Game over for IC.HACK

This is Day 5 of the IC.HACK tutorial series! To see the previous day's articles, click Day 1 – Starting, Day 2 – AI, Day 3 – Art and Sound or Day 4 – Creating Levels

And so we trundle to the end of our experiment in short-term, fast-paced development. In just a few hours a day I’ve knocked together a rough-but-ready game that’s got a little bit of everything, from graphics to level generation. Nothing clever, nothing award-winning, but definitely ‘a game’. And in terms of starting off, that’s all you can ask for.

Hopefully you took a look at our exciting new level generator yesterday and played around our new lairs. It’s time for farewell, and that can only mean one thing – we have to finish this game. I used to think that finishing a game was simple, a heavenly state I would be in if I could ever actually get going with any of my projects. Unfortunately, finishing is one of the hardest bits of development. Today we’ll look at why that is.

If you look at where we are with IC.HACK, it’s tempting to stay in that prototype mindset and see the thing as finished. We’ve got player characters, enemies, special moves, level generation - everything you need to play a full game. But there’s no rounding to it. You might have shown off your game to a friend or two so far, but that’s not the same as convincing someone to spend their free time playing it. To get that, you need to polish it, and fill in all those tiny holes you skipped over earlier.

First of all, our game doesn’t actually have proper objectives. The endgame is crucial, for obvious reasons, so we have to add in ending scenarios. But then it gets even more boring - what about players who want to restart? Or return to the main menu? Is there anything we need to clean up or delete in case they try and start the game again?

Finishing a game off is a case of returning to all of those “deal with that later” moments and biting a multitude of bullets. But it’s also the final few straits you have to run in order to become an official game developer. Spelunky/Aquaria developer Derek Yu offers a list of things to help developers finish their games on his blog Make Games, and my favourite tips I’ve tried to weave into the days this week – including the ‘cut out what you don’t need’ rule of thumb, and that all important step of actually starting development.

Today’s Derek-tip is probably the more depressing one – grind is normal. Grind is what it’s about a lot of the time. We started the week prototyping fast and loose, shooting off features like we were in a Western and our gun fired gameplay mechanics for some reason. Now, at the end, it’s time to fill in every little bit – writing the menus, the about text, the help, making sure the text is aligned everywhere and the animations synchronise (thankfully, none of that here).

It might, for the first few games you finish at least, also be a time of reflection on how things went. What would you do differently next time? IC.HACK is riddled with problems – a poor collision model, identical enemies and little variation in classes. The maps are a bit aimless and unguided, and there’s no inventory (I followed my own rules for once and cut out what I couldn’t implement in time).

But don’t be too critical, because ultimately you have developed a game. That’s awesome, and not easy either. In fact, despite starting over a dozen projects in the last six months, IC.HACK is the most finished of any game I’ve ever made. Small, ugly, but I’m still proud of it. And the lessons carry through to the next game too.

Hopefully some of you will have been spurred on to pick up Game Maker over Easter, or beyond, and fiddle about for yourself. I’ve been considering the idea of a society dedicated to such things at Imperial, perhaps to set up sometime next year; if you’d be interested in being a part of such a thing, please get in touch with me.

Interested or not, though, hopefully you’ve been playing IC.HACK. So next Friday we’ll be releasing a brand new version of the game, taking into account some of the suggestions we’ve received this week. Today’s version adds three new degree subjects to the game, but yours may not be in there! Email us with suggestions for new subjects, gameplay changes, or additions and we’ll try to include them for next Friday.

Thanks for following and to all who have emailed in. Use imperialgamedev@gmail.com for feedback on today’s article or any previous.