Game development is hard. If you choose this path, be prepared for your project to haunt you day and night. It takes a lot of discipline to stay on track and consumes an enormous amount of time. I’m not someone who makes a lot of plans. I usually just dive in and see where it takes me. In the case of my game called PROBABLY ART, this approach proved to be my downfall.

I had visions of creating an extraordinary game with a mystical atmosphere and a story that unfolds without any dialogue. The playtime was supposed to be about two hours, and my digital paintings would be on full display without hindering the narrative. I had big ambitions.

The visuals came together relatively quickly. My goal was to bring the style I use in my digital paintings into the game. They were intentionally cute to contrast with a darker storyline.

The Story: A Depressed Rabbit

The story stuck with me the most throughout the day, making it hard to switch off. In the game, I wanted to tell the story of a depressed character in a rabbit costume. I deliberately didn’t give “the rabbit” a name so players could more easily project themselves onto the main character. The rabbit’s past is explored in an abstract way, with time jumps between childhood and the present. It’s about home, which can be a place of comfort or a cage you’re too scared to leave, preventing you from having new experiences. That’s a small fragment of the story and how it begins. Themes of self-love and self-hatred were supposed to play major roles in the story. Everything was meant to be told ambiguously, leaving room for player interpretation.

The Ninety-Ninety Rule

Creating the visual aspects of the game was relatively easy compared to the rest. The Ninety-Ninety Rule kept popping into my head: “The first 90% of the project takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the remaining 90%.” The first 90% was the fun part — the game was almost playable, and the music was done. But everything you don’t see — the last 10% — like bug fixes, game logic, and so on, took as long as the first 90%. All the background work that a game needs overwhelmed me. And, honestly, it was sometimes boring. Days would pass before I could fix a tiny bug. But I learned a lot, and after four months, I had my first prototype. As I mentioned in previous blog posts, the project was still called “Mom Said I’m Special” at that point.

The whole style, with the old Windows desktop look, was meant to evoke nostalgia and childhood memories. As mentioned, the game often switches between past and present. You can also tell what time period you’re in by the color of the rabbit. As the game progresses, there will be more flashbacks, making the time jumps more understandable. I created the music in Ableton, but I’ll save that for another blog post.

You can probably imagine how hard it was for me to abandon the project prematurely. Four months of work for 5 minutes of gameplay. Completing the game would have taken me another 2 years. If I’m honest, I was already at my wit’s end by that point, but I didn’t want to give up entirely. So, I decided to think a bit smaller, and thus the idea for my new project, PROBABLY ART, was born.

Stay tuned for the next blog post to find out what happens next.