It’s not always easy to see what the final game will looks like. There are tools and techniques that can help visualize the final product and the more of them you implement in your workflow the better off you are but let’s be honest. Unless you have a big team with a huge budget and many years of experience you’re probably only using a few at best. Sadly in my case this lead me to a point where a core mechanic was just not working with the rest of the game and I had to give up on it and face the consequences.
I had an original concept I had not seen in any other game. I wanted to create an endless runner with re-playable levels. Most endless runner’s use procedural generation to give the player a unique level every time you play. In upigo I wanted to use procedural generation to create millions of different levels that are re-playable at will. technically speaking it’s pretty much the same thing, but this concept would opened up a lot of possibilities like different themes spread around for the player to discover and many other I wont get into for a good reason (It didn’t work out.)
As I had no example of a game that implemented this concept I had to think of everything, and through development I worked with it, solving problems after problems, figuring out a way of balancing the game, explaining this unfamiliar mechanics to player and many other small inherent link that I had not imagined. At no point did I doubt this mechanics. I was in too deep because as time went on, more and more features were balanced and developed with this in mind.
It went on and on for a year, believing I’ll be able to figure it all out when I have a more finalized version of my game. Eventually I decided to start working on a press kit for my game. As I was writing the description I realized the benefits of this mechanic were hard to put into words. This was the moment I realized that this idea I came up with before even writing a line of code had been molding the rest of my game.
Removing this core feature which I felt defined my game was a tough decision. The idea of having to rework a lot of the features and rebalance the whole game was very daunting, but at least taking a more traditional route, I had other games to get inspiration from.
upigo is now a more classical endless runner. There may be less innovation in my game than I initially planned for, but I got so caught up in creating a unique game I had forgotten that the core mechanic was the bouncing ball. I already had something original and as a one-man band I may have been taking on more than I could handle.
