We had put together a few quick levels, and while the general idea was fun enough, I found myself unable to come up with interesting level designs. Part of this has to do with the fact that I’m just not that into level design. I like creating game mechanics, but I don’t necessarily like coming up with interesting variations on them. I guess that’s why I became a programmer and not a designer.

So is the game canned?

No. I’m going to let it stew in my brain for a bit, and possibly get some outside help from some industry friends who actually like doing level design. The gameplay itself may even change drastically over the course of development. But hey, that’s what indie development is all about! If something just isn’t working, unlike at a big giant quadruple-A game maker, there’s room for experimentation and course correction. It’s no fun working on a game you just don’t fully believe in, so you might as well put the brakes on now before you’ve put so much time into the project that you can’t go back.

Visualizing The End

There’s another project I announced here on the site called Visualize, which was a visual logic editor for the Unity engine. While I had a large portion of the work finished for the plugin, I was mostly waiting for feedback from the Unity developers on a few features. They essentially came back with a “we don’t support that particular interpretation of our documentation”, and so a big feature I wanted to implement would not make its way into the plugin. Eventually, enough time passed that someone else did what I was trying to do, and managed to do a much more complete product than I had planned on doing.

So if you were looking forward to Visualize, I suggest you instead go download PlayMaker from Hutong Games from the Unity Asset Store. We’re now using it in our projects, which means that Visualize is essentially dead. I’m not complaining though; I didn’t really want to get into the tools business. We needed a visual logic editor for our games, and none existed at the time. Now one does.

More To Come

So even those Safety First is on the backburner and Visualize has been put out to pasture, we’ve still got other things brewing:

1. Word Monkey update: This one has been a long time coming, and it’ll still be a little while before it’s ready to submit to Apple, but it’ll be worth it! Retina display support, bug fixes, and Game Center support (leaderboards, achievements, and oh online multiplayer). No estimated time frame for that other than “soon”.
2. There’s a top secret project that we’ve been working on since the middle of last year. It’s been going very, very slowly, but it’s also our most ambitious project. It has the potential to be very, very big… but I can’t talk about that one, unfortunately. No time frame on that one either.
3. There’s also one other game we’ve been developing, and that’s one I do want to start talking about going forward. We started this one late last year and then I got derailed writing Visualize. Now that PlayMaker is out and I’ve found time to sit back down with the project, some pretty cool things are starting to happen with it. My next post will introduce you to the game and will kick off my (hopefully) regular posts about the development of the game.

The Indie Life Is A Hard Life

Before jumping into the what-went-rights and what-went-wrongs, I should start by giving a little bit of what life was like between the release of Sheepstacker (our first game) and Word Monkey. While it may look like it took us a year to make a small game like Word Monkey, the truth is a lot of things happened before our little word game even crossed our minds.

While I still feel like Sheepstacker as a game was a success from the standpoint of releasing a game all on our own, it wasn’t successful enough to pay the bills. Indeed, I had to take up a lot of contract projects, and even that wasn’t enough. So my wife and I had no other alternative but to move in with some relatives. There begins the long journey to the second Tiny Tim Game.

I think we went through about half a dozen different prototypes (of which I’ll write about in a later post). Some of them were good but weren’t feasible for the two of us to do alone; some of them were bad and the less said about them, the better. The problem was that with the relatively uneventful development process of Sheepstacker, I had gotten it into my head that we could make a much bigger game. Not so.

Then, one fateful day, my wife Shannon suggested that we make a word game. Which leads us to…

What Went Right

1. The Prototype. When Shannon suggested we do a word game, I thought it might be a nice break from trying to create my epic sprawling spherical-world dual-stick shooter (no joke). We talked at length about various gameplay mechanics, and had a few interesting (if convoluted) ideas.

The big breakthrough came when I started thinking more along the lines of Tetris or Bust-A-Move. The idea was that there would be a jumble of letters rising from the bottom of the screen, and the player must tap on letters to spell words. When the player successfully spells a word, the letters the player had tapped disappear, leaving more room at the top. If any of the rising letters hit the top of the screen, it’s game over!

It sounded pretty good in my head, so I fired up Unity with the intent to make a prototype to see if it was actually any fun. After just a single day of programming, we had our first taste of Word Monkey (which, admittedly, doesn’t sound very yummy). While it didn’t look like much, most of the code in that prototype is still in the final release of Word Monkey. The primary gameplay mechanics were in place. All we needed was a theme.

2. The Characters. While gameplay is king, I do feel that adding a touch of character to gameplay allows the mechanics to be more easily digestible. Thus we set out to find an appropriate theme for our game (which was tentatively titled “Word Up” at this point… very clever).

Originally, we had thought about doing some sort of glossy, Web 2.0-ish style interface so that it would reach a wider audience than our first game (which is only liked by sheep enthusiasts, I’m sure). However, nothing we tried really felt right, and it all just ended up looking boring or uninteresting. Though, I will say we did keep the blue letter blocks from some of these early designs.

I really felt we needed a proper theme, and we went through everything from volcanoes (rising letter lava rocks) to water pipes (rising letter, umm, water blocks). Nothing was really sticking. Then, one day while I was in the shower, it hit me… Word Monkey! I jumped out of the shower, ran to my wife, and simply said, “Word Monkey!” She immediately knew what I was going on about.

It took about two months from the creation of the prototype to that theme though, during which time no progress was made on the game at all. But once we settled on the theme, everything came into place.

We created some cute fiction that had the player programming words into the brain of a monkey. From that idea came my favorite character in the game, Dr. Schmachter, who guides the player along. The theme continued to add more and more value to the game as we developed it, and I think it elevated the game from a simple word game to something much more special.

3. Doing It All Ourselves. Little known fact: The sheep in Sheepstacker is actually a (heavily modified) model I purchased off the Internet for $5. With Word Monkey, though, we did everything. We designed the game from the ground up; I modeled, rigged, and animated the monkey and the doctor; Shannon took care of the textures and interface.

We even made our own music! Sure, it’s all stuff you can make in GarageBand, but it was satisfying. And since it was custom made, it fit perfectly with the game. Our vision is exactly what you see in the game. No more, no less.

4. Multiplayer. While we don’t have any statistics to back this up, multiplayer worked out better than I had originally anticipated. The idea was to have a Puzzle Fighter sort of mechanic where you could rain letters down onto your opponent.

One twist on this gameplay mechanic was to turn it into a sort of tug-of-war match. The bar at the bottom of the screen lets the player know how close he is to sending a barrage of letter blocks to his opponent (or how close he is to receiving the same). This makes the gameplay extremely frantic as you have to balance spelling smaller words to avoid getting a row of letters dropped on you with the fact that vowels are in short supply.

In addition to the featured multiplayer mode of the game, one unintended multiplayer mode crept into the iPad version of the game. Recently, some of our family had set the iPad down flat on the table and began playing. They would shout words that they find, reach across the table to spell words, and scream as the letters got ever closer to the top. It was great to see the game being played in a completely new way.

5. Free Game Of The Day. Word Monkey was featured in OpenFeint’s Free Game Of The Day promotion, and was downloaded 20,000 times. Up until that point, sales had been dismal, but after the promotion the game’s sales increased significantly:

But that’s not all. About a month after the FGOTD feature, Word Monkey was inexplicably mentioned on Glenn Beck’s radio show! Love him or hate him, our sales skyrocketed! Apparently, one of his kids was really into the game. Since I know the sales figures from before the FGOTD promotion, I’m pretty sure his kid grabbed the game while it was free. While I wouldn’t bank on that happening for all of our games, that just goes to show that word of mouth is indeed very valuable. You never know who might be playing your game!

What Went Wrong

1. Fatigue. Full-on production of Word Monkey took roughly two months. During the last month of that production, I essentially woke up, worked on the game, and went back to sleep. The constant work eventually caught up with me, and by the end I was severely suffering from fatigue. Hence, most of the remaining what-went-wrongs can be traced back to this. I was so tired and just wanted the game to be finished that a few things that should have received more polish or a bit better design didn’t.

To be honest, I’m not entirely certain why I did it, since I had no boss to answer to and we weren’t on any particular deadline. I was just excited about the game, and wanted to get it released as quickly as possible. Part of the reason could be because there was such a long time between Sheepstacker and Word Monkey. But even so, I’ve learned that the best thing you can do for your game is to take care of the person/people making it!

2. Dismal Launch. By the end of the second week of Word Monkey being available on the App Store, it had reached a version number of 1.0.6. That’s six updates (and in case you’re wondering, that’s back when Apple was much quicker with approving updates). The initial release had debug text listing the frames per second right in the middle of the screen. Subsequent releases had everything from power-ups that crashed when you tapped on them to level XP requirements that would take several lifetimes to actually achieve. It was a mess.

By the end of production, I was just so ready to put the game to rest that I rushed the release way before it had proper quality testing. This is something that is unacceptable to me, and it won’t be happening again. I can’t say that all of our future games will never have any bugs, but they’ll be the type of bugs where you have to jump in an obscure corner 500 times to get them to occur.

3. Visual Feedback. I feel like we hit a home run with the visuals of our game. We went with a minimalist design with mostly yellow backgrounds and nice interface widgets. Unfortunately, not all of the important information is properly conveyed to the player.

For instance, many of the power-ups in the game last for a certain number of seconds (i.e., the “fire” or double score power-up doubles any points you receive while it’s active; you can even stack them). However, there’s no way of telling which power-ups are currently active. A few options had been considered for how to display this information, but ultimately fatigue reared its ugly head again, and the issue was simply never resolved.

4. Interface Confusion. Due to the limited screen space on the iPhone, we had some difficulty placing all of the information we needed to display on the screen (which is one of the reasons for the power-up issue we had above). One way of creating more space for the actual playing field was to combine the label of the word the player is spelling and the button they need to tap to submit the word. I prototyped it up, we played it, it was fun. Done.

Unfortunately, I neglected to do proper usability testing with people unfamiliar with the game like we had done with Sheepstacker. What usually ends up happening when someone first starts playing the game is that they spell a word and then hit the backspace button. We’ve even gotten e-mails from people who had obviously tried long enough to write us an e-mail!

There were a few ways we could have solved this problem, but I think the best way will be for us to simply place a pop-out underneath the button every time the game starts, not just the first time. You never know when a new player will pick up a friend’s device and start playing your game.

5. Not Enough Monkeying Around. Again, due to fatigue, there simply aren’t enough monkey animations in the game! I’m not exactly a skilled animator, so the animations that are in the game weren’t exactly easy to come by. I think the point gets across fine, but so much additional character could have been added to the game if we just had more monkey animations!

On the flip side, I probably over-animated Doctor Schmachter. He has around 10 unique animations, and these are only seen during the intro. I’m extremely proud of those animations though, as I feel they worked really well with the character’s dialogue. But in the end, resources and time were spent in the wrong area.

The Indie Life Is A Great Life

After all is said and done, we still managed to have a very fun, funny, and unique game that we made all on our own from our bedroom. My commute to work was literally five feet, and there was no hot-shot, middleman producer dashing all of our design dreams. The game we made is the game we wanted to make, and I’m extremely thankful that we were able to do it.

We’re deep into production on our third game, and I’ve already taken what I’ve learned from my experiences with Word Monkey and am putting those lessons into practice. I still work when I feel inspiration. But if I feel tired, I just get up, go into a room without a computer in it, and just relax. Or I play other people’s games! What a novel idea — a game developer playing games!

As part of this “thank you”, we’d like to announce that not only have Sheepstacker and Sheepstacker Lite been updated for iOS 4, but we’ve also given a NEW LOW PRICE to Sheepstacker! If you haven’t tried the game yet, now’s a great time to pick it up. You can buy it from the App Store or try out the lite version first.

In addition to the Word Monkey update, Sheepstacker also received an update. The update fixes the freeze that would occur on iPod touches when trying to access the Options menu, as well as a bug that would occur only on first run of the game. Be sure to grab this update, which should be available now.

UPDATE: We’ve been notified of a problem where new high scores are not recorded or uploaded to the high score server. We have fixed the issue and have already submitted the fix to Apple. We apologize profusely for the inconvenience this has caused our users!

Word Monkey is coming to iPad courtesy of a new update that has just been submitted to Apple!

The new update makes Word Monkey a universal app that will run on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Essentially, if you already have Word Monkey for your iPhone or iPod touch, you get the iPad version for free!

Here are some new features coming with the update:

• Play Word Monkey on the beautiful iPad screen with hi-res graphics.
• Compete against a friend with the new split-screen multiplayer mode that’s only available for iPad.
• Don’t have any good letters? Use two fingers to scroll the blocks upwards to get new letters quickly.

Note that with the new iPad support, devices running OS 2.x will no longer be supported. You can upgrade your device to a newer version from iTunes.

We’re really excited about this, and we’d like to thank the OpenFeint team for such a great job on their excellent framework. Without it, Word Monkey would be half a game!

Most specifically, we tweaked one of the gameplay rules. Before, you couldn’t spell the same word twice in a single game session. The monkey would simply scratch his head, and the letters would stay on the screen. We realized this was confusing to some players (“Did I not spell the word right?” or “Is that word not recognized by the game?”). Now, the letters will disappear, but you won’t get points for a word that has already been spelled during a session.

In addition, we’ve added the “Smartest Monkeys” leaderboard in OpenFeint, so now you can see how your monkey stacks up to others that are playing the game. If you feel you must, you can also “Reset” your monkey and start all over again, though that would be a very mean thing to do to your monkey.

We clarified some of the instructions in the Dr. Schmachter intros, fixed a few bugs, and even improved performance on first generation devices. So make sure you grab the update from iTunes or in the App Store on your device. And if you don’t have the game yet, you can grab it here.