About 2 years ago, Artix Entertainment released a little game called PonyVsPony. If you weren’t following our twitter and design notes it must have seemed an odd choice of a game for us to release. It was cutesy, pastel, and all and all had a presentation that a lot of our normal players wasn’t expecting.
Behind the scenes, it was our first attempt at breaking out of our normal audience, and our first puzzle game, and our first “social” game (though I hate that term personally, it’s lost most of it’s original meaning due to over-use and bad implementations poisoning the well of what is a completely engaging and fun set of mechanics.).
It was also a project of love. PonyVsPony was my first game. I wrote it in a time where I was trying to advance my skills in AS3, and teach myself the structure of a monster that is a fully featured game engine. I started out developing it in my free time. I called the original few attempts “Daily builds” or something like that, little hour-long blitzes of coding for fun. Nights and weekends were spent playing with a very simple game-play mechanic – Drag to select the right orbs and make things happen. It was fast, it was addictive, and it worked well.
Back then I was still calling it Hurry, it had no art style or design concept to it’s name. I approached Artix with the project in it’s unfinished state, and was given permission to see the project through completion. I was given an artist, and allowed to borrow some of the best coding minds at the company for a time during it’s development process. I was also given complete creative control, and a deadline.
The complete creative control coincided with two things: Jemini – the lead artist for the game was amazing at creating “chibi” or adorable creations, and my growing love of the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Yup, I’m actually a fan. This wasn’t a role put on my shoulders during the creation of the project or some gimmick, I believe that My Little Pony and other shows like Phineas and Pherb are slowly walking children’s television back from the brink of unwatchable. Also, the fact that Artix and I had slowly been engaging in a prank war which usually resulted with his phone, desktop, or in one amusing instance, DVDPlayer backgrounds being replaced with adorable ponies of all shapes and sizes didn’t hurt either.
While the design was a natural progression of the team, the game, and pop culture the deadline was looming. I’m not going to lie, the last few weeks for PonyVsPony were the hardest I’ve ever worked before or since. At it’s peak I was managing a team of 3 coders and had art coming in from basically every artist at the company, and all while trying to hammer out design decisions and figuring out which features were going to make the cut for release.
And release it did. PonyVsPony went live in a close to complete state during DragonCon. The team and I were all exhausted. I pulled Alina, Samba (and her boyfriend) and Yergan all in on database entry and testing during the last few hours but it got released.
PvP’s reception was…not great (I believe this was the first time we made it on RPS though…) to put it mildly. The core gameplay was pretty much universally praised, but it lacked depth, it lacked polish, and it lacked core features that would have helped make the game earn the following that would justify continued development. That lackluster response, coupled with high priority other projects lead to PonyVsPony being put aside. Not canceled or shut down, but not finished. Just, set aside while higher priorities took up my time.
Until now. Over the last few weeks I’ve been teaching myself Starling, I’ve been learning about Adobe’s efforts on the iOS and Android platforms. I’ve been researching touch interfaces and all the while, I’ve been thinking: PonyVsPony would make an amazing mobile game. For a lot of you, this isn’t news. People have been saying that since day one, but it’s still just as true today as it was at the start, and now I’m learning how to make it happen.
That said, my priorities are just as full (if not fuller) as when the project was first set aside, and I can’t justify taking time away from Oversoul or DragonFable to work on it. But I have also been feeling an itch. I enjoy developing rapid-fire releases. Short little blitzes of an hour or two. I am going to bring back my Daily Builds to make a game again.
That game will be PonyVsPony:Rush.
Daily Build #2 : June 18th 2012 – TwitchType Mk 2
Postmortem:
So, got some fun feedback that got my mind going as I was trying to fall asleep tonight. Wanted to tweak the game. Here you go, my Daily Build for the day, at 3am.
The Good:
- Some pretty minor changes change how the game plays completely. For the better, I think.
- Scaling Difficulty. Novice players should be able to keep the game going for a little while, and advance players should get to their difficulty level very fast.
- New interface from Flash’s IDE that lets me build proper buttons that have different states and lay out art much faster.
The Bad:
- Spent way too much time designing the interface. I”m NOT an artist, I spent too much time trying to make it “look good” when i really have no ability to do that.
- Took way too long, I’ve been working on it since 1am, spent about 3 hours on it. Not really in-keeping with the daily build idea.
- Still no title screen, I really should focus on making that happen in the next project I take up, I’m cramming a lot of information into a single screen.
Next:
Now I really do think I’m done with this typing style game. Maybe I’ll do some kind of action game next. Something different.
Daily Build #2 : June 18th 2012 – TwitchType
Postmortem:
TwitchType (Still no title screen — No time yet!) is a evolution of my first game concept. It’s got a proper scoring system, better pacing, a “duration” timer, and a clear goal (amass as high a score as is possible.) As long as the letters are green they will earn you a point every 10th of a second (or so… Flash timers at this high of a resolution aren’t perfect). So it’s all about reaction time and typing speed. It’s a little addictive to me, my highest score is somewhere in the 600s.
The Good:
- Fixed a couple of bad coding decisions in the first revision.
- Ended up with what I’d consider to be an actual game. It’s got a goal and a challenge that you can improve on.
- Made finding “buttons” easier (outlines or backgrounds)
- Learned a really simple code snippit to use for a basic tweet. Not every feature I want to have in the new API, but at least this one lets me posh hash-tags. (the one we currently use breaks when that happens. HOPEFULLY this one won’t. Haven’t tested because I don’t want to link to the game before this goes live.)
The Bad:
- Ugly! But I’m a coder, not an artist.
- Still has a couple of small bugs I notice but not sure anyone else will.
Next:
I can’t really think of where to go from here for this game concept. Not sure there’s much else to do. That said, I’m happy with my first Daily Builds creation, and am ready to move on to something else. Have an idea of what that will be, but not sure if I’m going to have time for the next couple of days to put into it. Things are looking busy for the rest of the week!
So, for introductions, my name’s Rolith. I”m one of the coders for Artix Entertainment. I’m one of the coders that keeps us releasing weekly. Currently I’m the coder for DragonFable, and am working on the server architecture for Oversoul.
Several of our artists take a bit of time out of some of their mornings to do some “warm-up” sketches and paintings. Not all of them end up in game, but they are a great way to get creative gears moving. I’m a programmer, and my art skills are , to be blunt, non-existent. Because of that, I’ve decided to take their concept and give it a bit of a…tweak. I’m calling it Rolith’s Daily Dare
I’m going to take a bit of time – a half hour to an hour – on days I have the ability whenever I can (usually before or after the start of the day) and dedicate it to ramping up my coding and problem solving abilities. Also taking the change to test some basic game play mechanics that I think might be fun.
I’ve done something like this before, and it resulted in PonyVsPony. I’ve got no idea if something so amazing, horrible, and horribly amazing will result again, but it is something to keep in mind.
To get mioving on the diea, I’ve re-started my personal blog again (here!) Join me as I release the results, regardless of how amusingly bad they are, as often as I can.
Starting with TODAY!
Daily Build #1 : June 18th 2012 – Twitch Typer
Postmortem:
Every Daily Build will be accompanied by a postmortem, where I take a look back and go over the good and the bad. Simple, but should give a glimpse in what went into it and my process for making it.
Twitch Typing (as I’m calling it… it doesn’t have a proper name) involves you typing the characters you see on the screen as fast as you can to up your score as much as possible before they switch to new characters. I did this over the weekend and just getting around to sharing it now.
The Good:
- Took me less than an hour!
- First real test of this kind I’ve made in a long time, and “succeeded”
- It’s a functional game?
The Bad:
- Unpolished to a fault. No title screen, no title.
- Ugly Code. I was so focused on speed I overlooked a lot of things that I know better than to do.
- Had an idea to add a timer that would countdown from 60, giving the players a definite “goal” and ran out of time before I could finish it.
Next:
For the next Daily Build, I think I’m going to take this project and polish it a bit more. Maybe add a title screen and high-score. To push my limits I might add Twitter and Facebook integration and allow you to share high-scores. Maybe. Or I could have another idea.
So, here I am, looking at a empty blog again, and it actually feels pretty liberating. Expect some more changes soon.
EbilGeek 