Matt and I started working on The Incident in late 2009. Today I dug out my iChat logs and peeked back at where we were a year ago, about one month into development.
I had just started drawing the first level, Street. At that time, it was combined with level 2, City; we later split them up to have a shorter level 1.
Matt wasn’t 100% sold on my design for the “radar” (the top indicator showing where the next object will fall.) I wanted it to blend into the bezel of the screen. Matt pushed for a more prominent design.
We had a somewhat playable app very early on; playable in that stuff fell down, and you could guide proto-Frank in a slightly jerky, unpredictable way. Matt had just put in a goofy thing where if you climbed to the top of the first level, you could do a “suicide jump” which would collapse the pile.
I had just sent Matt the font we ended up using (and loving) all throughout the game, Yusuke Kamiyamane’s awesome (and free!) Tempesta family.
A month into it, we were sitting on a surprisingly large chunk of the engine all ready to go, a concept well proven. It was everything else that took months and months more. All the UI, interstitials, save-state management, adjusting controls, customization for different devices, performance fixes, the tutorial, the trophy room, the rest of the levels, hundreds of additional items, sound effects, music, the game’s website…
Sometimes I wish we could’ve put in all the other ideas we came up with. Other times, I wonder how we got this far at all. It’s a wonderful life and stuff!
P.S. You know that thing they say about how the last 10% of the work takes 90% of the time? There’s truth to that, but there’s also falsehood. In our case, I really think the last 90% of the time was spent on the last 90% of the stuff. It’s just that people tend to overvalue ideas. The pitch for the game isn’t half the work; it’s barely 5%.
