First weekly blog posting about my failed game.
Hey guys
So it's been recently been brought to my attention by Michael Cook, the creator of the game-creating AI ANGELINA, that there are plenty of post-mortems and posts about games that have been released and finished, but barely any about games that failed and started to gather dust on a hard drive somewhere.
In our world of game development there is a mantra that every single developer follows or should be following which is "fail faster" meaning make a game and watch it crash a burn, then do it again, and again.
By doing this you will be able to learn from your mistakes and build upon the wreckage until the pile is high enough to reach the stars. However, we never share these mistakes, or rarely do, when there are others who would be able to learn from your mistakes as well and avoid making them. Well that's what I'm here to do, I'm going to share my failed game in its broken and unfinished state and go through what went well or royally sucked donkey balls.
So if you want to try out the game before reading the blog here ya go.
For those of you who have played, the game ends rather abruptly so I'm sorry about that but I'm not going back to change that since I've moved on to a new project which I will probably write about sooner or later. For those of you who have played it you may be left confused or had no idea what you did, but in essence the game was a stanley parable-esqe game where instead of letting you decide one choice or another, I tried to manipulate the player into choosing a certain path. This was meant to be a game where every word I said was to be examined for the real meaning behind it.
And it worked! Some of the time. And that was the problem. For this game it was extremely interesting to people if they both understood the premise and were tricked by me in the game. However, if they were to figure it out (or they were confused and made a lucky guess) the game falls apart. They won the game. And it was unsatisfying.
There lies the problem of this idea. It was meant to be a subversive game, a battle of me vs you. However, the game was only interesting if I was winning. Once the player wins the game ends, even if that's at the very beginning which makes the game forgettable and boring to those players. However, due to the nature of this game I wouldn't let myself force the player to continue or cheat to win because I wanted to keep the pure experience of actually having a battle of the minds. It was actually fun for me to do it this way because I had to think of ways to try to trick most people who would play this game.
It was also a fun experiment in creating a dynamic space. my art skills are atrocious so all I had to work with were basic unity cubes and text. Through these constraints I was able to focus less on the art and more on the design. I've slowly been developing a style that doesn't rely on art and uses a surrealist sort of space in order to create the setting and I would actually love to know if you guys think I accomplished this at all.
Anyway's I have no idea what else to write down for this since this is my first time writing this sort of blog post deal so if you have any questions, suggestions, tips about this game or anything in general feel free to as and I will do my best to answer all questions!
So it's been recently been brought to my attention by Michael Cook, the creator of the game-creating AI ANGELINA, that there are plenty of post-mortems and posts about games that have been released and finished, but barely any about games that failed and started to gather dust on a hard drive somewhere.
In our world of game development there is a mantra that every single developer follows or should be following which is "fail faster" meaning make a game and watch it crash a burn, then do it again, and again.
How did they not see it coming with that title?
So if you want to try out the game before reading the blog here ya go.
Indulge me with this for a second.
For those of you who have played, the game ends rather abruptly so I'm sorry about that but I'm not going back to change that since I've moved on to a new project which I will probably write about sooner or later. For those of you who have played it you may be left confused or had no idea what you did, but in essence the game was a stanley parable-esqe game where instead of letting you decide one choice or another, I tried to manipulate the player into choosing a certain path. This was meant to be a game where every word I said was to be examined for the real meaning behind it.
A mind game if you will.
And it worked! Some of the time. And that was the problem. For this game it was extremely interesting to people if they both understood the premise and were tricked by me in the game. However, if they were to figure it out (or they were confused and made a lucky guess) the game falls apart. They won the game. And it was unsatisfying.
There lies the problem of this idea. It was meant to be a subversive game, a battle of me vs you. However, the game was only interesting if I was winning. Once the player wins the game ends, even if that's at the very beginning which makes the game forgettable and boring to those players. However, due to the nature of this game I wouldn't let myself force the player to continue or cheat to win because I wanted to keep the pure experience of actually having a battle of the minds. It was actually fun for me to do it this way because I had to think of ways to try to trick most people who would play this game.
It was also a fun experiment in creating a dynamic space. my art skills are atrocious so all I had to work with were basic unity cubes and text. Through these constraints I was able to focus less on the art and more on the design. I've slowly been developing a style that doesn't rely on art and uses a surrealist sort of space in order to create the setting and I would actually love to know if you guys think I accomplished this at all.
Anyway's I have no idea what else to write down for this since this is my first time writing this sort of blog post deal so if you have any questions, suggestions, tips about this game or anything in general feel free to as and I will do my best to answer all questions!
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