How do we gauge the development potential of our small team of developers? 

This was the question which ultimately led to the development of our small, stylish game known as Sky Stacker. However, there were several hurdles to tackle during the small development window of the game which we needed to overcome. I'll get into those in a bit, but first, a little overview of the development history of Sky Stacker. 

Humble Beginnings

Towards the end of March, amidst the boredom of quarantine, I wanted a game of some kind to develop. However, many of the small teams I had joined had their development marred by a variety of issues - mostly relating to leadership and lack of direction. It was then that a realization had come over me - why not create a small dev team and work with them? 

As a result of this decision, I posted a small inquiry on the Game Dev Network Discord server and quickly got a few responses. Within a few days, I had a small and competent team to work with. It was decided that Zack was to be the lead programmer, Noah was to be the lead sound dev, and I was to be the lead developer (as I have the most experience). We still had one large question to tackle, however - what kind of game do we want to develop? 

Deciding the Game to Create

We threw a few ideas around, many of which were far too out of scope. Being all too familiar with scope creep and the issues it creates (but also not wanting to demoralize anyone), I pleaded that these ideas were scaled back a little bit and then kept them in a list of games we could develop later down the line (coming soon in the next ten years!).

Within about a week of getting together, we narrowed it down to three ideas: 

• A wave-based top-down zombie survival WebGL game
• A 3D free-for-all arena shooter (to be released on Windows, Mac and Linux)
• A WebGL block-stacking game 

The second idea was put into the list of games we could develop later on - that one seemed far too out-of-scope for 3 developers who barely worked together before. Thus, it was down to the zombie game or the block-stacking game. We voted, and it was decided that we should go with the block stacker. Thus, the game was planned out! 

Starting Development (Mid April 2020)

We started development of the game a few days later. It was decided that we would be using Unity and the accompanying collaboration tools (Unity Teams) to develop the game, as we had 3 members which was just under the paywall and we did not see any need to expand. We quickly got spawners working, and we had a simple game playable in a few days. We were using Trello to plan out what we were doing, which worked extremely well, and I (fairly arbitrarily) set a goal to release by May 10th (a month after we started work). 

Things went extremely well, and we took the concept art and quickly made it into reality. As the lead developer (and only one with any real artistic abilities), I was doing the art and putting it into the game while Zack (and Noah to some degree) worked on the programming side of things. We were taking things easy, but it was coming along nicely and we were hitting all of our Trello deadlines. 

Mid-Development (Late April / Early May) 

By late April, we were still making progress, but the rate of progress had slowed down considerably. I had many real-life matters to deal with and so did the other team members (I had recently gotten my job back after losing it due to Covid-19). We were missing Trello deadlines (such as implementing new levels) and we were starting to lose momentum. However, alongside of momentum, we were starting to lose something else, something much more important - motivation. 

Game development is extremely fun to all of us - we are passionate about developing these interactive experiences for others to love - however, at some point it becomes a slog. Working on parts of the game which you hate to do is never fun. For myself, it was the menu system and drawing new art assets. For Zack, it was trying to implement features while he had real-life issues going on. It really affected us, but we kept pushing forward slowly but steadily. It was during this time that I decided it was worth it to push back the deadlines a bit and just finish up whenever we could - we are in the middle of a global pandemic after all, and none of us were being paid for this work. We could take it slow if we wanted, and that is exactly what we ended up doing. 

Late-Development (Mid-May)

After a while doing small bits of progress on the game, we finally had a really good product to show off. We really just had to polish up the game and add audio bits, which Noah was all-too-happy to find / create and include. We started gaining momentum again, and this is when we added a lot of the "feel" of the game. I remember adding the events to the game at this point (the shark in the ocean level and the cow in the tutorial level were the two main events which were triggered by player progress). This part of development was a lot of fun.

I also remember testing the game for bugs after building, and I am so happy I did. We originally had an issue where the credit links were opening up in the same tab, taking users away from the game and making them have to reload the game. This was not what I wanted, so I quickly changed that before release so that you could open up the attribution links in new tabs. Whew. 

Release (Late May)

Finally, the time had come. We had the release upon us. 

We tested for memory issues, I pored over the build settings for the ten thousandth time, and everything went smoothly. Our game went live right here on Itch, with an accompanying Twitter post. It felt great! 

What would we change about the game?

I feel like this answer should be obvious to anyone who has given the game a shot, but... 

More content. 

We only had a month development cycle (during the middle of a pandemic, mind you!) so we were ultimately very limited by time. I was not strict on deadlines being hit because we aren't getting paid for this ultimately (plus we all had real-life responsibilities) and the content in the game shows that. 

We originally planned to have 5-10 levels, one of which is actually mostly finished in the project. It was going to be a volcano level, but we decided against adding it due to it not having enough to add (we didn't feel it added anything new or unique). 

We also wanted to have more powerups added to the game than just the one we currently do, but we were at a loss for what we could do with them to help the player. We thought about adding a small sticky "glue" you could stick to blocks to make them stick together, but it proved quite difficult to implement and we felt it was not a worthy trade off as it would not have spiced up gameplay enough to justify its inclusion. We also toyed with the idea of destroying the last placed block, almost like an undo button, but figured the damage would have already been done by the time it was activated. There would be no point unless it also stabilized the tower, which is what the powerup we have in-game does anyway. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, we are very happy with the polish of the game in its current state, but we wish we could have added more content before release. Sometime down the road, we may decide to update it, but for now, we're focusing our efforts on planning our next game. The next game will be much larger scale, so follow this account for more info on it when it comes out! 

Thank you for reading! 

Justin Farrell, Lead Developer