It's (a)live! - Corona 2020 Post-Mortem Devlog

Ok, it's been a couple of days since the launch of the game and I feel like I want to share the process behind its making.

First thing first, I'm writing in English even though the game is only in Italian (it is, after all, a joke for my fellow Milanese) because I plan on being more "international" in the future, and I would love if anyone, reading this "story" took away something that might help them with their projects.

So, it went like this.

The envisioning:

It's February and Northern Italy (end especially Lombardy) has been experiencing issues due to the recent outbreak of COVID-19;  Milan, my hometown, has been experiencing a lot of unusual phenomena, from the curfew for bars and pubs and shutdown of any public event to people going around wearing any kind of useless respiratory system protection (like paper tissues...seriously, why?). Grocery stores have been raided by the panicked people and "Amuchina" (a popular Italian sanitizer) prices skyrocketed on Amazon because of people mass-buying and reselling it. €87 for a small 80ml bottle (as of today,  it would mean $97 for 3 ounces if you are reading this from the United States). The situation was not actually this bad, but (tin foil hat alert) the media managed to make it explode by picturing an overly exaggerated state of things and it went south.

Last week, on the 25th of February, I had the idea to make a game about all of this just to mock the irony in all of this.

The original idea was a top-down shooter game. You would get out of the subway in one iconic Milanese location, help the people, eliminate the Coronavirus threat and advance (by taking the subway yet again) to the next level. It took me just about a couple of hours to realize that my plan was way over-scoped for the development time of one week I had set myself: after all, I wanted to finish the project before the end of the COVID hype.

Not being able to follow through with the original vision, I opted for the FPS genre since I already had a janky first person controller lying around in my computer from previous recent prototypes.

The intro scene of the game: "Milan, February 2020. After the COVID-19 epidemic spread panic all over the city, the main streets and squares have been evacuated and are now deserted. The people, terrified, dreads the idea of just getting out of their homes. In this apocalyptic scenario, you have been chosen to help the few still trapped in Piazza del Duomo (the main square in the city center, where the Cathedral is located). Wielding only your sanitizer blaster you head towards what might be your last fight. How long will you resist, before the coronavirus gets the best of you?"

The crew:

Given the short time I wanted to have the game ready in, I could not do everything by myself. My friend Matteo has recently started 3D modelling so I hit him up and asked him to help me model the buildings. He is amazingly available when I do so, and immediately said yes: thank you Matte.

My friend and band-mate Eugenio is an incredible guitarist, so when I got off the phone with Matteo I called him: I needed just a couple minutes of very fast paced music and a few solos to randomly pick every now and then. He also agreed to jump into this experiment with me and brought along my brother, who is a highly talented drummer and producer. They are behind the amazing soundtrack of the game.

The development:

Here's where I came in, and it was not beautiful.

Instead of planning things out, drawing graphs and maybe producing a design doc and dev-board like I usually do, I let the strict deadline take over my lucidity and I dove right into the project without any regard or long-term thinking. After fighting with Unity's new Input System and its numerous bugs I quickly had the FPS controller ready, and had a white-boxed mock up of the level. I proceeded to model the gun (in the game I refer to it as "sanitizer blaster" since I could not use the trademarked name "Amuchina", and I only now realize how I wasted the opportunity of calling it AMMO-china...) and the virus model. The gun animation and concept is still my favorite part of this whole thing.

Initially I wanted to have the viruses have some sort of AI behind them, so that they would be able to pathfind their way to the player, but since I also wanted to port this game to mobile (this plan also quickly failed because I'm super lazy and hate the process of publishing on mobile stores) I was afraid that low-end platforms would not be able to handle up to 200+ pathfinder agents at the same time. Instead, the virus follow the player with a speed that rises up to just a little less than the player's top running speed. I know, it's not elegant...but it works.

Not knowing how to spawn the virus, I turned to my brother for ideas and he had the amazing idea of having people spawn in and keep on generating enemies until the player had delivered them a face mask (another iconic item of last month, with pharmacies running out of them as soon as they restocked). So I quickly modelled and rigged a very simple person in Blender, gave it a bright blue and slightly emissive color and put them in the game.

After some tweaking of the wave system the game was done. The intro scene was feeling really good, the post processing looked amazing (yes I abused of chromatic aberration and vignette but I can't help myself with those effects...I simply love them) and after implementing an health system for the player the game was done.

Road bumps and overcoming them:

What I haven't explicitly said is that the approach I took for this project – diving head first and making things as they popped into my mind without planning – was a really bad idea and a mistake not to be done again. All the interdependencies in the code are implemented in a very unprofessional and fragile way and the smallest bugs come from mistakes fragmented all over the code. Making changes is hard when it's not impossible without refactoring a huge part of the project. Errors are evasive and a challenge to be found.

For example: I spent hours trying to figure out why the blue people (the virus spawners) would appear outside of the spawn-area bounds I had set for them, for which I thought the code I had designed was rock solid and functional. I couldn't get my head around why it would not work: turns out my code was actually good but I had accidentally set some positioning parameter in the idle animation for each person to -8.27 and they would just not wait for the player in the place they spawned at.

I worked on the game for around five days during the week it has been in development (Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday) and only on Monday night I decided. to sit down with a notebook in my hand and plan out the following day. I don't know why I waited so long, but it really changed the entire process. If I had been stressed and unmotivated until the day before, Tuesday I had a lot of fun and proportionally managed to do more than in the whole week.

My take-away lesson? Don't let deadlines scare you and be sensible when preparing for a new project:  draw, graph, write down and plan out everything that needs to been done and you'll be good.

The publishing:

After creating hype among my friends (man have they been supportive, I really have to thank everybody) with a nine minute live on Instagram – in which my brother play tested  the game for the first time, annihilating my high score – and promising that by the day I would have had the game live here on itch, at 6pm on Tuesday it was time for me to look into publishing a game on this platform. I had previously published on both the Apple AppStore and the Google Play Store, but this was different. For a moment I was afraid of not being able to make it in time.

But luckily, I was wrong: publishing the game was incredibly easy and straight-forward and I really enjoyed the whole process. There is not much to say, but after building and uploading both the Windows and macOS version and filling in the game page, assembling a cover image on Photoshop (*cough* recycling the title screen of the game after taking away the buttons *cough*) and publishing the page, it was done. The game was live.

Conclusions:

Among the many projects and prototypes I put aside and never finish, managing to publish a game (surely it is not perfect, but it is pretty fun to play and to spectate) it's a great satisfaction. I am really happy to have undertaken this project and I am proud of myself for carrying it on to completion. I hope I have not wasted too much of your time with this post and that you have fun playing the game.