Prologue It has been some time since we start a development blog about one of our games, but is important for us to share the information about the good, the bad and the ugly of game development and check it out from time to time in order to determine what went wrong or how to replicate success. For the fans is fun to know how their favorite game is coming along and give their opinion to create a better game for all of us. Ok, with all that said, the bottom line is to get you entertained and encourage your participation into this articles in order to create a game that youd always want it to play. So, lets start! This game start as a 2 days game jam. The idea come from my girlfriend, Chriss Vasquez and with the help from Gonzalo Muñoz in character design and animation we start the development. I was the programmer, game designer, GUI, music and sound effects guy. The main idea was to have a bunny on top of a carrot rocket jumping from planet to planet rescuing his friends. Pretty simple and fast forward to complete in two days. The first prototype prove to be quite fun and it looks like this Not very impressive? well, youre right. Every prototype has to answer a question and the question here was: is the mechanic fun enough? the answer was yes, so, we continue. The next one was made to test some graphic proposals. Gonzalo started to send really good material and as you can see, with just a little graphic design, the game was started to take shape. The upper number is the number of planets visited and the bottom one is the number of friends saved. This last one is accumulative and it doesnt reset on every play. Who would play it? But here we start to wonder something very important who will play this game? The graphics and gameplay has to appeal to some defined target group. Until now, we were focus on make the game and didnt think about that at all. Should it be for children under 10 years old? for moms? for hardcore gamers between 24 and 30 years old? After a lot of discussion we started to look into our own game and established that the gameplay is short and funny, easy to pick it up and play for a few minutes and come back anytime. With that information, we established that the players should have little time and the game was meant to kill some time waiting for the bus or waiting in a line to get a coffee. The age was defined, we were pointing to young professionals or students between 20 and 24 years old. Sex, sex, sex The next question was to establish if the game were suitable for male, female or both. Little bunnies are something better suitable for girls, but one may say that doing that we are closing a door for a big market and thats right. We decided to focus on the female market but making the graphics to appeal both genders. And so, heres the next steps on that: In here we have to take a big decision, Gonzalos design include things like buildings and mountains on the planets, but the new style was conflicting with them, so we have to take them out At the end it was better, but with better planning, this would have been avoided. Well, the game is taking shape at last, but theres a lot of work still needed. In the next article well dig into monetization, should we sell it? put ads on it? how many and where? is the graphic style filling the expectations? what do testers has to say? well, all and much more in the next one. Remember, the idea is for you to participate, make questions and please share! Thanks for reading! Follow Come Home, Space Carrot Bunny in Facebook
