Menu Mockups

To create the illusion that we were making progress, I utilized the plugins we developed for Awesome by tossing in some mockups of the different menus that would go into Bubble Pinch. After a couple of snags that broke the build, the mocked up menus were functioning in the game as you can see in the video below. Hooray, Bubble Pinch was starting shape up!

New Menu

We were making some good progress on Awesome, so today I decided to spend another hour to toss in the additional elements that would be required in the menu for the One Week Game (I think at this point I'll just start calling it Bubble Pinch, since that seems to be sticking). On top of the play, help, and game center buttons, the menu now had buttons for the music and sound, as well as a mystery button using an element from our company logo, which would send the user to a cross promo page so they can check out our other games.

Oh yeah, the one button I didn't mention is "Stuff". We would be really happy if we can make a living out of creating indie games, and even happier if we became appallingly rich! To become a part of the elite 1%, we would have to monetize somehow. I put together a really rough mockup of the stuff menu which should illustrate how we hope to get a couple of bucks for our hard work, which still hasn't really amounted to a full day of actual work. Which is good, because we only have 6 more to bring this puppy to the finish line!

Swiping is Fun

At this point our engineer had put in about a half a days work, if not less, and I had shamelessly gotten away with a mere hour and a half. The three of us wouldn't meet to finalize the game design until Monday, April 30th. No sense in putting in any more hours, right? Well, maybe just one... An updated prototype was in our hands the Friday before our Monday meeting. The main menu I put together was in the build and the game now allowed you to swipe the birds to pop the other bubbles on screen. It just got a little more fun!

We finally met yesterday, celebrated the success of our friend's game Cannon Cat, bitched about games that are merely task generators with no actual game play, and finalized what Bubble Pinch would ultimately be in the end. Oh yeah, and while we were at it, we came up with another game that got us super excited. "I'll probably have a prototype of it at our meet up with the other indie guys next Monday," proclaimed the engineering powerhouse!

Concept Art

Our speedy engineer was starting to make us look like slackers with all the progress he was making on the prototype, so tonight I decided to put together a quick main menu screen. It's a little premature to do so, considering we hadn't met in person to solidify anything yet, including art direction. But hey, with the awesome tools our engineer put together back when we started production on Awesome, which makes exporting menus, animations, and game assets a breeze, we can toss even throwaway stuff in the build just to see what it looks like. Here's the result of about an hour and a half of playing around with the main menu.

Prototyping

The next day, on April 20^th, our engineer posted an update of the initial prototype. Working on this was a much-welcomed distraction from the production of Awesome for him. Variety is the spice of life indeed, as it showed by the progress he made on the prototype. It was actually fun to play already. I found myself trying to beat my best score and panicking as the “bubbles” (which were still snowflake assets from Awesome) sped up.

The great thing about rapid prototyping like this is that you quickly figure out things you couldn’t by simply writing down game descriptions on paper. For one, if you have long nails, as do many well-groomed women and some poorly groomed men, it was difficult to execute the pinching mechanic. Obviously we would have to brainstorm a solution, or as I jokingly said, “Let’s just make a single in-app purchase for $0.99 that switches the pinching to tapping.” Hmmm…

At this stage, the prototype kept track of the most bubbles you have popped and how long you lasted in the game. When you miss 3 bubbles, the game ends.

I quickly swapped the snowflake and background assets so it doesn’t look so much like Awesome, before I showed it to a couple of friends. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive! All the obsessive casual game groupies of the female persuasion, as well as the finest Peruvian drugs our neighbors from the south could provide, would be our reward; if only we could put this game out there in the short time frame we proposed.

The next step was clear. We would meet in person to make the decisions of what exactly the final product would be, and how we would divide the women and drugs. The strategy was gradually shifting. Instead of shipping Awesome first and then devoting a week to this simple game, we could develop both at the same time by putting in a few hours here and there. Potentially, we could release the One Week Game first, and thus generate a user base we can tap into when we launch Awesome Snowcube.

Pre-Dev

The best ideas always sound crazy at first, much like the notion that we could build a game in one week!

We had been developing our first iOS game for some time. We were hoping that Awesome Snowcube would reap the benefits of all the hard work and passion that we put into it. But, we also knew the reality of how unlikely that would be. From all the articles and indie developer blogs we had read, one thing seemed certain; the more games you have out, the more money your next game will make. At what point does a game start to make enough money so you don’t have to use your savings to pay your rent? That still wasn’t very clear! It made sense. For one, you would already have a user base to tap into when you release your next title, and you seem more credible with several titles under your belt.

This got me thinking. Why not make a super simple game that will, hopefully, at least generate a fan base. The game would be free, there would be no strategy to monetize it, and the development should take no longer than a week. Because it’s free and so simple that anybody can play it, perhaps we could generate a user base that we can introduce to Awesome Snowcube, and the untitled Game 2 for which we already had a mechanic and were planning to start production right after releasing Awesome. If we could make the game in a week, it would be a small investment, and worse case scenario; at least we’ll have a second title out. The question was; could we do it in a week?

Around 10pm on April 19^th, 2012 I sent this one page game description to the other two guys on the team, who had agreed that this would be something worth doing.

This was all fine, but the question still stood; could we do it in a week?

As is his nature, our beast of a programmer and one man engineering powerhouse, answered the question not with words, but with a working prototype ready to be downloaded on our devices 2 hours after I sent out the game description above. The answer was clear; The One Week Game was already in pre-production!

The prototype was using art assets and the music from Awesome Snowcube. The golden snowflakes would appear from the bottom of the screen and float up. When you pinch them, they disappear and fire off a particle. You could see how many you popped and how many you missed. It was a solid proof of concept that took less than 2 hours.