The Beginning
The beginning of my gamedev journey started with an idea. When I was a kid I had this idea of a 3d rendered rain drop falling from the sky. Absorbing other rain drops, splitting, dispersing, and coming back together as it fell through the blue sky. Eventually it hit the ground, landed in a puddle, and the puddle was run over by a car. It was a car commercial. My big idea was a car commercial.
Now what does this have to do with gamedev you might ask? Absolutely nothing. But I thought it would be cool to make a videogame.
A year earlier my daughter wanted to make a videogame with me, I had recently found out about the PICO-8 game engine and thought it would be the perfect opportunity for both of us to learn game development. She was enthusiastic about drawing the characters and the game map, and creating the sound and music. I was familiar with programming but as a web developer, we weren’t sure if we would succeed but we tried anyway.
Several months later we finished the game. She decided to move on to other interests but now that we had created one game all of a sudden I had so many other ideas for games. The car commercial idea I had in mind I thought might make a good first game, so I decided to start developing it. I have always liked the shump genre of videogames and I really liked the game Osmos which after beating I still wanted more. What about some type of mashup, but rendered and developed for a retro fantasy console?
At the same time the pandemic hit and we were in lock down. Isolated from family and friends, I decided to take our hangout sessions online. My friends and I had always thought it would be cool to make a videogame, we liked playing them. Maybe this was the impetus to get started.
So I would share my screen on Twitch and they would tune in, sometimes joining through chat and sometimes through voice and I would live code and draw the game and they would give me real time feedback. This was also essential as we composed the music. It was truly a collaborative game development effort. Other people would drop in on Twitch and also give us feedback. We’d go on all sorts of tangents. Six months later we had a finished game Rain Drop for the PICO-8. With 90% of the development effort done live online.
It was a lot of fun working with a tight knit team and also having a bunch of outside collaborators on Twitch. If you get a chance to check out the credits you can see everyone who had a hand in this game.
The album: In addition to the game we also dropped an album a little while afterwards featuring the soundtrack of the game.
Our first sale. A couple of months after launch we made our first sale, this was released on itch.io and we weren’t even expecting the general public to play the game much less buy it. We made one sale so far, but a sale is a sale. We were now officially game developers. We couldn’t just stop at one game, now that we had all these ideas and the ability to bring those ideas to life. You’ll have to wait for the next post to find out what happens next.
Play Rain Drop on Mobile and PC
https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
PICO-8 Fantasy Console
PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs.
PICO-8 Fantasy Console
PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs.
https://abemassry.bandcamp.com/album/rain-drop-original-video-game-soundtrack
