The 10-minute game that took 4 years to make
I should invent a new category of crunch where instead of doing too much you do too little.
A couple of days ago I published ABC, a tiny game that surprisingly took 4 years to make. In this post I want to explain why this happened and why I’m so happy that the development took this long.
So here we go, the 10-minute game that took 4 years to make.
2020
Approximately four years ago, by the end of 2020, I had the idea to make something like a game jam but just for myself. Here I would make a small game about controlling a lot of characters at the same time.
I planned the game to be developed in under 7 days, it was just one simple mechanic recycled across some levels, simple enough.
Here’s how it looked when I first started with it:
As you can see the game was quite cool, a couple of characters and each one was controlled by its own dedicated key on the keyboard. The mechanic at first was that all the characters advanced when you pressed space. However, it quickly changed to running automatically as pressing the space all the time as a mechanic was quite useless.
I was so sure that I was going to release the game in 2020 that I even featured it in the dev reel that I made that year.
The game was almost done at this point, it had all the art, and the mechanics, but then a problem emerged, I’m terribly bad at designing levels. And sadly, that made me abandon the game for over a year.
2022
At the beginning of 2022, I reopened the project and started designing some levels. And even though I didn’t do much, I got to the 50% of the levels done.
And this is quite fun, because normally what I would do in a game like this is make levels until I get tired and then finish the game. But in this case there was a dumb but brilliant idea which was to make each level selectable by pressing the numbers from 1 to 0 on the keyboard, meaning all the levels were sorted like the keyboard, making it more significant for the game.
The problem with this idea was that I was forced to make 10 levels, and my concept sounded too cool for me to discard it.
But after those 2 or 3 levels that I designed in 2022 I abandoned it because once again, I got tired of designing levels. So let’s fast-forward one year more.
2023
Okay, this year was the year, when I almost finished the game, during the beginning of it I had plenty of inspiration for the game and started working on it for hours.
Here I did a lot of things like adding some new obstacles for better levels (this made me redesign most of the levels, whoops), changing the color palette of the entire game and finally, the most important one, googly eyes 👀.
But really, the one change that was the most important was the change in how you controlled the characters. Until then the characters ran automatically but that year I tried making so the keys had to be pressed for each character to run, this single change added the exact chaos factor that I was searching for when developing this game.
[video]
But in the end, I abandoned it again, 3 levels away from completing the game. See you next year.
2024
As I previously explained in a blog post, back in February I gave a talk about “failures” at BCN Game Creators, a great meetup where you should go (I’m recommending the meetup so much in this blog that they should be sponsoring my blog at this point). In there I showed some of my abandoned projects, being ABC one of the most interesting and attractive as it wasn’t quite abandoned, but at the same time wasn’t in progress.
At the end of all the talks, some people started approaching me, only to encourage me to finish the “funny letter game” so they could play it. Although my inspiration and motivation for level design are real hard to obtain, one night just when I went to sleep a ton of weird ideas started appearing in my head to finish the game, and I was constantly going back and forth between the bed and my notebook to write down whatever I thought.
It wasn’t much, but it is quite fun to see.
With all this motivation, the next day I started working on the levels and refining the art tirelessly, I designed 2 levels which turned out to be as fun as I thought they would be, and made a last “thank you” level which I think not many people saw that it put thank you in there.
And yeah, this is a weird practice I use when I run out of ideas for level design, see my dominoes game conveniently called Domyno (don’t ask me why I wrote it with a Y).
In the end, I ended up with a weird game about letters with googly eyes that run and jump around while your fingers are in the middle of a chaotic battle against the keyboard.
This game, although I didn’t think in 2020 that I would need so many years to finish it, this has been a great experience to finish this game in such an interrupted way. I can’t stop thinking about how many great people I’ve met since the beginning of the development of this game and how they encouraged me to continue doing what I do.
And finally, even though I made a total of $0 with this game, I couldn’t be happier having released it and seeing so many friends have fun playing this game.