This is a simulation game a buddy of mine made with me. We’ve been working on it for quite some time. The main goal is to build as much as you can and purchase as much stock without going in to the negatives. The more you build, the faster you make money. However, you can get to a point where nobody wants to buy your products anymore because demand may be low. This forces people to play for this moment that comes at random.
Game’s Backstory
Around early August of 2014 I came across a gaming contest for $10,000. However, I was a bit busy with College at the time and didn’t really think to truly try out for it. A few months later it crossed my mind again and, in early November, I asked my buddy Toby if he wanted to participate in it with me. Toby and I have worked on a few projects together before and I felt that he was deserving of half the winnings.
Now, the tough thing here was that we were several months behind. The contest started probably sometime around February, I learned of it in August, and the both of us were busy with things in our lives. Regardless, we made a split-second decision and did something we had never done before. We worked 24/7. The deadline was at the beginning of December, right after my birthday, and we only had just about a month to make a project.
We’ve gone through some tough stuff to come this far. Our artist was a bit full of himself. We had never touched the mobile side of Unity. So, tiling and saving/editing sprites wasn’t something we knew how to do off the bat. Our artist was actually being nasty. Having to respond to him resulted in a few days of slow work. Essentially, because Toby and I were not experienced in mobile development, the artist thought it would be the perfect opportunity to make some slick comment that went something a bit like this, “What? You don’t know how to use Unity? You guys suck. Let me show you.” Now, mind you, to the best of my knowledge he had no programming experience or even any game development experience. I found it to be very offensive that he would act like that. So, we both immediately stopped talking to him and moved out by ourselves.
Without an artist of any kind, two programmers, Toby and myself, put in hours of work to develop a game with little knowledge for a big contest without any experience with contests like this either. How did we do it? Well, since Toby typically stayed up until all morning and I got home around 2:00PM, he would work on it when I got offline and I would work on it when he got online. While we transferred files, we would discuss what was changed. The challenge we faced here was not using any form of version control though. Instead, Google Drive was our friend.
One this I found interesting with this daily collaboration was that when there was something one us was too lazy to add, the other would either be encouraged to do it or would gladly take up the chance to do it simply because it was found to be interesting. Eventually, we got the game in to a playable state with sound that I made and art that Toby made. Now, the deadline had finally come.
The judges determined that our game was among one of the finalists. I was actually in shock. In all honesty, I thought the game looked very distasteful. I was no professional at creating music. And, Toby and I were both honest to ourselves… the art looks like crap. Nonetheless, I went to represent our game at their headquarters. Alone. Why alone? Well, we’re both broke. Toby doesn’t live in my state. So, that explains everything. I felt as if I presented the game perfectly fine. But, I know for a fact that I failed to deliver a quick and strong sales pitch in under 10 seconds when recorded.
In the end, we placed second and lost. Here is our project that made us finalists:
Updates coming soon
We found an artist, a good friend of mine, to help us out with this project. And, with the help of the Unity Community, we also found a sound engineer. As a result, here is a few things that will be posted as updates below in due time:
- New sprites for all buildings
- New income sources
- New music for both the quit menu and actual gameplay
- Emotional states for your character
- Character customization
- New UI images (window & buttons)
- Better anchoring – We finally understood the rules of the new GUI’s functionality
- A few micro-transactions to help users get out of sticky situations (since you can literally go to a point of no return, except for starting a new game)
- A score screen for when you go bankrupt.
- Sprite customization [Possibly]
- Upload your own images [Possibly]
- Character movement [Possibly]
Based on what’s in the video above, I’d have to say that what we have currently is a big step up. I can’t wait to post some updates about it. Let us know what you’d like to see in the updates aside from what was listed! Thanks for your feedback.
I hope you like the progress so far. Please give some feedback on how things are looking.
