Switching Gears Demo Available

Switching Gears Demo Post-Mortemy thoughts.

So this will be the last post on this game. We did finish the demo and for those who are not interested in reading a large chunk of text you can just grab the demo here:

www.switchinggearsgame.com/SG_demo.msi

Note: After you are done installing the game, just throw the folder away. It installs itself to c:\SwitchingGears

The demo was developed for XBox Live Arcade, so a XBox controller hooked up to your PC is kinda required to get the full effect. If you use mouse / keyboard you WILL run into bugs and weird behaviour.

Large chunk of text to follow (I'll intersperse some screenshots from the game to save your sanity):

Two guys, one dream and a whole lot of late nights and weekends. About 2 years ago, me (Fredrik) and my
friend Ryan decided that it would be awesome to build a game. After much discussion we decided on the platformer genre simply because I wore Ryan down with my arguments. I love the platformer genre and even though games like Psychonauts sold worse than air conditioners in the arctic, we decided that if we are going to stick through with this thing, we better do something we both enjoyed. So a platformer it was.
Do something you have a passion for and don't give up!



Since we are both working full time in regular day jobs, the game developement took a lot longer than it should have. Balancing work, home life and social life together with developing a much larger game than what is usually seen around these digs, is something that I really can't recommend unless you have extremely patient friends / partners / wifes. Thankfully my wife is a saint who allowed me to continue with this crazy idea even though sometimes (often) it meant I skipped out on doing social things with her, opting instead of animating a character.
Be realistic in your scope, and don't forget the rest of your life.

So we did what all self respecting game developers do. We wrote a script, we sketched characters, we planned out as much as we could and even though we thought we had everything planned out, we later discovered that when you think you have everything planned out, you are only about half way there. You will always discover things that you didn't plan for. Small things. Things you don't think matter. Well, guess what.. those small things add up pretty quickly and WILL take a lot of time. When you do discover these things, evaluate them to see if they are necessary. If they add to gameplay / immersion in the game, then do it.
Plan as much as you can, but don't be surprised when you discover things you need to do but never planned for.



After spending awhile getting up to speed with TGE (when we started TGEA was still in beta and we found that TGE would serve us well) we plunged headlong into production of assets and code and solving problems and reading forum posts and all kinds of things. In the beginning we relied heavily on the kindness of strangers to get up to speed and it really did help. Even though there's documentation, Torque has some quirks and if you just look around you'll find other people who has, if not solved it, usually is working on it or has answers for you.
Use the forums and the resources posted.

After we had our first demo done back in October of last year we took it to the GG meeting and showed it to fine people there. It was pretty disheartening to hear all the negative feedback, but in the end I believe the final demo couldn't have been done without that feedback. The first demo was too unorganized, too freeform and plain and simple just not fun enough. We had envisioned a meeting between a platformer game placed in a freeroaming city. The player would be able to go anywhere in the city and get quests and missions from both NPC's as well as package machines (the main character is a delivery robot).
Show your game to anyone you can and get as much feedback as you can from as many people as you can.



After coming back home we realized that we needed to reduce the scope of the game and rework the entire gameplay. No more free roaming city. No more quests from NPC's. Faster gameplay. Faster movement. Everything was reworked and replanned and rescoped. The only thing we actually kept were the characters and the storyline.
We introduced the concept of "goo" which forces the player to push forward to get another weapon or ability. Goo is our way of adding strategy and thinking to a genre that usually only gives the player a handful of guns and tells the player to go shoot things. With limiting what the player can do (each pile of goo gives the player a certain weapon or a certain ability) we can not only setup some interesting scenarios but we actually saw some very dynamic gameplay emerge out of it. Even though the game is on a path we give the player the illusion that there are several ways around obstacles with giving them choices on how to approach said obstacle.
Giving the player choices, or illusion of choices, is a GOOD THING.

About halfway through our development of Switching Gears my friend Michael stepped in and offered to help us plan the game. He has an extensive background in scoping projects and thanks to him I belive that we managed to develop a LOT more than if we had just gone at this alone. He brought order and a sense of direction where otherwise we would just have created a bunch of stuff and thrown it together. Even though you may not know of anyone who wants to do this, I can't recomment at least getting overlord to help you plan and scope the project.
When your project grows to a certain size, a producer is invaluable to help you.



Blog! Use GGE! Post on gaming forums. Keep yourself visible. Garagegames gives you some tools to help you show off your game. There's nothing like posting a gameplay video on a game site and receiving feedback. Positive or negative it WILL help you. If you recieve positive feedback, soak it up and revel in it. If you receive negative feedback, learn from it. A lot of gamers will say vague things like "controls feel sloppy" or "this enemy is f*cking impossible!". Think about the feedback and try to realize what the gamer actually
wants. The controls might be perfect, but it could very well be that the player character doesn't turn around
fast enough. That enemy might be just the right strength, but the player might have run out of ammo on his
way over to the bad guy.
Keep yourself visible. Learn from the responses.



In the end, we had a great time working on Switching Gears. We learned a lot and met new people. We hope that you download and give Switching Gears a try and be sure to give us feedback good or bad.

Thanks!
Fredrik S