I wrote this post-mortem for the Tigsource forums back in August 2013. Reading parts of it today makes me cringe. I only hope my writing style has improved since then.
Part 1: Warp Gates
Probably should have started this much sooner, but up until a few days ago there was a very real chance that the game would go up in smoke... like so many before it. Happily, it survived!
It was the end of April 2013. 3 months have passed since I resigned from a lucrative but unfulfilling job.
I had enough savings to last for 6 more months. Or at least I would have, if I didn't have to pay for my son's operation to fix his undescended testicle. Poor guy.
That left me with maybe 3 months. Maybe. After that, I would have to start asking my wife for money. I didn't want that, I'm a provider dammit.
I had just given up on an artsy fartsy flop of a game. It was time to sell out. Make a tower defense game. Make a quick and dirty sequel to one of my own games. Anything, so long as it took less than 3 months.
I wish it were that easy. But there's this jerk at the back of my head who kept saying "Aww, is that the best you can do?"
So I started on a new project called "Warp Gates".
It was to be an RTS in the vein of Relic's Company of Heroes. There would be two bases, or "Warp Ships", that could call in squads of smaller ships. You would move these ships around the map, capturing strategic points and building up enough strength until finally assaulting the enemy Warp Ship directly. There would be a rock-paper-scissors dynamic to the units.
I wanted to launch the game on iPad and Android tablets. Why? I am a PC gamer at heart, and I could never make a PC game that I would be proud of in less than 3 months. Also, tablets only. Mobile phones I felt were too small for an RTS. This gave me a useful set of constraints:
I didn't have time to fully think about the implications of these constraints. Time was wasting. I had a solid plan (or so I thought), so it was time to jump right into art production!
I wanted the game to have an isometric perspective, which meant I had to make sprite sheets of the ships from multiple angles. 3DS Max allowed me to do this quickly. I stuck with low poly models for now because I was expecting to make some revisions. OK so I had some ships, now for some backgrounds.
Homeworld style Middle-eastern inspired space backgrounds! I could hear Paul Ruskay's Aboriginal music playing in my head the whole time.
Unfortunately this style is really time consuming. I needed a quick and dirty method of coming up with plenty of space backgrounds. I decided to just mash some space stereotypes together.
Hmm not bad for 2 hours. Take a public domain photo of a nebula (thanks NASA!), recolor it with some circle gradients and the "overlay" blend mode. Add some more stars using Noise > levels > "screen" blend mode. Make a big circle, give it a gradient, glowing edge, and some light texturing with cloud images. Lastly, slap a big Lens Flare on it and bam! Hey, I could keep doing this for all the backgrounds!
I wish that voice hadn't chimed in then... "Looking a bit generic isn't it? Doesn't seem very inspired". "Shut up", I said. "It'll have to do".
OK, the backgrounds are good. Time to make some better looking ships!
That's a lot of detail! No way I could have done all those details by hand in the time I had. I have this little magic plugin for 3DS Max called Greeble which automatically adds details to any quad or triangular surface. Thank you Klanky the Robot! Your plugin saved my life. I used the Mental Ray renderer and the "Glazed Ceramic Tile" material that comes with 3DS Max to get the realistic lighting effect. All massive time savers.
Here's the new Warp ship design. I started thinking of it more and more like the Mothership from Homeworld (God I loved that game). The story would revolve around the journey of this ship.
Here are the little ships that will fight it out. They will be warped in by the Mothership.
Here's a screenshot of the working prototype I had. I haven't been talking about the programming aspect of this project much, because well... it's hard to talk about programming without sounding like a complete nerd. But I did have a working prototype at this point. Ships would form little squads and you could draw paths for the squads to follow.
By now I had a story forming in my head. This mighty Mothership from Earth, forced to flee in the face of impeding doom. There would have to be some dialogue, a human face to give context to the epic space battles. Maybe cutscenes?
At this point things started to fall apart. I started spending more time just staring at the work I had already done, imagining wild scenarios in my head, instead of actually making something.
During these flights of fancy I was constantly struggling to reconcile my epic story with scientific facts that I couldn't escape. If the Mothership can warp in ships, where are the ships coming from? What is building them? Why can't the Mothership just build the ships itself, like in Homeworld? That's silly, you can't really have a spaceship just barfing out more spaceships, it takes YEARS to build a spaceship!
Come to think of it... Homeworld didn't really make much sense. It beguiled me with it's haunting music and beautiful art... but I realized that, mechanics-wise, it wasn't a very good game at all. All you had to do was max out your fleet populations and then let those pretty little ships do their thing. Also, you had to choose between playing the game properly (that is, zoomed out), or "experiencing" the game's beauty (zoomed all the way in).
It was too much... I couldn't make a story! I wasn't a writer! I was a programmer with some cheap Photoshop skills. I had to pull myself away from this epic story I imagined and drastically change directions. Oh crap, I only had 2 months left!
And then this happened:
