When I set out to make Meexarps, I had a couple ideas. Some involved VR, some involved multiplayer. I was really interested in doing something innovative rather than something impressive. After the brainstorming period however, my experience in software development trumped my dreams and I made my first criteria… Simple. Something that could be done quickly as practice because the first thing you put out will always be bad.

The next couple thoughts happened in a big swirl (this is very right brain thinking) but I ended up with a jackbox style game where the focus was more about personality rather than trying to be funny. Just like youtube learning is edutainment, I really like edugamement. I love games that teach you something, and I love learning about my friends. Marrying these two concepts seemed natural to me. I love personality questions like Meyers Briggs, dating profiles and would you rather. 

I talked about reasons to play games in devlog #1 and for the social aspect, one element is the range of people I can play with. There are people I want to hang out with but I don’t really have anything in common with them. This is where party games shine. I think everyone has fun playing or watching people play jackbox, and everyone likes talking about something. I think people who play my game will have fun like in jackbox but in a slightly more edugamement or personal fashion. 

So based on description, why not make a simple web ui interface? You don’t need cute graphics, mobile support or art assets to create a game like this. Great question! My secondary goal was to publish a “real” game. I wanted to do the legwork to try and match something you’d pay money for on steam. And oh boy, did I underestimate how long that would take. I thought I could get a prototype out in two weeks, and finish the game within a month after that. After all, this game is very straightforward right! Wrong! Trying to get a game to production level is veeeeeery challenging. I used to think $60 for a AAA game was too expensive. Now I believe games should cost 3x as much (if we base the price off of effort put into it, I still don’t buy games at $60). It ended up taking a month to prototype and over a year to productionize! I even had to bring in more people to help me out! There is no way I could have gotten the game to be halfway as good as it was without the help of my 5 friends. 

Anyway lets review. Why Meexarps. I wanted

1. Something simple
2. Edugamement
3. Production quality game

I recently watched a devlog (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnI_1DOYt2A) where the lesson learned was “dont make a wishlist of what you want and hope it all comes together”. Idk it worked for me but maybe I just got lucky. I highly recommend watching this video. This Dev’s 5 year journey may be able to save you some time if you learn from his mistakes. He has a lot of concrete examples of his lessons. 

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next week.

Don't forget to check out our homepage https://betakyros.github.io/Meexarps/