Hey all, my name is Kevin. My buddy Alex and I are the founders of Hit By A Truck Studio, a game design duo that just operates out of my home office for now. This is going to be the first in a series of many blog posts regarding our company and the game we’re working on.
We were both unemployed, and we would meet regularly at local coffee shops to apply to jobs together and keep each other accountable. It was over one of those slightly-sticky tables that I first pitched the idea to Alex.
Our first joint project, Perfect Metal, is currently on trajectory to be an Old-school RPG like the original Final Fantasy. We wanted to be a bit campy with it and intend to leverage some funny narrative tropes we both find hilarious, one of which our company’s name is based on.
We both wanted to take this project really seriously, so we put a lot of effort into vibe-checking each other at the beginning. To make sure the project survived past the initial days of excitement, we organized the project formally. We had meetings to establish realistic expectations and time frames for the projects scope. Much of this effort was in part a way to filter either of us out if we weren’t serious about the project. Given where things are today, vibe-check definitely passed.
Alex and I were friends from a local Austin Meetup Group, I’ve known him a little over a year and a half at this point. I had come to know Alex’s technical skills by then quite well, and we’d regularly argue about one programming language in particular: his favorite, Lua.
Alex had taken part in a recent game jam at the time where he worked to make a fishing mini game. I always liked the idea of making my own game, but had never taken part a game jam. I had some experience using engines and writing game engine code in the past, but I never personally finished a game development project. Then, at one point while we were at a coffee shop one day, I forget who exactly catalyzed the conversation, but I pitched the idea of working on a game together.
I put forward the idea of a simple JRPG, something that would minimize the coding effort and allow us a medium to tell whatever story we wanted to. Initially, I posed a 3-Pillar Design; the RPG I was envisioning had: - A Combat Phase, in which quests and plot points would be resolved through stat math and violence. - An Exploration Phase, in which players would have coarse control over what kinds of encounters they would engage in through some form of mini-game. - A Hub Phase, in which players would return to base, spend time working on their character builds and equipment, managing inventory, and talking to story NPCs before diving back into the more of the meat-and-potatoes content.
All that was left was to build the game. Starting a project is always exciting, but it’s important to pick the right tools ahead of time. After deftly dodging the initial traps of logo design and naming, we held an ADR meeting to discuss composition of our engine stack: - Unity (My Bid) - Pygame (My Bid) - Amulet (Alex’s Bid) - Love2D (Alex’s Bid) - Arcade Engine (Alex’s Bid)
We might go into the specifics how we settled on it later on, but eventually we decided in favor of Love2D for what we were going for.
In a typical week, we would meet Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and each day served its own purpose. We also expected each other to put in a solid Independent Session day each week for however felt appropriately long, with a benchmark of 4 hours.
Monday was our primary collaboration day. Alex would come over to my place and work on a mini-desk in my home office while I worked on my main tower. He was our Infrastructure and UI Guy, so he set up our VPC/VPN, Git, CICD, and Email and wrote the beginnings of our UI library. I was the Game Director and System Designer, so I steered the major game design directions and coded our combat engine.
We very much subscribed to the idea of “don’t quit your day job” while working on the project. However, we were both jobless so we made a serious effort to remedy this. Every Wednesday was a job hunt day. We would meet at a coffee shop, or someone’s house/apartment, and spend at least four hours applying to jobs. We used the in-person nature of the affair to keep each other honest. Eventually, we opened the day up to friends who were also looking for new jobs.
Friday was another in-person collab day, but we treated it with a little bit more importance. Every other week, Friday was for direction-setting, where we decided what the priority targets for the following week were. Every alternate week was our roundup, where the goal was to see if we hit our targets and what obstacles we were expecting to run into. Fridays weren’t too structured since we would regularly do some minor agenda management throughout the week, but we wanted it on the schedule as a guarantee that it would be done if it was ever needed.
In the beginning of April, we started to notice something on the horizon looming. Alex was making progress on the interview pipeline with a company and it looked very promising.
We had to prepare for the inevitable. The plan was that when he started his first day, we would switch our schedule from three days a week to just Sundays. This was something he could still commit to while working a full-time tech job. Meanwhile, I would keep mostly the same schedule, spending more of it independently working and then we’d sync up and collaborate on Sundays.
Then, I got an interview with a company in San Francisco. It was the first interview I had gotten for this entire stretch of months of unemployment, and I wasn’t very optimistic. The opportunity the recruiter described was too good to be true, so I still gave it my best. Meetings with the company were soon and fast, a number of people from my past we working there, too. All with good things to say.
The inevitable hit. About one week into Alex’s new job, I was given a formal offer. With my move to San Francisco on the horizon, we only had a few Sundays left before I’d be taking a minor hiatus from the project to get situated and start back up. We decided to put the project on pause until July 20th.