Post Mortem: A Perfect Time to Panic

When I started TakeTwoTablets my initial aim was to create 5 or 6 prototypes and get some experience in making some games before looking at making something 'proper'. During January of 2013 I discovered onegameamonth.com where developers are encouraged to make and finish a game every month. So I decided to sign up to this and go along with it for a few months to give me deadlines which would push me into finishing things.

Because I found #1GAM fairly late in the month I had to make sure that my third game was super simple. So straight after deciding to get involved, the tight deadline was forcing me to focus on single mechanics and release things rather than faffing about for a few months.

My logic went something like: do something with instant feedback - you touch something and it explodes - you don't get much more instant than that. It kind of made me think of bubble wrap. So I created that but then I wanted some more urgency. So I made the particles grow in size and start shaking. This made me think of balloons inflating and bursting. But then the aim of the game seem to be reversed. So now the player was tapping the objects to prevent them from exploding. When an object explodes I had it take out all the other objects. So now it felt like some sort of cascade chain reaction that you were trying to hopelessly control. Then I ran out of time.

Quite a nice little prototype of a simple idea. Players seemed to enjoy it but watching other people play it made me realise that the game wasn't balanced very well and was too easy to keep going indefinitely. I want to revisit this in the future to give it some sort of virus type feel to the visuals.