Looking back to 2010, a group of young, highly talented guys got together to make an awesome game. Good luck to them. Somewhere else, we got together to start a company and create our first game. There were many decisions to make and, apparently, looking back, we did plenty questionable ones, as the target platform (started with iPods instead of trying Xbox 360 with the indie dev environment). But it was part of the learning experience.
After plenty brainstorming ideas (and, looking back, some of them were more promising), we decided to move forward with a minigolf game. Unexperienced as we were, we sketched some levels, decided on some environments, and tried the best we could. We are talking about Unity 2.X era, at some point moved to 3.X, when we had to pay to deploy to mobile platforms.
The game itself had little content, and was released at a low price, around a 2€, in iOS. But it was hard to sell, and we barely got any income from it. We learnt as we were burning our cash, and that’s probably the best we can say about this work. On that point, the game was released in two stages, 10 levels each. For the second release, we tried an “agile” approach, and it worked very well. It was the right context to use the agile approach, and we missed the deadline by only 3 or 4 days in a 2’5 month cycle.
Verdict: We had some love for this game, as it was the first. But, gladly, it is far from being the best we have done. A good learning experience that had to fail earlier.
Anecdote: The video in this page was develop as some sort of learning experience + promo material. It only worked as the first one. Obviously, for the ones that want to see the gameplay, which is most of us, we created some others, like this one.
Anecdote: We changed its name to start with the “A…”, so it could appeared higher in some lists. It doesn’t work that way 99% of the time: put the name that best works with the game, and make a great game.
Some screenshots:
