“Every 10 Seconds…” Post-Mortem

I first talked to the programmer on Every 10 seconds, a window washer falls to his Death when I just asked on Twitter if someone was interested in jamming with me. We chatted a little bit, then waited for the kick-off. We skyped about the theme for about an hour, discussing how we didn’t want to do something based around a 10 -second timer. We looked around for inspiration, and at some point I googled “Every 10 Seconds” and found a bunch of weird ideas (“A woman gives birth very 10 seconds, she must be very tired”). Among them was the idea of a game based around the Onion article *Study: Every 10 seconds, a skyscraper window washer falls to his Death,
* which we thought was HILARIOUS for some reason. So we doodled a bit and came up with a jetpack game about saving window washers.

PLAY EVERY 10 SECONDS A WINDOW WASHER FALLS TO HIS DEATH (web version!)

What went right

No stress. We decided to do this for fun, not to compete, and we decided to something small and dumb that we knew was in our power to complete. We were okay with the possible failure but confident in our skills and our idea. We slept a whole lot, we took time to breathe and see the sun (at least I did!), and we laughed our way through the week-end. Our game was not going to be super innovative, but it turned out even greater than what we had in mind at first.

A playable version on Saturday. We aimed for a playable really early so we can test it out and see if the fun is there as soon as possible, then polish polish polish, which is exactly what we did! We spent half the week-end on polishing controls, balancing, and clarity of the mechanics. I spent a good deal of the last day on adding animations and fun stuff (limbs explosion!), while Fernando was adding menus and tweaking gameplay until it was to our liking.

What went semi-wrong

Tested late. We got a playable on saturday but only tested it out on Sunday afternoon. We realized one of our main mechanics, “rope healing” (flying over a rope to repair it), was not understood at all, or maybe it took a good 5-10 minutes to figure out. Once we had feedback from testers, it was a tad too late in the code and art process to do radical changes that might have been clearer and better. So next time, we’ll test our first playable out, it’ll give us time to get and try crazy ideas.

File size. Using MP3 music from the web (creative commons stuff) makes it hard to edit and have better file formats for games. Working with a composer would have made integration easier and the game lighter. But the music was so good! V_V

Thanks for playing our game and reading this!