Hello everyone, my name is Mattabulous, or Matt! I am a 17 year old game developer and content creator. Ive been in the industry for more than three years and Ive been developing my first commercial game since Ludum Dare 45, in October of 2019. Prior to this, I had been forming a team. Now named Head Tilt Games.
[h2]TEAM ORIGINS[/h2]
From a simple, ugly, advert that I put out on Twitter and on one of my YouTube videos, I gathered up two people who contacted me. Our first member was Ectho, an artist - I had/have no experience in artwork and he was essentially the missing piece of the puzzle. The second was someone who I was friends with, Spitzy, and he was wanting to start doing game development. As a token of my gratitude to our friendship, I invited him to join the team. He had experience in video editing and some in programming.
[h2]FIRST GAME JAM[/h2]
Shortly after we had a team, we partook in the Community Game Jam. As a result of this game jam, we developed a game called Belated, a difficult and ridiculously unforgiving platformer. It had some fantastic voice acting done by yours truly.. It was at least comical. Nonetheless, it was the start of our journey and we placed 43rd which was an extreme feat for all of us. If youre interested, you can play it here:
You can also watch the development log I did on it via YouTube:
https://youtu.be/OaCXfHi9zG0
[h2]OUR BREAK[/h2]
Although its not the most impactful, negative decision weve made; we took a break for around a month but during that month, we probably could have made something.. But instead, we just sat there. Please dont make the same mistake we did because having this unproductive time is super bad for motivational purposes within the team.
[h2]MILLIONS OF MINIONS[/h2]
In October, Ludum Dare 45 took place: and this was where Millions of Minions was born. Despite the rushed nature of Ludum Dare, we were able to produce a fairly decent game that we named Millions of Minions. This was initially named as this because there was no limit to the amount of minions you could carry, but we later tailored this to the storyline of the Steam release.
https://youtu.be/gpuA289fArg
After a month of failed prototyping for another project, we went back to the Millions of Minions project and decided to take this to the next level, and get it onto Steam. One thing that we are countlessly talking about is this fact that NO preparation was done and that was a large reason for our downfall.
[h2]GOEST, A NEW MEMBER[/h2]
Itd be wrong not to mention our previous lead programmer. Goest was able to fill a void that we couldnt fill with three of us. With Goest, our systems were refined to be readable and maintainable. Its honestly crazy how much help you can get from a single person. Goest has saved us many hours of work and completely improved the workflow of our project. Without him, I can imagine this release would have been delayed to as late as next year. If youre reading this Goest. Thank you.
[h2]BECOMING OFFICIAL[/h2]
By December, we had a public demo to show everybody: the whole world. I cant even fathom how cool this feeling was. I had released games before, but it really felt like we were doing something even more extraordinary, and we were. Later that month, Head Tilt Games was an official business, and our Steam page was created. All of this came at once, so whilst it was quite overwhelming: one thing kept us going. We were doing what we loved, we were doing exactly what we had envisioned when we had started game development. I cannot put into words how enthralled I felt upon these events.
[h2]GETTING FEEDBACK[/h2]
After these events, content creators started playing our game, I was featured on a couple of podcasts, and everything just kept going. Our website was finally looking fairly clean, the Steam page was almost perfect and we were met with a lot of good feedback. Including some really constructive feedback.
Although, one piece of feedback we received countless times was how it reminded them of Binding of Isaac. Whilst this isnt a bad thing by any stretch, we wanted our game to be unique. It was with this that we put more of an emphasis on the minions: allowing you to unlock abilities for them, upgrade them, and purchase other upgrades to enhance the players experience.
[h2]LOSING A MEMBER[/h2]
A month before we were scheduled for release, a member of the team departed Head Tilt Games. His reasoning was justified but it still hit us hard, at least it did for me. One thing I learnt though, was to make sure you knew as much as you could about how systems they create work. On a more broad note, ensure you know what the person is doing and how theyre doing it.
[h2]POOR MARKETING[/h2]
Something that Ive realised is that our release probably wont be the most smooth. I cant imagine it going viral. We didnt really market the game as much as we should have and its a true shame. Even with my YouTube channel, I didnt promote it enough. Its hard to predict this as we are going to make sure that this next month will be our marketing month.
[h2]PRESENT[/h2]
That leads us to now; 8 months into development, with an almost complete commercial game. Here are our thoughts on the development as a whole:
Most of the planning and organizing was done spur of the moment, but as development continued, we started to get to know Millions Of Minions, and each other. We learned how to work together, and how to manage ourselves as well as the team to create a game. - Ectho.
At first, we only had some ideas and temporary plans for the game, and didn't really know what we wanted to do with the project, though later on, it quickly became our main project as we all liked and enjoyed working on it. The last 8 months of development were a big journey and a really good experience, as the game is almost complete at this point. - Spitzy.
I wish we would have planned more but Im glad we have still been able to make a game that I am proud of. Its been a weird rollercoaster, honestly. From weird marketing strategies, to poor planning: Ive learnt so much from this. - Matt.
[h2]Thank you for reading[/h2]
I cant explain how much it means to me, personally, knowing that somebody is interested in the process. It would mean so much to us if we could get to 300 wishlists: currently at 164. Go here to wishlist the game. You can also support us by pre-ordering via our website (more expensive than EA will be, but is a good way of supporting us), or signing up to our mailing list.
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