Show HN: Life Goes On, my side project game that turned into a release on Steam
lifegoesongame.com
lifegoesongame.com
The project started with a group of strangers meeting at a global gamejam event in 2012. The first prototype was super buggy, but our idea about sacrificing your character to solve puzzles and make progress was well received, so the four of us decided to keep working on the project as an evenings and weekends thing.
Sharing early prototypes with online communities provided a lot of feedback and encouragement. As the project progressed, more of the group started to focus on the game full time, working up to the release this month. The Steam page for the game is here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/250050/
If anyone has any questions about the process, or the game, I'd be happy to answer them.
I have a question - this game seems to be possible to easily port to mobiles (it looks like it would run smoothly on tablets and newer mobiles) - do you guys have plan for that?
The game is built with Unity, so on that side of things, a mobile port is pretty straightforward. There are some challenges though.
- Performance: The game uses physics simulation pretty heavily, with the ragdolls, ice cubes, and that sort of thing, which might take some rethinking to hit a mobile CPU budget. And while our graphics aren't that intense, they weren't built with a mobile GPU in mind, and would also likely take some work.
- Controls: Life Goes On doesn't require very much precision platforming, but the levels are designed for a player at a keyboard, or with a controller. We don't know how well this would transition to touch controls.
- Market: The biggest challenge for a game on mobile is finding an audience, and standing out from the crowd. Though if we can build enough fans on the PC, then we might have this hurdle overcome.
We purchased a few plugins to make GUI, input, and sound management easier.
We create all of our own assets, and implemented all of our own gameplay logic.
Can this be done procedural? Or did you have people sitting there and come up with new puzzles one at a time?
If you have a moment and others haven't already asked the same question, I'd like to know which technologies (i.e. Unity?) you used to build the game and a bit about how you learned game development.
The game is indeed built with Unity. 3D models and animations were created in 3DS Max.
Game development was a hobby for me for a long time, with most of my experience coming from participating in 48 hour game jams, like the LD48. (http://www.ludumdare.com/) It's been an interesting journey transitioning a hobby project into a commercial release.
An interesting challenge that our team faced was that we all came from a programming background, so through the project we have had to find ways to fill all of the other requirements for the game.
And I think your team has handled the artistic aspects of the game very well, especially considering that you have programming backgrounds that might not have included visual design training.
Anyhow, thanks for sharing and best of luck with your title in the future.
Our team was very fortunate to have someone with some 3D art experience, even though his primary background and education is in programming. I sometimes joke about the "programmer art" of our game. Here is an imgur album that looks at the art a bit, and gives a glimpse of how it has evolved.
At one point we did play around a little with having the camera turn and fly around when the knight grabs the cup at the end of a level, but the levels are really only build to look good from one perspective, and it would have been hard to make it work well.
Out of curiosity, are you on any other markets, such as gog.com?
We are also on the Humble Store at the moment. (http://humblebundle.com/store/p/lifegoeson_storefront)
We reached out to Gog, and would love to be on their store, but we haven't been able to convince them so far.
Our team was very fortunate in that our game won an award from Intel in their Level Up Demo contest. (http://software.intel.com/sites/campaigns/levelup2014/)
For most indie games, getting voted on by the community in the green light process is the most straightforward way to get on steam. If you have a project that has the right mass appeal, it seems that this can go very quickly. But it seems that most games need to build up a fan base and a following that can deliver votes and push them through the process.
The art and game play looks really good and your composer did a very good job!
I will definitely get a copy of the game! It reminds me of one of the best platformers in my opinion - Earthworm Jim (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthworm_Jim)
Now you need to enter the game into festivals, drum up PR, conduct interviews. By publishing to a Steam first, you will also have a hard time getting on XBLA, if you were interested in that--a shame, because this game looks like a perfect fit. Maybe PSN?
Any insights during the development? What worked? What didn't? How big was your team? How did you split the work? How long did it take from inception to release? Would love to hear your thoughts.
One lesson was that we should have invested more in our tools upfront. We largely depended on Unity's built in editor to create our content. If we had built level editor tools, and an art workflow based around that, content creation would have gone much faster. And we might have gotten to the point where we could have offered a level editor to players.
Our team was four core members, with a composer and a GUI / 2d artist helping out on contract. We also had help on the business side. With the game starting as a hobby project, we didn't have much structure, and the work got divided simply by people taking on the jobs that they had the time, interest, and skills for. On that front, we are fortunate that things worked out as well as they did. The project started at a Global Game Jam in January 2012, so we were a little over two years from start to release.