Howdy fellow gunslingers!
Let's dive a bit deeper into how the idea of Colt Canyon came to my mind and how it became what it is today. As I already told you in the last update in my first semester at the Cologne Game Lab, in game design class everyone got two random keywords to develop a game concept from. For me it was ‘Help’ and ‘Cowboy’. I didn’t actually had to develop a prototype but write a design document. However making games is my passion, not writing documents, so I focused on making a prototype instead.
I started by creating a folder called ‘cowboy’ (which is still the name of the main development folder for Colt Canyon lol). My next thought was: What do cowboys do? They shoot revolvers and stuff, so obviously I had to make some kind of shooter. Since I had to keep it simple and didn’t had much time I started designing the game rightaway and it became clear what the game will play and look like within hours.
At that time I didn’t envision it as roguelike but just a small game experience not longer than a couple minutes and without any bigger plans. Because of my time constraints, it was also clear that I had to stick to my already somewhat developed skills of making minimalistic pixel art for the prototype. I made a concept for what I envision the game to look like. This is the actual concept I drew. It's not a screenshot, but something that I drew pixel by pixel as a mockup:
Style-wise I was inspired by my previous project Just Get Through, but also by some other games that I saw in my twitter feed. With a style and basic game concept in mind it was time to open up old trusty GameMaker Studio 1.4 and hack together the prototype. Most time was spent on the movement, enemy AI and the quite different HUD I had back then. The first prototype, known as ‘Help’, was made in just one weekend, before uploading it to itch.io I only made some basic bugfixes and small changes.
There was just a single level, no menus, no other weapons, no procedural generation or anything. Only 2 different enemy types that both looked the same and only a couple of destructible objects with no fancy particle effects. Visually the prototype also looks way more flat and far less interesting with a very basic and static environment. Despite this there are still a lot of similarities between 'Help' and Colt Canyon as it is today.
Sadly I never got graded for my small game 'Help' or received any other detailed feedback, so I decided that possibly the internet might give me some feedback instead. I published the prototype on itch.io and to my surprise with little promotion effort it was picked up by a couple smaller content creators and even got a couple articles on some websites. The feedback was great, which motivated me to make a couple more small patches to the game before calling it a day.
At the Cologne Game Lab we have to develop a small but full game experience every second half of the semester in small groups, so I didn’t have any time to work on the prototype anymore as I had to focus my game development effort on that instead. In the project phase following 'Help' I was the programmer in a group that made a game called ‘Shell Shift’, that used quite similar input and movement to my prototype. I reused parts of the code of 'Help' in 'Shell Shift' and it was quite a success as well.
After the semester was over I wanted to return to Help because after weeks of not doing anything for the game there was still traffic on the page even without getting featured on the front page of itch.io. This interest in the prototype and the fact that I had so many more ideas for the game caused me to start thinking about how I could make a full game from this prototype. In my semester break I started to brainstorm ideas on how to increase the scope of the prototype and make it a full, polished game experience.
I had two main ideas. One was more narrative, quest-based. The other one is basically the concept that is now Colt Canyon with randomly generated level, more similar to what the prototype was, but with a bigger scope, more variety and higher replayability value. Because the first idea seemed more complicated, more work and more exhausting to develop I went with the second idea. My love for roguelikes and hate for narrative focused games probably influenced this decision as well. In the end the first idea would’ve probably become more roguelike-y anyway.
At that point the hard part started, because I was still studying game programming I couldn’t focus 100% of my energy on developing the game. I had to keep it simple or else I would never be able to finish it. I wanted to finish it in a couple semesters, but I was only able to work on the game in semester breaks or sometimes in the afternoon or weekend for the first half of the semester.
The game grew and grew and so did my plans for it. I was a slave to the feature creep.
I had to redo parts of the game over and over again because I always got new ideas that didn’t work with the old implementation. Stuff that I originally didn’t plan on doing: Console versions, boss fights, coop mode, different stages, high res interface, character artworks, unlockable different characters or weapons, most of the visual effects I have now, animals, secrets and much more. Some things like the console versions or high res interface only became possible when the following happened.
One year after starting working on Colt Canyon I got the opportunity to show my game at the German Dev Days in Frankfurt. I didn’t expect it to become such an important event, but this was where I first met someone from Headup, the guys who are now helping me with publishing the game. At first I didn’t even plan on getting a publisher, I released all of my games on my own before, but I do know that nowadays it is getting more and more difficult to stand out and reach the players. And as a solo developer and student I would never have enough time to do enough promotion next to developing the game.
After a couple chats and meeting with the Headup team I was confident that working with them was the right decision! But this also meant the scope of the game grew even more. The partnership unlocked the opportunity to bring Colt Canyon to consoles, but my current engine didn’t even support console development. I had to port the game to a newer version of GameMaker which was quite some work that I ignored up to this point. Fortunately I had a practical semester that I was able to use to port the game to the new engine version.
And that’s where we are today. The scope for Colt Canyon grew bigger and bigger, but together with a couple great freelancers and my publisher I managed to get it done. Well not quite yet as there is still a couple of things left to do but I am confident that we will manage it just fine. I can’t be happier with what Colt Canyon became over the last years! And I am sure it will become even better in the future.
Stay tuned for more detailed news and more reveals about Colt Canyon in upcoming Dead Man's News!
All the best and stay healthy!
Jonathan
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