Hey everyone!
Ever wondered what goes on behind the screen? How games come to be? Or how the people behind those games come together? Well, while we can’t speak for every studio’s experience, we can certainly speak for ours!
This Dev Diary will unearth our experience as a small indie studio, from deciding on a studio name to the things we learned developing GoobnBalloonsDX. Enjoy!
About Us
We’d like to start by telling you how IconicArtsLLP came to be. Before settling on our current studio name, we proposed several (ridiculous) name suggestions, “Square Enix 2” being one of them.We came upon the name “NothingWorks” and it was almost what we went with, until a few people pointed out that it might be hard to find potential partners with that name. We decided they were right and it was rather unfortunate, since we’d already made the logo…
So what made us decide on “IconicArts”? A month before we established the company, the team was watching an Adult Swim show called "Smiling Friends", where some of the characters would often say the word ‘iconic’ liberally. Tie that in with the fact that Veronica (Our Amazing Art Lead) had been using ‘iconic’ during our meetings for a while already, and the rest of the team members following after watching the show and interacting with her, we simply made each other laugh just by calling things ‘iconic’; it became quite the inside joke for us!
And then one day, someone just asked “Why don’t we call ourselves IconicArts?”, and we just rolled with it. A lot of us had an artistic background, so it makes sense to add that to our name, since we wanted to show that we’re an art-focused team. And there you have it, IconicArts!
The Origins Of GoobnBalloonsDX
In school, a few of us came together to work on an RPG called Project Lullaby. While developing that, Kris and Fintan worked on a week-long Gamejam, creating the original GoobnBalloons on itch.io. The theme/prompt was “Growth”, which we incorporated into our game via inflating and popping balloons, additional background assets fading in as your score accumulates, and more layers of music fading in with the score. Our game received plenty of positive feedback and we decided to polish and expand it after we were finished with Project Lullaby.
While we carried over the things we developed for the Gamejam into GoobnBalloonsDX, both Kris and Fintan (Art Director and Technical Director respectively) went back and forth about the next things to add to the game. There were a lot of disagreements, a few of which Kris took to heart (sorry Fintan😅 -Kris). The only things they both agreed on from the start were that the game must be a single screen game, and there would be no jumping; a decision inspired by the Nintendo minigame Bird and Bean (which also inspired us to do the changing background).
We started by recreating the original game in its entirety with a hand-drawn art style. Fintan, Veronica, and Kris ended up finishing that in about a month. The rest of the team subsequently began working on the enemies, playable characters, story mode, and bosses, with the last two taking the most development time.
We had help from Svidanza Audio to create the game’s beautiful soundtracks, with the team there bringing in live saxophone performers and singers, which was awesome. Most of the music in-game is dynamic, reacting to how the player performs or how much content they’ve seen.
Challenges of Making A Game
Initially, our goal was to recreate the original itch game down to the letter, which we completed rather quickly. The challenge then became deciding what to add (and what to leave out), along with developing the game and managing the scope.
Regarding the shoot-em-up gameplay, the original game featured three types of balloons: the basic, the bully, and the star balloons. While we initially planned for more types, early playtesting made it increasingly obvious that the enemy roster needed to be diversified. Several players specifically expressed a want for more hazards beyond simply being overwhelmed and touching a balloon. Our solution to this problem was to implement types of balloons that would occasionally shoot projectiles or explode, as well as a type that ignored collisions. Not only did these changes put more pressure on the player, the overall gameplay was made more interesting as most non-balloon hazards (such as spiky projectiles) popped other small balloons.
A memorable gameplay-related problem we had was the early balancing of Pajarito. He differs from the rest of the playable characters in that he extends his beak to pop balloons instead of shooting them. Our idea to balance him was that he would be able to instantly pop balloons, minus triggering the effect of a star balloon (which pops all balloons when popped). As development moved forward, we found that Pajarito needed to be balanced further, accounting for the double-edged nature of the more hazardous balloons!
When we participated in the PlayNYC exhibit, we were shocked by how players in co-op were effortlessly achieving absurdly high scores without breaking a sweat. We realized the extent to which Pajario nullified mechanical interplay between the balloons, which became essential to the feel of the game going forward.
Overall, the difficulties in making a shoot-em-up game boil down to predicting exactly how different mechanics will interact, especially if there’s an endless mode. We felt we learned the most when we had people play the game and push it around for us to see what worked and what didn’t.
A couple of interesting issues we faced other than gameplay were the shifting scope and priorities over the course of development. The itch version of GoobnBalloonsDX only had an endless arcade mode, which we initially thought was enough. We assumed that our DX version would be similar, but after recreating the base game in the new visual style, we brainstormed a bit about what we wanted to add. One idea that came up was implementing an auxiliary mode, inspired by the “Event Mode” from Super Smash Bros., which involves completing small challenges within existing stages.
We also thought it would be fun to connect these challenges on a little over-world map, giving it a ‘campaign’. The challenges were initially intended to be things like "break the targets", "get X score in Y time", or "survive a flood of X balloon type"; while these challenges still made it in, one thing led to another and we eventually figured the mode was a great opportunity to introduce bosses. Much more work was put into these bosses (as well as the other challenges) than we anticipated. Before we knew it, we found ourselves putting significantly more time and effort into this "side mode" than the supposedly "main mode", Arcade.
When going to events, we would find that these bosses, as well as other challenge stages, were eye-catching to visitors. The priority would not fully flip, however, until very late into development when we had our consultancy. Up to that point, "Goob Odyssey" had to be unlocked by playing a little bit of Arcade mode; Christian, our consultant from Acorn Games, advised strongly against this and insisted it be the other way around.
What We Learned As An Indie Studio
For most (if not all) of us on the team, GoobnBalloonsDX is the first project we’re going all the way with. It’s our first commercial game, with a publisher, and will be released on several different consoles and PC. Our original intention for recreating the game was to have something simple, fun, and light which we could use to experiment with, and we planned to complete the game in 6 months.
Needless to say, that didn’t happen😅. During most of the game’s development we assumed we would just publish on Steam without funding or marketing. We wanted to release the game, see the response we got, and use that momentum to publish on consoles; an avenue for us to release future games multi-platform.
Everything changed when David (Our Wonderful Producer!) found both private investment and a publisher that was interested in our game - Nejcraft - which allowed us to shift our plans and immediately aim for releasing the game across multiple platforms simultaneously. As for the marketing side, we brought Acorn Games in to help so we could shift our focus completely towards finishing the game.
This was a surprise to all of us, deviating from our original plan, and we didn’t expect the scale of development to be quite this big. We began to look at the project differently; instead of testing the waters, we were diving in head first.
Other things we learned while developing GoobnBalloonsDX were the preparation to launch the game on different platforms, being mindful of how we talk about consoles publicly (manufacturers are very particular about this), preparing JSON files for translators (we had to quickly refactor all of the text in the game and pull one together on the fly, a hard lesson learned), and for localization, the decision to display important text in an image, since the devs had to edit the image multiple times for each language; again, lesson learned!
We hope you’ve enjoyed a peek behind the curtain; don’t forget to wishlist GoobnBalloonsDX and follow our Twitter for more updates! Have a question? Join our Discord and chat directly with us in the server daily!
Goodbye from all of us at IconicArts, and see you at the next Dev Diary!👋👋