In part 1 I took a high level overview of the game. In this part, I’ll get to why I shipped the game if I recognised that it wasn’t that great. Why not try to make it better first?
It is impossible to over-emphasise how important finishing something is for two important reasons. One, the purely practical one of learning what’s involved. Icons, screenshots, videos, descriptions, metadata, marketing—there’s a lot of work and knowing what’s involved lets me plan better for it in future.
Last week I released my new game, Barista! It’s free and available now on the App Store. Today I take a detailed and critical look at what I made and attempt to extract some actionable lessons from the project.
My new game, Barista!, is now available in the App Store!
Barista! is a fast-paced coffee creation game. Can you fulfil all of the orders and get to the end of the day before your Jim fires you?
Orders appear on the blackboard and you’ve got to get ’em made before the time runs out!
With four different types of drinks with various combinations of cups, espresso shots, and mixers, can you harness the power of caffeine to keep track of it all and survive the day or will the pressure grind you up like so many medium roasted beans?
* Four different drink combinations with up to 3 shots per drink to keep you on your toes!
* Bonus Busy Days where you can double your earnings—if you can keep on top of things!
* Up to four orders at once to really test your cool under fire!
* Many levels of coffee-making mayhem!
Created as part of my 100 Hour Game challenge, it ended up taking me around 160 hours to get it to finished product.
This is actually pretty good for me. Usually projects take 2–3 times longer. This only took 60% so…win!
I’m excited to finally get this out there. I’ve learned a lot during this process and I’m eager to take what I’ve learned and get going on my next game.
Barista! is available in the App Store.
After further negotiations with the wolves, I have reached an understanding and have gained some control over my many distractions.
Things that have happened in the last few weeks:
1. Trail Wallet 3.3 was successfully released
2. EmptyBucket went into beta
Which just leaves number 3 on that original list, Barista!
My 100 Hour Game (that has evolved into a 200 hour game) has been on hiatus for the past few months but it is, as the walrus said, time.
This week I finally finished the primary game music, one of the last major blocks. I have also completed the victory and defeat music and started adding the dozens of sound effects.
The main track, now named Dark Roast, is a remix of the music from Tap Tap Power. Tap Tap Power was my first foray into games development, created with my good friend Tom Krones from Till The Money Runs Out.
The music was originally conceived as a chip tune in keeping with the game’s theme, but it has been brought out of the 8-bit world and now completely betrays the fact that I was trained as a drummer.
You can listen to it here:
There’s a saying among game designers: “Your first ten games will suck—so get them out of the way fast.”
Over the New Year I read Jesse Schell’s outstanding Art of Game Design and it is a phenomenal work, full of immense insights about game design and, frankly, creativity in general that are presented in a friendly, approachable way. It doesn’t seek to provide a comprehensive solution to game design—in fact, it argues that there may never be such a thing.