RUMBLEFEST - Journey to Early Access (Robot_Gif Dev Diary 1)

Hi everyone! This is Theron, lead developer and one third of the 3 man indie team at Robot_Gif Studios. I’ve already posted in the showcase about RUMBLEFEST, so please take a look there if you’re curious about the game. I’ll be using this space to talk a bit about our team’s journey to initial release, our current goals, and a bit about our vision for the future.

RUMBLEFEST is a game my co-founder and artist Meeka has been dreaming of making for years. We were co-workers at a previous job, and one day as I was leaving at the end of the day I saw him still hunched over his desk, tweaking pixels on game sprites. I casually asked him what he was working on, he enthusiastically told me, and we’ve been working together ever since.

Meeka isn’t a developer, so he experimented with a few different game engines that promised a ‘no-code’ environment, eventually landing on GameMaker. We did a lot of work in that engine, and eventually produced a reasonably solid proof of concept for the game. Due to a variety of factors which I’ll elaborate on in a future post, we ended up switching over to Defold, which turned out to be a critical step in our journey.

For most of RUMBLEFEST’s development, it was Meeka and I working together in our spare time. But he’s an artist, I’m a developer, and neither of us are particularly good at sticking to a schedule. So one of the biggest factors that contributed to us finally releasing an early access product has been the addition of my longtime friend Nick to the team, who not only provides the music for the game, but also serves as de facto product manager. I’ll make a future post about how important making and sticking to a schedule is, especially when you’re passionate about a project and have 1000 ideas about how to improve it.

Thanks in large part to our new dedication to scheduling, we were able to successfully release an app on the iOS app store a few weeks ago. It’s not finished, and there’s still a ton we want to add, but our priority has shifted from building what we THINK people will want to play, to actually gathering some data and feedback to determine what people ACTUALLY want from our game.

Working on our first game has been an emotional roller coaster, with highs like controlling a character with user input for the first time, to lows of verbal fights and me even “quitting the band” for a period of time. But it’s been a fun and rewarding journey, and we’re looking forward to making RUMBLEFEST as great of a game as we can.

I’d like to especially thank everyone who’s been helpful on these forums. Defold seems to have a small but dedicated and helpful community, and I’ll be doing my best to contribute to that community in future dev diary posts.

Love, pixels, and folding chairs,
Theron
Lead Developer, Robot_Gif Studios

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Definitely gonna end all of my correspondence with this quote from now on. Really looking forward to reading the dev log – seems like quite a journey you’ve been on so far!

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