Who I am, what I share and why you might be interested, indicated in the first post (link).
Disclaimer: I don’t tell you how to make games correctly, but I tell you how I experimented, learned and continue to develop in this direction.
Links to all articles in the series in the application.
In the 5th part of this series, I promised to talk about the role that our first build played in the development of the game. So we can say that thanks to him our Rummy Games team appeared. The founder of the project (Vlad) took courses in Game Project Management at VSBI in 2018. As part of the training, each student must make his own project and defend it as a thesis. This is how our game was born. The first version was compiled on Unity and only Vlad knows where it is now. Having defended his diploma, he decided to push himself further and after 4 years of working with Unity, he began to master blueprints in Unreal Engine.
As a result, he spent about 8 months transferring everything he had done in Unity to Unreal, improving and finalizing along the way. In February 2019, a prototype based on the new engine was demonstrated to Vyacheslav Utochkin, who decided to launch a training project based on it. This is how our team was born.
Let’s go back to https://gazzabetcasino.co.uk/ the prototype. He served for us as the very starting point from which it all began. Since it was already made in a Sci-Fi setting, we didn’t change anything, we started putting a narrative on it, etc. The first time we suspected that this prototype could not be turned into a game was before the first showcase in May 2019. In the process of fixing bugs, it became clear that they were immortal: as soon as we fixed them in one place, something immediately fell off in another. Along with this, our programmers, who joined the project in the summer of 2019, looked at all these “pasta” in the blueprints and immediately said that it simply couldn’t work properly. Code refactoring / clean architecture assembly has started. It should be noted here that the game prototype does not have to work normally, be optimized and without bugs. We mistakenly wanted more from him than he could give us.
Autumn and the time for the next exhibitions approached, so the blueprint prototype could not be abandoned. We revived it: repainted it, made the level more interesting, added an experimental UI and took it to the showcase. So we lasted until December 2019. But there was still no clean architecture.
The fact is that we all work part-time. Therefore, it is not so easy to create a clean draft, and even focusing not on the build that shows “how it should be”, but on the one that shows “how not to”.
Thanks to the producer, in January 2020 we managed to get on the stream of Albert Zhiltsov and Sergei Volkov in “After the Credits”. And again we couldn’t show the clean copy. I had to carry a half-dead old prototype. By this time, it had deteriorated a little: after experiments with the inventory, the navigation in it began to fail, which is why some npc and inactive squad members began to run away to the zero coordinate without permission. As a result, we received a bunch of recommendations “what needs to be fixed in the game”. And the main thing was that you need to “add a game”. That is, there was no “fan” in the prototype, without which there is no game itself. After participating in this podcast, we unanimously decided to abandon the old lame horse named “Build” and focus all our efforts on creating a clean version.
Spring 2020 came, quarantine and a bunch of online exhibitions in which I had to take part again, but with a “frozen” prototype. Along with the conferences, we entered the Unreal Engine competition, in which we were surprised to pass 2 qualifying stages. However, it was completely impossible to squeeze into the finals with the version we had. Therefore, before the final stage of the competition, we decided to revive the prototype one last time.
Our game has 2 main activities: missions to rescue victims and respites between them in the form of a game hub – a spaceship on which a team of rescuers travels. Over the summer, we completely redesigned the ship, so we replaced exactly this part in the old prototype, also changed the interface, repainted it, improved the step-by-step mode controller, disabled non-working functionality and the Russian language. This is how the update was rolled out at the end of last month. Our founder, Vlad, was able to do all this in one person. This ensured that the rest of the team’s resources were not diverted from development priorities.
We didn’t make it to the finals of the competition. After all, in the prototype, as before, “there was no game”. Even though we added beauties, two cut scenes and updated the interface, it was not enough.
As for the final build: we plan to release it by February 2021. In the meantime, we use it to check lighting in scenes, check scales, check effects and prototype individual mechanics. Before adding a mechanic to the final version, we first create a prototype of it on blueprints, test it in a new build to see if it should work like that, and rewrite it on the pluses.
The period that I have covered: February 2019 – October 2020.
Why am I doing this?:
just one prototype build was able to create a team, participate in dozens of exhibitions, attempt to participate in competitions, create documentation, announce on Steam and much more. Build is your best friend in development and marketing. It must be created immediately and updated all the time.Especially if you don’t have finances for promotion.
the build can also be used in development, testing mechanical prototypes directly in it. Then it’s easier to rewrite them into a clean copy than to code directly in it.