Trick and Treat: A More Successful Story

Since the last few posts have been focused on less-than-successful endeavors in game development, I felt like it would be good to take a step back and look at a project where everything went right.

So let's talk about Trick and Treat, a game I worked on for a game design course I took during my third year at RIT. For the course, we had to pitch game ideas to the class, then voted on which games we wanted to create. Teams were formed and we had 5 weeks to build our games. Before pitching our first games, however, we were given the stipulation that the game had to feature a vacuum cleaner.

Trick and Treat was the game I pitched. The game centers around Tom, a delusional "ghostbuster," who takes to the streets every Halloween to combat the ghostly menace. At the time, I thought I was just being kind of silly, with a game idea where I could say "Well there is a vacuum in it." Whether it was intentional or not, I realized this idea was actually sort of clever. Other people pitched games where the vacuum element was at the forefront. Many of the games pitched featured characters that were vacuums or the game was set inside of one. That's not to knock any of my classmates, many of their ideas were really cool in their own right. But, when they were given a theme, they focused on the theme. I, on the other hand, was inspired by true events involving myself, a vacuum, and some curtains.

Now before I start sounding too egotistical, let me just say I do not consider myself a particularly good game designer. And that's what makes Trick and Treat such a big win for me. Not only did I come up with an out of the box solution to the challenge laid before me, but my fellow classmates also like the idea enough to vote for it. We ended up with 8 people working on the game, about a third of the entire class. That was certainly surprising after I had just pitched a "joke" idea.

The fun doesn't stop there, though. This was the biggest team I had worked on and with that came a lot of talent that I was not used to having available. I am very much a programmer. Mediocre at best with art and design. And because of that I typically had very little idea of what exactly the projects I worked on would look like until it started coming together. Even when working with smaller groups, there usually wasn't time for an artist to create any concept art, so we got whatever sprites they delivered and that's how the game looked.

Trick and Treat was different. This time around, we had 3 artists at our disposal. I had a basic mock-up of what the game would look like from my presentation, which we used to come up with an art-style and concept art. And then we made the game, knowing what it would look like. You can see for yourself how the game progressed from concept to production:

Mock-up from my original pitch

Concept art from a better artist

Screenshot of final game

Looking back, it's almost sad that having some vision before jumping into development is what I'd call a "success story." Yet, that was the reality of student projects. There simply wasn't enough time to invest in a vision. But Trick and Treat spoiled me, in a way. After working on this project, where everything was made to spec, I couldn't go back to the "we'll see how it turns out" sort of projects.

I could go on and on about this game, but I think that's enough for now. I know I haven't actually said much about it, but this post is already getting pretty long with no end in sight. I may do a proper deep-dive post-mortem at some point, but there are some recent projects to talk about before then. Stay tuned for those. Oh, but if you would like to play Trick and Treat for yourself, check it out here.