Space Monkey Games Blog

So what went right and what went wrong? The design changed a few times but it was early enough in the development schedule that it didn’t effect the project too much however not having a clear idea from the get-go wasn’t good either. Once we got our bearings, development was pretty straightforward. I shoehorned in some ideas here and there and removed others while being careful not to affect the development schedule too much which ended up being around 6 months give or take.

At one point it was about giant robots attacking a city!

The first idea was pretty far from a breakout variant;  in fact it was a platformer that dealt with action and puzzles using forces such as push and pull. The logistics of a platformer put this idea beyond our budget and so we looked at alternatives. The first mistake was probably not looking at what was currently selling aside from playing Peggle and sayings “hey, let’s make a ball bouncer!”

So the choice was made for some sort of ball bouncer, eventually landing on a pinball/golf combination where players took careful shots in a platformer view while scoring was mostly related to golf.

An early test level for ball bouncer design.

After having many problems with TGB’s collision and physics we eventually decided to do something more proven and we settled on a breakout variant with a twist which was a match three element with falling gems.

The original golf game had 27 levels which would make a breakout style game quite short, so I increased that to 81. The levels have been the largest part of the game so far from a design standpoint and honestly haven’t received the attention they deserve. I still think they turned out but if there is ever a next time I think I’m going to do a project that has one game screen like a match 3 with interchangeable elements and more random variation in gameplay.

The current codebase is built on top of Torque Game Builder 1.5 (from 1.4) from scratch using TorqueScript, it supports profiles, high scores, awards, cut scenes and a lot of customization through xml.

Using Torque Game Builder helped us to quickly prototype the game and it came with a large community of developers from which to pool resources from.

Doing a breakout variant was also good as it’s a simple and proven game which lowered the risk on the project. This also potentially puts it in a position where it may not likely be noticed with the most popular game types being match3, time management and hidden object and arcade game like Orb Blast may well be overlooked which it was. I believe the lesson learned here was that we played it way too safe; sure we got a game out but is it anything that defines Space Monkey as a developer? Could we have done something different at a higher risk and still manage to get it out the door?

I’ve been asked a few times why Space Monkey? Well, I knew I wanted an animal this time around, some sort of mascot character and monkeys are awesome when they’re not flinging sh*t at you and although it might seem sort of foreboding to name a studio after an animal that was used in experiments and essentially crashed and died in horrible ways but the name just happened to stick.

For me though it symbolizes a personal and professional journey into territory I haven’t trekked, like the first monkeys shot into space exploring the unknown if only for a brief moment and if I crash and burn at least I’ll be able to say I gave it a shot.