Games

After the success of our first game, we decided to make a sequel. Making a second game should be easier, you are supposed to learn from your mistakes, right? Well, not only did we repeat a lot of mistakes from our first game, but we also added new ones.

The game is Hidden Paws Mystery. Here are the 4 worst mistakes that we made:

1. Scope – As before we planned too big a game, way bigger than we could make in a reasonable time. And we made even more levels than previously.

2. Topic – Our first game was about winter, it looked lovely: islands covered in snow, pine trees, little houses. We decided that our second game would be Halloween themed. The problem is that it’s difficult to make Halloween cozy and beautiful and cheerful. What’s worse — we actually planned to make it all weird and scary. But this was still a game about finding little cats. It didn’t match up. Players didn’t know what to make of our game.

3. Promoting – since our game didn’t look as pretty as the first one it was more difficult to promote on Twitter and got fewer wishlists on Steam.

4. Art style – our first game had a cute low-poly look. Our second game has more real looking graphics. Not only does it take longer to make a game with this art style but it was completely unnecessary for such a simple game.

Not surprisingly it sold poorly. It has very positive reviews though so that’s good.

In December 2017, like every Christmas, I visited my mom. My brother was there too. Usually, we eat a lot, maybe watch some movies, do jigsaw puzzles, and play games. It should be relaxing, but it never is. Or maybe it is at first but we don’t like being unproductive for days.

So, we were there for yet another Christmas, and we knew how it would go and that we would feel tired after all the sitting around and eating. We came up with an idea of creating a small game. We wanted to make it in 3 days tops because we were delusional — most game developers are when they estimate how long it takes to make a game.

It was winter and it was snowing outside so all our ideas revolved around winter and we agreed that there would be an island and that little kittens would be hidden there and a player would need to find them. My brother knows 3D modeling so he made the cats and the island in Blender and I programmed it all in C# in Unity Engine. We had a small working prototype within a day. But there was still a lot of work to be done. And we kept adding isles and things. We kept making the game when we got back to our own apartments.

We titled it Hidden Paws. This is the description that we came up with:

“It’s winter and cats are still outside. Cold and alone. Find them and bring them home.“

We finally released it in March 2018 — our first game!