Blogs

There’s a common problem that video game developers suffer… after staring at the same game for a year, it’s really easy to lose sight of what does and doesn’t work about it. I can’t tell you the amount of times Frosty has told me a level is too easy, only to then try it on a newcomer and have them be utterly defeated by it!

It had been 6 months since anyone outside of the office had played rooftop renegade, and there had been a ton of new changes and mechanics added in since then. We needed fresh players to try out what had been added, and make sure we’d taken the game in a direction fans could agree with!

Our team is really passionate about our industry, and always looking for ways to get more people interested in game development. We saw an opportunity to catch up with, and meet, not just our friends but also fans of games and development in general, all while getting some valuable feedback. Instead of inviting some friends around to play our game, we decided to make a public event, where anyone could walk in, play the game, and learn a bit about how we put it together. So we booked a venue, set up an invite, and started building up a guest list, easy right?

Well here’s where agile development gets a little messy. During the build up to the event we brought people from around our office at GamePlus to test out the game, hoping to iron out any major bugs before the big event. Here we ran into two main issues. The levels were too hard, and a lot of the new mechanics were unclear. Another result of us working on the game too long, we needed to drop what we were doing make some new additions, and fast!

As the game’s designer, it’s my job to work out solutions to these kinds of problems, prototype them, and then pass them off to be implemented by either artists or programmers. The unfortunate reality of this job is that often I have to add to my own and the team’s already large workload. I remember less than a week before the event, tapping Alex on the shoulder, him already bracing for the bad news, “Hey Alex… we don’t have a score screen layout yet”.

We managed to pull off a very strong week of fixes and additions in the lead up to the event. Using my new level building system I managed to build up a tutorial, and a much more friendly first level, which brought us to a total of four playable challenge levels at the event. Combined with Alex’s amazingly complex new version of the Cyber City environment, we had a great selection of playable content ready.

We’ll be posting up blogs that go into the nitty gritty about these changes, so look out for those in the weeks to come!

Finally, it was the Saturday morning of the event. We’d faced a lot of challenges along the way, and as is common with game development, we’d left too much work and bugfixes until crunch time. Exhausted, nervous and excited we packed up our equipment and rushed over to Greenlight Comics. The rest of the day is a blur for me, but some great photos, excellent feedback, and excitement from players, made the event absolutely worth the effort. I can’t wait for the next one, and I hope to see you all there!

Much Love,
Patrick.