SPEEED! - When a game jam project becomes serious
SPEEED! is an action-packed, endless runner mobile game developed by me and my friends. The story behind this project is interesting, to say the least. What started off as a simple 1-week project eventually grew to be an actual fleshed-out game that we're gonna publish on Google Play and the App Store. Check out this awesome trailer we made!
📘 Backstory
This project was... something. Shortly after I graduated from university last year, my friends and I wanted to work on something huge, but with our limited experience in game development we knew it's probably not a good idea to work on a "dream" game right away (we wanted to make a location-based game with procedural generation—blog post on that coming soon!).
As a sort of "practice project", we decided to make a simple mobile game called "SPEEED!", where the initial idea was to simply use your phone's gyro input to fly a spaceship through an endless obstacle course. Since I already had several years of Unity experience, the plan was to have me work solely on the art and visual effects while my friends work on the core gameplay programming. We were expecting to finish our practice project within a week, and—surprisingly—we actually delivered.
What you see is actual gameplay that was recorded from the first week of development (there was no sound at that point), and honestly, it's not that far off from what's shown in the trailer! My friends and I wanted to experience what it's like to actually publish a game, but we knew our game was going to need a lot of extra polish.
Huge Mistake #1
Admittedly, the code was pretty bad at this stage since our minds were still in "game jam mode". If the scope of a project massively increases mid-development, it's important to refactor the existing codebase from the beginning to be more scalable. We ended up waiting a bit too long before those major refactors were implemented.
Huge Mistake #2
Get people to playtest your game! For a large portion of development we didn't realize that our gyro controls were either unintuitive or didn't work on some devices (like iPhones). Since the core gameplay relied on gyro controls, we really needed to get this part right and get as much feedback as possible.
Overall, SPEEED! was a fantastic project and I'm so glad I worked on it. Funnily enough, even though this was meant to be a small project, I was able to participate in a different game jam as well as build Skraggl.io and release it long before SPEEED! will hit the app stores. I don't know when that will happen, but when it does, please give it a shot! Be warned, though—it's a bit hard.
