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.