NeonBlue is made up of two professional software developers, Evan and Luke. In addition to our coding skills, Evan has marketing and graphics design skills while Luke (me) has hardware and networking skills. I mention this so you know that before Finger Puppet Frenzy, we’ve had no game making experience at all but do have some of the required skills.

Over the past 6 months we have played with the idea of creating a game. We both love playing games and, like many others, are always coming up with “million dollar” game ideas. We figured we have most of the basic skills required to make a game. As you may guess, we didn’t have a clue what we were getting into.

We decided to start small. So the idea of a massively multiplayer game where the world changes as the players interact with it was where we started. The idea was mainly born from the software we chose to use, Unity3D. With it, we could make a 3rd person game, add a networking plugin and we would be finished. Just add some levels and story – right?

Guess what? That didn’t work out to plan. We were still learning how to use Unity and although we had networking experience, this was a whole new ball game. The idea was soon abandon.

We reevaluated our skill set and newly acquired Unity experience and decided on a simple dragon game. In this game you would be a dragon (3rd person in a 3D world) and you’d be matched with another player where you would battle it out in the skies. There would be upgrades and unlockable skin colours and types to change between and it will be awesome.

Dammit. Our lack of networking skills got in the way again. Ok, fine. It was still a dragon game (as we had already bought some dragon assets) but it was now single player.

In this game you were a baby dragon and your mum was stolen. As you progress through the level you would start to unlock new abilities. So in the first level you can only jump-glide a short distance and eat chickens. By the end you could fly around, blow fire balls and destroy castles.

This was a game we could make! We got to it. Level designs, buying assets, making character controllers, adding sounds. A month passed and we hadn’t really gotten anywhere and what’s more, we were losing our passion.

In steps RageSpline. I saw the RageCube game, read up about RageSpline, bought the plugin and started messing around with it. Within an hour or so I had some cute little characters made and the idea for a game formed.

I was tired of making the mistake of biting off more than we could chew (we did this for more than just games). So this game idea was super simple. It’s a kids game where little characters poke in and out of all sides of the screen and all you had to do was tap them. By the end of that night we had it fully working. You could tap the little guys and they would turn a different color and a particle effect would happen.

This was a fun little game but got boring pretty quickly as there was no goal. We decided that there was potential but it needed some work to change it from what it was to a complete game.

We estimated 3 weeks. It took us almost 4 months to create.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting about those 4 months and how we got to our completed game, Finger Puppet Frenzy. Stay tuned.