We really like video games. A lot. So much, in fact, we started a little gaming company with almost zero knowledge of what it took to actually make a game! Minor details…
Piasa games was founded in 2012 on a cold night in Chicago, IL. Determined to create something playable - and above all else… fun - Jake Fleming, Corey Warning & Mike Blazek (that’s us!) each held a little piece of what it takes to bring a game to life. Over the next year we went to work on Grilly The Cheese. It took us around 1 whole year. We learned a lot of things the hard way, but through trial and error we released our first game into the world via the iTunes Store! It even reached the top 100 charts in Action and Arcade! We currently have over 10,000 players in Game Center and around 30,000 downloads.
To us, that was a screaming success. But it took a very long time…
We really wanted to approach the next project in a way that allowed us to move faster, iterate more, and never second guess ourselves. Hot Shot Santa was created in just 6 weeks with our small team of 3, and it just hit the App Store today so go get it!
You might be thinking to yourself, “Well, so what? Big deal. Six weeks is a long time.” And if you’re thinking that to yourself, then you are CRAZY. Six weeks fly by in an instant, and if you’re like us you probably have a full-time job and are pursuing your real passion in your free time, which most of the time isn’t actually free, because you have to bargain with your wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, children, brain, or all of the above to let you stay up in the wee hours of the night in order to get anything done!
So how did we do it? It was pretty simple actually and I’ll outline the 6 steps that we took below that you can use as a guideline to your process.
1. Start with a great idea (or at least what you think is a great idea).
This one’s the easy part. Ideas are a dime a dozen, and you’ll have 3 more by the time you’re done reading this article. Just pick one you think would be the most fun, or the one you would actually want to play yourself. Just remember, keep it simple. You’re not going to make Clash of Clans with a team of 3 in your spare time. It just isn’t going to happen.
Our idea stemmed from old games like paperboy and the joy people get from flinging things at other things, and also the christmas season of course. We had a dirt simple concept. All we knew at first was that we wanted Santa to be flying over the street throwing presents into chimneys, but this was as good of a jumping off point as any.
2. (MVG) Minimal viable game. Forget the art, start with a prototype
As the designer for Piasa Games, this was really hard for me at first to wrap my head around. When I think of ideas for games I’m always seeing them in my head the way they would look as a final product and am so anxious to start sketching concepts for characters and scenery. I’m not saying to absolutely not do this, but you might want to wait, because the prototype could show you that your idea sucks, and then you would have wasted your precious “free” time. Instead, have your dev buddy whip something up with spritekit and koboldkit to get those ideas in your awesome brain flowing even more. Take that idea you had in the first step and sit down with your developer, in our case Mr. Mike Blazek, and decide the minimal viable game to see if its fun and worth pursuing. All we knew is we needed a character (santa) in the middle of the screen that is more or less stationary, with a moving tilemap below (houses and buildings) with objects (chimneys) left and right of the character, and you needed to be able to swipe to throw objects (presents) into the chimneys. From this our Sound guy, Corey Warning sketched out the basic concept. Below is an image of our first sketch, what our prototype looked like, and the final product. It’s beautiful right?
The prototype helped us get from colored block objects to Hot Shot Santa in just 6 weeks!
3. Map it out and define your vision
Now that you have a playable prototype, have shown it to a few friends, and have gotten a little feedback on whether the idea has potential, start figuring out the details of how to make your very simple game concept feel well rounded and not so simple. What’s going to make the game fun? Throwing presents into chimneys is only fun for so long unless you find a way to challenge and engage the user. For Hot Shot Santa, that meant adding elements like naughty houses, wind, blizzards, speeding the player up, multipliers, adding slick menus, funny sound effects, and awesome music. The great part of creating a prototype first is that it helps you figure all of this stuff out without a lot of guessing. You instantly have a feeling of if the game will be fun or not and what you will need to do to make it better. After this step, everyone will have a really great idea of what they need to do. Design will know what assets need to be provided, Dev will know what’s coming their way, and Sound will be cranking some sweet tunes out along the way. You’ll have a clear vision of the finish line. Go team!
4. Set a deadline and think small
Our deadline was pretty set in stone. We were making a Christmas game, so we wanted to have it out a couple days before Thanksgiving so people could download it and play it while eating turkey with their friends and family. Let’s be honest, what else is there to do on Thanksgiving besides sitting around, stuffing your face, and playing on your phone…oh and maybe talking to your family once or twice?
Setting a deadline serves multiple smaller goals that ultimately lead up to your bigger goal of releasing the game.
One of those goals is to stay motivated and always get something done everyday no matter how small it is. With a hard deadline there’s no dragging your feet. You either get what you need to get done or you fail and have wasted six weeks of your life on a Christmas game that you will probably never release. Again, if you’re trying to develop a game in your spare time with two buds and you don’t have a deadline, you’re game will not see the light of day for a very long time. This is the mistake we made with Grilly The Cheese. It took us way too long, because we didn’t have a deadline and we didn’t have a clear vision of the game.
Which brings me to another small goal setting a deadline will help you achieve, and that is avoiding scope creep. It might seem like you’re sacrificing things when you have an idea and you don’t have time to put it in, but you need to get over this feeling. You don’t even know if the public will like your game or this random feature you just made up. You need to think small and get the things you agreed upon in step 3 done first. If you have some time to fit that new feature in after then go for it! Plus, you can always add it in an update if your game has some success. If you really feel strongly that the feature is a must-have for the game’s success then at least ask 5-8 unbiased people if they agree. Ask your opinionated girlfriend or a friend that doesn’t know how to lie to you.
5. Get feedback every day and iterate like a champ
If you aren’t showing your game off to your friends and family and anyone else who shows a remote interest in what you are doing every day you are setting yourself up for failure. The bad kind of failure–the kind that comes from guessing what users will like. Users never like what you like, and they never do what you think they will do. Talking to people who make games, posting in game development forums, and design forums, is where you’re going to get some really amazing feedback that will help shape your game into something that you are extremely proud of and that people will actually like to play.
6. Don’t be afraid to fail
You will fail. It’s not only likely, it’s probable. You aren’t going to strike gold with your first game, or your second, or even your third. If you’re making games just for the money, then you’re weird and probably shouldn’t be making games. We make games because we love games. We all grew up playing them, drawing our favorite characters from Zelda, Megaman, Mario, and collecting figurines. We flippin’ love games, OK? If we can make a game worth playing and make some money, then that’s icing on the cake. Now go make a game yourself and eat some cake dude!
We hope this article was helpful to you in any way. A lot of it might seem obvious, but if you’re just starting out like us, then we hope we can help you avoid some of the mistakes we made. Please reach out to us if you’re developing your own games and want some feedback. We love checking out other indie games and helping in any way that we can. Keep doing what you’re doing (unless it’s something dumb). Good luck!
by Jake Fleming at Piasa Games