doesn't seem like a good idea. Especially if both the ones I pick are the Halloween games because they will be releasing at the same time. But then a thought occurred.
Mario Strikers is a Switch exclusive. The football game doesn't have competition on other platforms.
So it was back on the table. And then it was reported that 2K are making a LEGO football game, which is likely to be multiplatform. So now it's back off again. But it proves that I'd identified a market for child friendly football games, which means I have to somehow work that magic again and manage to get it done before anyone eats away at the market.
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| For readers outside the UK, or those who are too young to remember, the title of this post is a reference to the TV show Stars in Their Eyes, hosted by Matthew Kelly. I had to do a quick Google to double check he's not one of the older TV presenters that got involved in bad stuff, and he's clean. |
Honestly, the puzzle game scares me. I'm surprised it doesn't already exist, and my guess is that maybe people have tried to do it before and it just wasn't fun. There are lots of design challenges to overcome, and I don't think I'm really ready for that.
Halloween Game 1 is something I've tried to make before. Years back I was making it as a homebrew game for 3DS and ended up abandoning it because it kept crashing and I had no debug tools to figure out why. I was able to get it to output the crash dumps onto the SD card but they were not useful. It's also single player so I don't have to worry about networking. But it involves a lot of 2D assets in an art style I'm not even sure I can be consistent with.
Halloween Game 2 is another idea that's been with me for years. It requires a lot of 3D assets and is very much like Pokémon Legends Arceus in the sense that you spend most of the time wandering around and throwing objects at things.
Both Halloween games seem doable in the 6 and a bit months I'll have until October.
Or I could go back to Bird Game. If I had more time, how would I improve it?
- Make a logo and show that at the start
- I didn't do a logo deliberately because I wanted the option to localise the game, and it was easier to do that as plain text
- Have a prompt to say "Press [button] to start"
- The simplest way of doing this would be to always say a specific button
- The "proper" way of doing this would be detect if a controller was plugged in and show the controller button, and default to keyboard if not
- Some way of displaying the controls in-game
- I was going to add a text file inside the zip so it is at least with the game, but I forgot so had to add a section onto the itch page
- Less pixelated text in the pause menu
- I don't really know how I'd have achieved this, but could have figured something out if given a few hours to look into it
- An indicator that changing resolution whilst fullscreen doesn't actually change the resolution
- When fullscreen, the game is actually at the resolution of the screen and not the one displayed in the menu
- Changing the resolution when fullscreen will still affect the resolution when in windowed mode, so it does technically change even though it can't be seen immediately
- An indicator to press a button to restart the game from the score screen, and an option to quit
- Mechanics
- Revisit the idea of having to steal items to faciliate pooping, and force the bird to do a longer poop if all the player does is swoop down as a penalty for not using both mechanics
- Make it a bit more obvious that the bird is flying out of bounds to explain why they have suddenly lost control
- A rival bird to occassionally steal items before the player has a chance
- Art
- More detail on everything - I had initially drawn tiles for pavements with edges on them and then forgot about it when I ditched tiles to go for a single texture
- Better diving animation
- Shadows to indicate that the bird and the drones are above the ground
- Footsteps when the AI walk on the sand (they don't actually go to the beach because I didn't put any nodes there, but if they did then I'd want this)
- Waves in the ocean
- Basically everything about the art, really
- Have the poop appear on the people
- The code does "attach" it, but it does not display properly
- Audio
- There aren't any sound effects when the bird is killed, or when it steals the items from the people
- AI
- Technically a bug, but there's supposed to be two directions but the AI only ever goes one way
- Reactions to getting items stolen / being pooped on
- Cars driving round
- Bug fixes
- Stop the drones from overlapping each other
- Make the bird turn back into the world properly, as it is janky sometimes
- Some nodes don't line up with the street properly
- I don't think that despawning works properly
- The drones don't always kill the bird
But I'm not going to go back to Bird Game. It was an experiment to see if I was capable of actually "finishing" a project. Granted I did finish and release Tabletop Adventure Journal last year, but that wasn't a game, and I haven't finished one of those on my own for a long time.
So, what am I going to work on? Or, what have I been working over the past couple of weeks?
Halloween Game 1. Or probably just Halloween Game as I will be referring to it until the eventual title reveal.
The first week on Halloween Game was a mixed bag. The first 2 days were pretty productive, but then I realised I needed to write tools and that has been a lot more difficult than expected. My decision to go shopping at lunchtime on Thursday also completely threw the Thursday afternoon schedule out the window. And then having the Friday off was... boring.
Working on Bird Game planted an idea in my mind - maybe every few months I take a week to work on something completely different. I was then browsing the upcoming itch.io game jams and saw Remake Jam - remake an older game and add some new content / put a new spin on it.
My first thought was Popstar Maker (this is not a joke, that was a genuine thought), but that involves a lot of audio and I'm not ready for that. And then I read a little section on the page which mentioned it was possible to remake one of your own projects. That made me think back to my University project, but it would take more than a week to remake a 3D platformer with 4 worlds.
Then I found an old document of what I imagined a sequel or spiritual successor to that game would look like. Seeing this cemented that I wanted to make some kind of 3D game, which led to a meeting with all the leads and production, who are all me, to discuss some changes at work.
"Fridays are gonna suck if there's no plan. I propose instead of spending a week every few months working on a week-long project, we spend a bit of time every Friday building up a second project," I put forward.
"Is that not going to distract from the main project? And what about the Thursday shopping problem?" production asked.
I have come up with a plan.
"Monday to Wednesday stay the same - 7 hours each day. We then drop Thursday to 4.5 hours, so it ends once shopping happens. Then Friday becomes a 4.5 hour day. That takes us from 28 hours a week to 30. We lose 2 and a half hours from Halloween Game, but we don't know if we need them yet anyway."
"This seems to go against the 'two projects at once = bad' idea, but everyone good with this?" production asks the other leads.
The art lead has some concerns.
"If the second project is 3D, that means creating and rigging a lot of assets..."
"Guess you'll have to get good with Blender then," production says as they leave the meeting.
So, two projects:
- Halloween Game - 2D, developed in MonoGame, targeting October 2022
- 3D Game - 3D, developed in Unity, ready for some kind of release in 2023 or beyond