After the last two prototypes for a town building game we were feeling a bit stuck. We liked the idea of working on that type of game but were missing inspiration for which direction we should go with it.
So, we tried something entirely different!
Garret suggested that maybe you should be able to control a character in the town builder.
We gave it a try and suddenly in a complete change of direction we were working on a 3D platformer :)
3D Platformer
Working on this was so much fun!
We built a huge playground to test all kinds of gameplay mechanics and moves.
The thing with developing management games is that they don't really feel fun to play for years. It's only towards the very end of development when all the systems, content and balancing are in place that the game actually feels good and interesting.
With an action game it's very different - moving the character and jumping around was super fun within the first day. It still takes lots and lots of tweaking and adding interesting moves, interactions and level design to turn it into something good of course, but it's a lot easier to see if something works or not.
This prototype did excite and inspire us immediately and we went much farther with it than with the others.
We came up with an interesting setting and story, ideas for the overall design and layout of the world, gameplay mechanics and had some concept art done.
And yet... we cancelled this idea as well right before moving into proper production!
This was a really tough decision though and hurt, because we did enjoy working on it and spent a lot more time on it (roughly half a year as opposed to a couple of weeks for the town builder prototypes).
What we learned
- the project felt risky because we had never worked on a platformer game before, which made it difficult to judge if we would be able to make something good and if there's a market for it. None of what we learned from Parkitect would apply to this game. In retrospect all of this was true when we started with Parkitect as well though. Also this prototype felt like a pretty good start, so we might have been a bit more scared than we should have been
- it was relatively easy for us to make the movement feel good and to come up with interesting moves and mechanics, but we had a really hard time designing interesting levels. Maybe the moves we came up with weren't that great for level design? But most likely this was due to inexperience with level design, and also because we had no good tools for level building. We tried a few different one but they were all awkward and slow to use and didn't allow us to quickly make changes and test them in-game. So what we probably should have done is spend more time on creating good level editing tools and maybe that would have fixed the other problems over time
- we noticed fairly early on that this type of game would require a lot less time to program and a lot more time for art and level design, which didn't work very well for our team composition. We would have to find more artists and new tasks for Patrick and Sebastian