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POSTMORTEM: CUBE UP
11/07/2018Game Design
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READ MORE
POSTMORTEM: CUBE UP
11/07/2018Game Design
Cube Up is an endless mobile game based on completing cubes at an increasing speed avoiding obstacles. It was released in October 2018 for Android devices and it has been in development for fourteen months (yes, f-o-u-r-t-e-e-n months, a really long time). You can download the game at this link (feedbacks are really appreciated!):
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.macaco.cubeup
The Cube Up development started in a strange way: we were working on a third person shooter financed by a private investor on PC. After few months the collaboration with the investor ended, forcing us to stop the development of the project. After some weeks of absolute crisis (mental for the disappointment and physical for the long crunch period made in the previous months), we made a reunion with one objective: to choose the new development path to follow. All the team members shared the same idea: to avoid big projects that would have required funding for the development so we decided to approach little projects in which the funding was necessary only for the marketing. This is why we decided to develop little games in the mobile market, despite the huge competition in it. The self imposed objective that the team set at the start of the project was: to create a little game to get experience in a new market, not giving too much importance to the financial aspect because we knew that our first game would have hardly been a killer app for the lack of experience on mobile game development and publishing.
WHAT WENT RIGHT
Ah, one moment...I like motivational quotes and stuff like that, so at the start of each section there is a cool quote (absolutely not mine) inherent to the topic.
We have finished and published it!
"It is easy to prototype a game, selling it is the difficult part"
- Bleeding developers after the first published game - It is the most basic thing but it is not trivial because numerous projects die especially when the developers have no experience and the obtained results do not satisfy the expectations. Approaching in a positive way the failures during the development is the key to success.
Planning and structuring the development using the intelligent fast failure is a really good strategy that works very well for teams and developers without a lot of experience.
Learnt:
• The road to publish a game is not a sprint, you have to face it with resistance and constancy. • Use the failure as a tool to explore and test new options, ideas, solutions. Prototype stuff to understand and gain experience, not to focus on an idea.
After all the final product complies our initial concept
"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad"
- Shigeru Miyamoto -
It is very common to wrongly estimate the amount of required time to achieve the milestones. This was a nightmare for us, in fact we achieved all the milestones with at least one week of delay.
The simplest idea to overcome this problem could seem: to cut partially or entirely one or more features to reduce the required time and stay in the planned time. Cutting features is really difficult because you have to make a deep analysis to understand which features create the core of your game experience, because if you cut one of them your game probably collapses. Cutting features during the development is the last chance you have.
A smarter approach to solve this problem is to design rules, dynamics, systems, etc. using a priority level that indicates how much this element is important to transmit the experience to the player. Using this method you start the development with a clear idea of which elements are the core, which ones are the reinforces and which ones are optional, so if you are forced to cut features you obviously will start to delete the less important ones. In our case we cut all the optional and some of the reinforcing features, but we have always developed the core ones, with the result that our final game experience is almost identical to the initial concept but it took more than a year (too much time).
Learnt:
• To design features using the priority method to understand which are the core elements that generates your game experience. • To prototype graphic, UI animations and user experience stuff use Adobe After Effects because you can create very quickly mocap videos with 2D and 3D elements. Only if the created video is approved, start to implement this thing in the game using the video as reference.
