Galactic Bar fight final pre-launch thoughts with Game Director Jonathan Jennings

I. Take me back to the beginning. You, Travis Van Essen (Lead game designer), and Victor Villalobos( Lead Artist) all get together and say, "we're doing this. let's make a game." 

What was the plan? What were the timelines you set for development? What were major milestones leading up to the release (vertical slice, demo, early access), and what were the major steps that needed to happen to meet those milestones?

Jonathan

So for me, Galactic Bar Fight (GBF) has had two lives, the life when it was just a prototype and I was slowly piecing it together as a bedroom coder trying to get my feet wet in Oculus Development and learning how to create my first shooting game in VR, and then the current iteration which is a larger more well-rounded gameplay experience.

In all honesty, that first iteration was very basic (make a cool VR shooter), make a VR gun that fires,  learn how to make AI that shoots back effectively, give that AI melee capabilities, create a simple playable arena that captures the general vibe, and develop a simple score system.  Ultimately that is what the publically available version of Galactic Bar fight on the app lab previously was,  an experiment I chipped away at for years and then ultimately tried to polish up for my Oculus Launchpad submission.

It wasn't until Oculus Launchpad was wrapping up and I had TREMENDOUS anxiety did I realize the reality of making a game completely by myself was overwhelming and so I reached out to my greatest and longest time collaborator, our game designer Travis Van Essen and showed him what GBF looked like, talked about my very basic vision. He was the one who came up with the core premise of "Let's make this into a galactic bar hopping tour." 

He had concepts for different potential arenas, ideas for how to continue capturing ,and also evolving the aesthetic styles, and really expanding the game beyond just a simple shooting gallery.  I've always felt I come up with ok ideas that Travis turns great and it's one reason we work so well together I think we build well off of each other’s strengths. 

Victor and I also  did a small project together when we worked together at our shared previous employer and we had a team of 3 and Victor was the reliable partner, we made a small wave-based shooter prototype called Tanks Versus Dinosaurs (which is where I built the gun system used in GBF now). The project didn't go anywhere but Victor’s discipline and contributions made me believe in him as a creative partner for our art and this updated version of GBF, especially when Travis and I discussed having a hub space. Prior to Victor, art was always our major chokepoint of working together which we found ways around but it's been much easier just communicating with him and having him on the team.

By our powers combined, we are Weird Kid studios.

As far as milestones, the first milestone was just to submit for Oculus Launchpad, then became upload to Oculus App Lab, then came rewrite the entire game based off of App lab feedback and scaling up and polishing systems. Our ultimate goal from the beginning of this iteration is the game GBF is turning into right now, an arena combat game with various challenges, ultimately will feature a variety of locales (Travis has already started working on our second arena and as a Star Wars fan I am excited as I’ve walked down its streets a few times), and just make sure the game feels as alive as possible. 

GBF is a VR arcade game so it's not a big game but we have worked hard to make it a game with lots of replayability and simple reasons to visit and revisit

II. What challenges did you need to overcome to meet your development timelines? What problems came up that you didn't anticipate, and how did you and the team overcome them?

Jonathan

Oof I think Game Development is just one big problem-solving venture after another. 

So if I look at the full Journey of GBF, there was a time when I tried using an AI library that kept breaking in the headset so I ultimately had to write my own much simpler AI system that is reliable If I've learned anything over this project it's that reliability is better than imaginary scalability that doesn't work.

There was the phase of testing for level size  because scale in VR is a whole different beast, something really small in editor might be a skyscraper in VR and so Victor created these reference humanoid models that are basically like Mannequins that gave us an idea of what 6 ft looks like in a VR space, we matched that scale to Unity’s metric system and basically build our whole game around those "Mannequins" Victor gave us

On the Quest performance issues are a given because you have to REALLY  simplify your assets to make them look ok and run well so optimization is an ongoing battle for us. A lot of fixing things comes from playtesting and looking at Unity's performance metrics which help us define what a "target" performance should look like. 

When we started the complete rebuild of the game the first major problem people mentioned in reviews was how dull the guns were so I took a much more complex and scaleable gun system that I prototyped in Tanks Vs. Dinosaurs converted it to work in VR, added a few updates and tweaks, and then created a system so that Travis could relatively easily create any gun he wanted in a matter of minutes. 

Then we had a few conversations with Victor about Thematic mismatches because the burden of creativity when you can make ANYTHING is that figuring out what "feels right" can be hard especially when large parts of the game are undefined as they were for Victor as he created the hub space initially.  and then later when the hub had a defined look we needed to rely on Victor’s expertise to fix the color and lighting issues to again make sure the space " felt right".

So all of our problem-solving came in the form of playtesting -> analyze -> Go back to the drawing board and discuss the problems -> make fixes and put them back in-game -> playtest

and we fixed it by communicating A LOT, I feel sorry for the guys sometimes because I ramble a bit during meetings but there are so many factors to consider sometimes my brain feels on fire and I need to get it out but when we talk our way through problems we make better decisions solving them

Starting a studio was another can of worms I won't get into

III. What did you learn during this process? How did you balance the responsibilities of being a game designer with that of being a boss and a project manager?

Jonathan

In all honesty, I'm still figuring it out and it is not at all easy. I have to think about the best leaders I have worked with and the best bosses I've had and I didn't even get along with some of those people, but seeing how smoothly things ran when they brought order to the chaos of their job inspired me. 

I talked to a game producer by the name of Alan Dang asking him for help organizing the studio and he blew my mind with one simple question. " Are you curious about organizing and structuring the studio or organizing and structuring the game?" and that blew my mind.  Up until that point, I was drowning because managing Weird Kid Studios as an organization with all the legal stuff and managing Galactic Bar Fight as the project Director were two different jobs that I didn't see as separate.

So first I had to learn to keep the studio and the game separate. That made it easier because I didn't feel like I had to do everything all the time, I could prioritize moving the studio forward or moving the game forward, and that helped tremendously. That's the first thing I learned , running a game studio IS NOT the same as running a game team. 

As far as balance I have to listen to myself very intently. I have absolutely busted out 17-hour feature sessions to get Galactic Bar fight ready for pitches or submission events, or even podcast interviews where I let the interviewers play it. But I can do one of those maybe every 2 months because otherwise I exhaust myself and don't want to touch the game at all for weeks and especially right now as we approach launch it's pertinent that I put pressure on myself to deliver for the guys, to deliver for myself and my game dev dreams, to deliver for the hand full of people who've been awaiting this update, but also that i don't ruin the momentum and hard work we've built on to get us here. 

So balance is key. There are nights where my brain screams at me to keep working and instead I take a walk on the beach at midnight, there are nights I tell myself I’ll stop working on GBF  at 9 pm and I actually stop at 1 am and so I make sure to constantly check in with myself because the day-to-day demands change so rapidly and I have to make sure to be there as a resource for Travis and Victor and also drive some of our business management and pitching decisions. 

So balance.. as Victor says " Short story long," the answer is balance.

IV. When did you decide to stop adding features? What did your team decide were the core features and elements needed for your game to have its own identity, and how did you decide what was extra and where to draw the line?

Jonathan

It's hard because I think good gameplay is like an algebra equation to me it's stacking a bunch of emotional and perceptive highs on top of each other. The player hears spawn portal opening + nearby enemies shot whizzing by their head * Sees a sword, hammer, or gun out of the corner of their eye, and remembers their goal of killing X enemies in Y way. 

The goal of that formula is to figure out how these different values and key engagement principles "stack " on top of each other to create an enthralling experience, it's funny for making a game that I hope is intuitive and engaging I have to really define the technical details explicitly, and perceive in my brain how they work together. 

So to me adding features stops when the formula feels right. I like to consider what's the simplest goal we want to achieve (players want to fire weapon) and do we add an experiential layer on top of that (player wants to feel impact and excitement of firing a weapon - add sound and particles) and then decide how well that formula for an object or interaction ties back into the core gameplay.  When the result feels right I think that's the time to stop. 

You can "noodle" a feature forever but if it isn't making the task the player wants to accomplish easier and it isn't adding an impactful aspect to the experience of using or performing an act in-game then what's the point? At that point, you are needlessly obsessing and a lot of game devs (especially programmers) in my experience create more for their peers than their audience. I think that's a shame because the audience is everything to me

VI. The launch is coming up pretty soon. How do you feel? What expectations do you have? What do you think is gonna happen? Do you feel ready?

Jonathan:

I'm extremely nervous but releasing a game has always been nerve-wracking and I've done it over 20 times for the past decade. You always have questions on whether the finished product is enough? Will people get it? Did you make the right call there? Is that bug you constantly saw in development but has been hidden for a while REALLY gone?  

It's like putting on a nice suit or dress when you have a stomachache. You try to look and present your best but you know that there is/ was a LOT of discomfort behind the scenes and that is what release date is like to me trying to navigate all of that.

I'm actually really excited. We have worked so hard to get attention on this project, to maintain consistency in developing the game, to try to establish our game studio startup. This is as complete a launch or image of a game as I can imagine us having created. Ultimately I know we put more love and attention into this version of the game than the version with nearly 12,000 downloads which doesn't have half of the content we've prepared and created.

I'm a big believer in working so hard and so intensely that I can't ask myself "what if" in the aftermath. I want to be able to believe whether people love it or hate it I gave my best at that time and I 100% feel that with this build of GBF. 

Am I ready?! NOPE. We have a big optimization issue I am working on this weekend

I have lots of small design and bug fixes I need to hammer out in the next month but I feel very confident there are no major roadblocks ahead of us and that's the best place we could possibly be before launch.  

What do I think is gonna happen? I have been really doing work to stay present If I try to imagine what GBF might be too much I might end up reducing whatever impact it does have, so What I HOPE happens is that we made a fun game people enjoy and want to buy. Will that happen? We'll see but I want to give that idea space to come into reality and not weigh myself down with overblown expectations.