Dad Strength Postmortem
Dad Strength is a comedic beat ‘em up video game modeled after old-school titles such as Double Dragon and Final Fight. In this postmortem, the game’s development process will be examined in depth. Dad Strength was developed over the course of two years, and luckily a developer’s diary was maintained throughout this time.
I. Music-based Brainstorming
Music is an incredibly inspirational catalyst for my imagination. There are particular songs whose moods alone can convey a rich visual representation, and I often find myself puzzling over how one might adapt these into an interactive medium such as a video game. In fact, most of the game play mechanics I have designed find their origins in the attempt to integrate music and sound into an interactive form without diluting the identity of the music. The goal is therefore not quite a holistic medium; Players should be able to enjoy the music as a separate experience from that of playing the game.
Lately, I’ve been increasingly interested in the do-it-yourself (DIY) mentality. My friends and I often write and record our own songs, and sometimes the results are quite poignant (to me, at least). My brother in particular writes some fairly unique music. He came to visit me in Washington D.C. during the summer of 2007, and we wound up creating a few short loops in Garageband using existing samples. It was nothing more than automatic creation through experimentation, but the results spoke clearly to us both. In listening to what amounted to nothing more than a few seconds’ worth of music, we could wholly conceptualize a simple, beat ‘em up video game reminiscent of those of early 90’s. We explored our imaginations for exactly what kind of game the music could suit, and the foundations for Dad Strength were soon born.
II. Design, Pre-production, and Development
The initial design for Dad Strength was very minimalistic. The game would consist of the main character, two or three enemy characters, a scrolling background, and possibly a blunt weapon that could be picked up and swung about. When thinking about game development, I generally try to wear a programmer’s hat in order to maximize code reuse whenever possible. I realized that if Dad Strength was designed carefully, many of its components could be slightly altered for re-use in other game genres such as a 2D fighting game, side-scrolling platformer, or vertical-scrolling space shooter. I kept this in mind while sketching out each of the game building blocks such as the character entity and the health bars.
In order to save time and avoid relying on programmer art, it was decided that sprite-sheets would be developed by filming live actors and extracting key frames. The actors were filmed performing a variety of motions before a green screen. The film was then digitally edited using a chroma key to extract the characters from the background. This approach worked well and also lent itself to creating sprites whose image fidelity fit within the game’s 16-bit nostalgia aesthetic.
There were many times during development that, due to various technological problems, I felt like a decisive barrier had been reached. In fact, there were spans of months where no progress would be made at all, which was quite depressing. From time to time, I would entertain the idea of calling it day. During these slumps, it became increasingly difficult to become motivated about the final product when it seemed to be nothing more than a concept. However, I was fortunate enough to have had a continuous flow of positive support from friends and family. Coupled with the raw desire to play the game myself, I found the energy to follow Dad Strength’s development to completion. Of course, sacrifices and concessions had to be made during the course of its development, yet it is incredibly satisfying when a project surviving on passion alone is finally released for others to enjoy.
III. What Went Right
Comedy.
The game is, in many ways, a parody of the simpler beat ‘em up games of the early 90’s. There is literally no back-story, character development, nor plot to be found in Dad Strength. The game stars a middle-aged father figure fighting random foes (of which there are apparently a full supply of identical twins) for no specific reason. The justification for developing this game can be boiled down to wanting to add a strong entry in my personal game development portfolio, and the game makes no attempt to hide this. It is a simple game, and its essence lies not in revolutionary game-play nor stunning graphics; It is primarily a demonstration of my programming abilities in the guise of entertainment.
The premise of the game is absurd enough; However, the dialog acts as another supporting pillar of its comedy. The game opens with the FBI anti-drug warning so commonly associated with arcade cabinets of the 80’s. The titular character then saunters across the screen and promptly warns the player by saying, “Because I said so!” In the first few seconds, the tone of the game is established and continues all the way through enemy death cries such as “Et tu, Dad?”.
The game is truly a one-dimensional beat ‘em up in the sense that the player can choose to move left or right along the horizontal axis yet has no control over the vertical axis. To keep players from being bored or frustrated with this design choice, it was necessary to make the content engaging and justify repeat playability. I chose to achieve this through a mixture of comedy and absurdity.
IV. What Went Wrong
In general, I wrote no technical specification documents to guide the development of Dad Strength. There were but a few well-defined goals, milestones, and self-imposed deadlines to provide perspective on its progress. This was largely due to the fact that Dad Strength was a project being developed on weekends and during lunch breaks. Furthermore, I was developing the underlying technology in tandem with the game itself. Dad Strength runs on the SFII90 engine whose development goals changed specifically to meet the vague design goals of a side-scrolling game - namely Dad Strength.
A significant consequence of having but a page of technical guidelines was the continuous miscalculation of time requirements. For example, the character artwork was captured using live video in the effort to save time associated with creating detailed sprite artwork. Nevertheless, the art pipeline used for processing video data to a final sprite-sheet took no less than four months. Regarding the programming side of production, better and more robust methods of implementation were constantly being discovered during development, and the fundamental building blocks of the game were revised multiple times.
V. Lessons Learned
Throughout the development of Dad Strength, a number of my friends were eager to hear of its progress. Some of these friends are incredible artists and others seasoned coders. In retrospect, I feel that I should have asked them to lend me their expertise and, in doing so, matured the Dad Strength development team from a one-person project to a small team of three or four with specialized skills. This would have undoubtedly decreased the production time and created an enjoyable team dynamic at the same time. For subsequent projects of a comparable scope, I intend to work toward making the process a more collaboratively-driven effort.
Speaking specifically to the game’s programming process, I have found that after deciding upon the core game mechanics, the programming itself should focus on creating a library of reusable, extensible components. In essence, this is akin to creating a level editor as opposed to a set number of levels. Keeping in mind the “big picture” is crucial for when design documents change and it becomes necessary to modify or scrap the content of any previous iterations. Case in point: The Ruby scripts for Dad Strength were completely re-written at least three times. Each time, the design became better organized, less inter-dependent, and easier to maintain. The cost I paid for each revision was a few more months in a world without unjustified Dad on goon violence.
For those interested, Dad Strength may be downloaded from here: Dad Strength.
VI. Supplementary Media
The following is a collection of Dad Strength related media. Most of the media provided highlight the development of the in-game sprites and associated hit detection logic.
VII. Miscellaneous Dad Strength Information