Welcome to part2 of our reflective account of the development process of our latest title. If you haven’t read our previous blog post (PT1), you can find it by clicking here.
If you’d like to check out the game, “The Unfortunate Tale of Mr. Explosion head” is available for download (For PC Users only at the moment!) at the following link:
http://gamejolt.com/games/arcade/the-unfortunate-tale-of-mr-explosion-head/39850/
NOTE: If you want us to make this available for Mac or Browser based, we’d love to know. We’ll make it for you if we get enough requests! Contact us: [email protected]
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In PT1, we ended the article by outlining the initial problems that we faced which was, basically, real life. Ben has a day job to go to and I’m supposed to be doing my uni work for my masters degree. The run up to Christmas also adds pressure to an already stressful situation.
The thing that saved us in the end was: experience, planning and communication. Assad had already taken part in a few game jams before as part of his undergraduate degree so was more experienced than either Ben or myself in how things were done. He also knew of some rapid development techniques which were central in getting our work flow organised and ensuring we met the deadline of 5am on Monday morning.
All of Friday evening was spent planning the weekend and making sure certain targets were met. We wrote it all down and scheduled in meetings every couple of hours to see what everyone was doing. Once we had decided on the basic principles of the game, we fell upon the work like hungry animals.
Assad was doing all of our sound effects and composed all the music using nothing but hardware. As a musician myself, I was super impressed at all of the gear and the sounds that were produced. We did some basic foley for the Rocket grannies and lots of the death cries! The recording of the narration was probably the most fun part, though we still lack the funds for equipment which doesn’t produce an hissing noise. It’s good to know that we are capable of writing an engaging and funny script.
I have to say, that first night, was very productive. Everyone had had plenty of sleep and we were geared up on coffee and ready to work.
Saturday night was considerably slower.
By Monday morning we were all looking like this:
Assad had to leave on Sunday afternoon so after dropping him back to his place, me and Ben continued working hard on putting the finishing touches to the title. I finished all the assets pretty early on Sunday evening so I tried to help Ben as best as I could by making tea and coffee and dodging his pissed-off, half asleep, bitchy comments – (I forgive you, Ben). Really there wasn’t much else that I could do except helplessly watch him code and implement all the assets that me and Assad had been working on for the past few days.
By this point, I think everyone deserved to be a bit of a bitch. We’d been up for so long and Ben, especially, had been pulled all over the place. He was the voice actor, animator, coder and scriptwriter – it was quite a challenge like I said!
Would we do it again? Yes, but I think I would do it differently. Having come out of the other side of this experience, there are several things that we could have done better. Personally, I wish that we had researched the platform a little more so that we were aware of what format to release the game on and that we had better microphones to record the vocals.
However, the experience itself has given us new hope that people might actually like our products! We are so used to showing off unfinished titles to friends and family that even we started to think that it might just end up as a hobby. Making this product showed us that we are more than capable of making games that people want to play. We just need to finish them.
I hope you enjoyed our 2 part series! Thanks again for reading!
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