Why does this game exist?

Hey,

It's Mace here, the main programmer & driving force behind One Hit Wonder. I've seen and read lots of game post-mortems, devlogs and other associated blog posts written by games developers but I wanted something I don't think I've seen before: a "why this game" post. A post that explains the driving force behind the games existence, both from the perspective of those involved but also why certain technological decisions were made at the start of the project.

 Me, and the team behind this game (comprised entirely of close friends I play games with) have always wanted to produce a game together. We made many attempts where we would draw up beautiful design documents, only for the project to fall apart in the prototyping stage. Or we would prototype something but have too little design to lead the way after that so the project would burn out. This cycle led us to believe we’d never be able to do something together, and so we stopped trying. I, myself, have been a games developer in some amateur form for years. Having undertaken many game jams, produced games in university for assignments, and prototyped many different gameplay ideas, I began something new.

 One Hit Wonder was born out of a desire to play with the most recent updates to the SFML library (a C++ multimedia library that can be used to make games). I saw it as an adventure in testing their recent developments, offering me a pathway to give feedback to an open-source community I am a fan of. I work with C++, I’ve coded many game jam games in C++, my skills are in games, graphics and primarily C++. Because of this set of factors I began producing a small prototype of a boss rush mini game with a friend, Tom. Together we formed an idea of a game where the player has but one life, is felled by a single hit and must fight against the odds to defeat the bosses.

 This idea carried us to the prototype of a first boss, with awful placeholder art and primitive movement systems. Now, many months down the line, this first boss still lives mostly in the form that it was in during that prototype: the Evil Eye. As progress churned along Tom was unable to continue working on the game as a programmer, and thus the game was paused for a while. I picked it back up months later and with the support of Henrik (as designer) alongside Tom and Zack as testers, was able to prototype a second boss and vastly improve the quality of many aspects of the game. Eventually, Tom returned as a developer and my own brother offered his support doing audio. Soon we reached a point where there was a team dynamic, a group of people actively working through features, bug fixes, design decisions. Playtesting often with friends and ticking off milestones.

 With all the success we felt of the development process we realised we couldn’t afford an extravagent artist, or even some of the cheaper ones. We held many conversations with artists (more than we’d like to say) and eventually settled on the idea that since this was our first game as a group, and we had no desire to release it for financial gain, that we would use free artwork found on itch (with credit given to the immensely skilled artists of this site). We’ve constructed something not out of a desire to have millions of players, but out of a desire to prove our team can complete something. And if we can do one game, why can’t we do a second? So whether you play our game and were curious, or are a developer struggling to reach the end goal just know it took us many failures and unfinished ideas to get this small game as far as we have. We’re going to get it to a stage of finished we’re satisfied with. It won’t be perfect, it will have problems, but those are what we aim to learn from when we do whatever game comes next. Maybe this is the start of the cycle of producing things that me and the rest of the team have always dreamt of being able to do.