Unrealistic Expectations vs Shipping a Game
This blog is about the development process of the game (Food Fight) for the past 3 days. It’s like Flat Heroes but players (Refugees) fight for a burger.
Day 1:
Themes were announced (Generative, Refugee, Harassment, Fairy Tale). So as usual we did the brainstorm sessions, the first idea was ‘let’s kill refugees’ 😛 and we ended up with two ideas.
- Landlord harassment – Where you play as a landlord and sneak pass into tenants house and break things to collect more money from them.
- Refugee battle – Minimalist 2D platformer where two players (refugees) fight for a burger.
After this point we wasted a lot of time. It’s almost took a day to decide which idea to make.
Day 2:
We loved the Landlord Harassment idea, but we felt we needed of art and most importantly we are not sure about whether we can finish the game within time.
One of our artist is working from his hometown. So we didn’t want to put much pressure on the art side. We wanted to do this game jam in a way, where you can sit and talk with your team mates face to face rather than talking in Discord or Slack.
For me the most important part for this game jam was – Finishing a game, and sending it out. Because we were not able to finish our personal projects 😛 for the past few months.
So finally we started prototyping in the evening, the idea was pretty simple it’s like Flat heroes but two players (refugees) are fighting for burger. After 2-3 hours of development life happens these Bescom guys exactly knows when you start working 😛
So the estimation of anything = Estimated time + Estimated time/2 + Bescom madness (∞)
Day 3:
And one more mistake we did was not completing the game loop. I mean what happens after you eat the burger, how many rounds you need to win. So that the play testing would have been easier. We thought about making the loop in the beginning but it was ended up completed by the night.
And also they were few tweaking of controls, amount of time it takes to eat the burger and amount of you get stunned.
Even we thought about picking one random level from the set each time when you play the game. We thought it would be a nice generative theme adding to Refugee theme. But it ended you appearing only in screenshots.
Day 4:
Home Screen
Again we did the same mistake of keeping unrealistic expectations. We created playable UI but it was already 11’O so chuck it. One of the main lesson I needed to keeping remembering from time to time is “It’s not about achieving your unrealistic expectations, it’s about shipping the game, within in the time. When you are working with a serious deadline.”
At the end I was happy how the game turned out to be. Ya there were many small things that could have been done better. But for me this time it was about shipping the a complete game rather than achieving my unrealistic expectations.
Go give it try: Food Fight
Play with your friend or family.
Akhil Nivarthi 