Hey folks,

It's been a week since my colleague and I put out our first game as part of a
university program to design and develop a game in several weeks.  I thought I'd
talk about our experience briefly, and invite y'all to play our game.  We'd
really appreciate any feedback!

We spent four weeks on the design phase, where did brainstorming and prototyped
ideas in paper, giving playtesters a chance to show us how bad our ideas were.
Paper prototyping is hard, because it is only an accurate representation of a
small subset of game genres.  That said, we did fail fast, and settled on a
fairly simple concept.

Next, we spent two weeks developing the concept in Haxe.  I've worked in Unity
before, and I must say that Haxe is exceptional for learning and getting started
quickly.  We also got a little experience with Agile development.  The main
utility of this practice was to itemize the tasks, so that, though the high
level task of developing a game seems large, each individual task takes an hour
or so.  This allowed us to complete the game in the short amount of time we had.

One of my big takeaways from the development stage is that it takes relatively
little effort to put out something, as long as you stick with a simple design.
Of course, that's not to say it doesn't take some time and dedication, but it's
an easier process than one would think.  I especially saw this while designing
the assets - the sprites and the music - which were created from scratch.
Typically, you might think that creating artwork or composing music would be
crafts that you would have to perfect over years of training.  I did not have
years of training, nor was I about to start.  But, what we did have going for us
was a simple aesthetic, and so by sticking to simple genres - 16-bit pixel art
and chiptunes - I was able to learn what I needed to know to create some
surprisingly reasonable looking and sounding assets.

And, of course, when you have such simple and powerful tools like Haxe, there's
no real excuse not to spend an afternoon hacking away at an idea!

This last stage of development we have for our university program is to use data
collection to keep working at fixing problems that still exist, so we're always
looking for input on how we can make our game better - even just playing our
game for a few minutes will help us out!  So, try our game, Sheep Savior; see if
you can save some poor sheep just wandering around in the dangerous wild.  Also,
let us know what your thoughts are on our design and development cycles - we're
just getting our feet wet, so we're always looking for suggestions.

- Alexey