Snappy Word
I originally wrote the game for Right Pedal Studios back when the Apple Watch came out. The game was one of the launch apps and I'm quite proud of being there at the beginning.
I was lucky to get Snappy Word assigned to me when Right Pedal wrapped up, so rather than ~re-releasing it I decided to do a major update. This meant making it work with Swift 3 and the latest WatchOS, adding in an iMessage version, redoing the art and adding in a new game mode.
Despite it being a fairly simple 2D word game the rewrite in Swift 3 and the addition of new frameworks ended up taking a few months of part time work to finish.
But I learned an important lesson doing this update:
No matter what you do it will take a lot of work.
I've already started my new game - a cool 3D game built in Unity with my mate and talented artist Pete Mullins.
Billy Carts made in Unity
The amount of work to get the initial 3D game up and running was probably a little less than it took for me to wrap my head around the iMessage framework. But showing the 3D game to friends got oohs and aahs. This was a "real" game.
This game is definitely a leap ahead of my previous stuff, and yes, it will take a lot of work. But you know what? I'm really looking forward to putting in that work because this time the effort is going to show on screen.
As I've learned everything takes effort so you might as well go for gold :-)
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2 comments:
That feeling where you start a game and you convince yourself that this time "it won't be much work" - "this will be a great one to do, because it will be quick". It is never quick!! Never.
Its the details that get you - all the under-pinnings, like levels, and leaderboards. Story elements that can take forever to get right. Remember Dan complaining about how long it took to get some simple story elements coded up around his racing game.
Motto: "It will take way longer than you think!"
Yes, so true! And that doesn't even take into account life events you never planned for!
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