GoMoStudios

It was a constant theme in every tutorial we checked at the beggining.

“Keep it simple.””Don’t make your first game a big game.” “Start small.”

“No way, man.” we said.

It wasn’t about swimming against the tide. We started developing Iris because we wanted to make a great game. We needed to create something that we would be proud of, not just another Super Mario clone, or a blatant rip-off of a game that we already loved. Game design is about creating something from scratch, exploring what you can and you can’t do, setting milestones for yourself and getting past them.

The thing is, Iris is not a huge game. We are not building a procedural universe, or a huge open world space fantasy 4D sandbox. We didn’t even know what Iris was, at the beggining. We had a mechanic, a cool gameplay loop, and that was it. Then the art style came along, and our hopes got pumped up. We thought we could do something great, and we still believe we can, but, as Voltaire once said: “the perfect is the enemy of the good”.

In a few months, our game had changed from an endless runner type of game, to a rogue-lite platformer, to a skill-based arcade game, and back to a rogue-lite. We were developing maps, and enemies, and mechanics that we would scrap the next day, and that’s when we weren’t just imagining how cool the game would be, whithout actually doing anything. We developed a prototype, and we have a fun as hell prototype… Six months late.

And it works, don’t get me wrong. What we have of the game is fun as hell, but it has been exactly the same since we began this year. The only good thing about taking this much time in developing a small game is that the core gameplay has gotten as good as ever.

We certainly should have spent as much time developing the game as we did imagining how we could improve it, though. It’s not about keeping it simple, it is about knowing what you have to do and actually doing it.

I’m writing this, not as a self-pity post, but as an apology, for all the people who thought (because we told them) that the game was coming out earlier this year (because it hasn’t). I’m writing this to tell you that we are beggining to see the light at the end of the tunnel. We have time now to make Iris the game we want it to be, and we have learned enough to make it happen. It is happening.

So, starting today, we are out of development hell.

See you soon ;)

Mike.