Dead Man's Mine Devlog

Here's some development backstory to this project, which was created during an internship for Callum Birkett at Grey Alien Games.

Goals

• to give Callum some work experience
• to give us some experience of working with an additional coder
• to ship a prototype if possible
• to get feedback and decide whether we want to develop it further

Development

Chosing a project

Jake already had several ideas for games for Callum to work on, ranging from games that required coding from scratch to ones that could reuse some of Jake's existing prototype Unity code for a 2D game. (This had been used by us to make a prototype funded by UK Games Fund.)

We brainstormed the ideas and Callum ended up picking the survival horror genre because it's a genre that he and Jake like playing, e.g. the Resident Evil games. We also thought we had a good understanding of what makes these games fun. 

So we did some design work with Callum and eventually decided on a genre and game loop that was quite different from our Unity prototype, but had in common that it was 2D and used procedural generation for levels. 

Finding the fun

Initially, Callum just got used to the codebase and made some basic mechanics work. Then the aim was to "find the fun," and have something playable (even if janky) after two weeks. During that period we tried lots of things out and improved the playability.

Production

Next we reviewed the game as is and made a giant list of things to do (using Trello) and moved most of them into a Polish list to be done at a future date and only kept the vital things required to ship a complete game with limited scope game. 

Vital items included:

• fixing the bugs, 
• improving the proc gen
• making sure it had a working title screen
• credits, win/lose state
• UI, tutorial
• Iterating on the graphics and sound effects. 

Callum, who is studying Computing for Games at Falmouth University, has also made the art and sound effects for the game. Although we had settled on the core game loop and mechanics, we only finalised the name and theme for the game after several weeks' work.

There are loads more things we could have done, but we had to put them to the side in order to finish and ship the game.

Testing and iteration

During the remaining time, Callum playtested the game a lot and showed a couple of friends to get feedback. Jake and Helen also playtested it and helped Callum decide on what to work on next.

Shipping and marketing

Finally Helen helped Callum to create some key art, take screenshots, and set up the itch.io page. This includes some backstory/instructions about the game, and some small gifs showing gameplay. The art and text also features in the game on the title screen.

We are really pleased that he has managed to ship this prototype game in around 130 hours.

Please do give it a try! We would love to hear your comments.