In the Making
GoatPunks started off as a small project. It was suppose to be a game made in six months by one person.
I had never programmed a game before. Prior to this I had made one other application for DSLR cameras, called DSLR.Bot. This was my first attempt at programming, learning as you go. It was a small enough project to get my head wrapped into thinking like a program. I guess after that experience I though it can’t be that hard to make a game.
So I started making ‘Lightning Goats’, this was the first name iteration. I managed to make goats move on screen, success!! It wasn’t as scary as I though it would be to get this done, this was about five lines of code. Then piece by piece I had put together this game, from the weapons then to the AI (artificial intelligence) for the goats. The AI was fairly primitive at first with all the goats using the same numbers. It was okay to play but started to get predictable. I couldn’t find much about how to program AI from google so I had to come up with my own way of doing things. Eventually I created and AI system that is individualised per goat and can be trained to play similar to how their trainers play. Most elements of the game followed the same evolution as this, even the name.
About a year into the game development this thing was now called ‘Goats On Fire’. Best name ever but the domain was not available. Reserved but not in-use. At this stage gameplay was done but all menus still needed to be created. This was probably the hardest part of making the game. I had to learn several other programming languages to get this connected online. I always steered clear of database related stuff. It seemed so complicated and boring. But I had to do it to get things working. So I literally stared at the code for a few days till by brain started picking up patterns and it started to not be so foreign. I guess that’s one way to learn.
After pining over having an elongated domain name like ‘goatsonfiregame.com’, I came up with ‘GoatPunks’, as it seem to fit perfectly the game’s final aesthetic, and ‘goatpunks.com’ is also available. Now the game is complete, after 1 and 3/4 years and a few thousand lines of code Its finished. I would say its pretty much done because there’s nothing left on my list of things to add to the game… except maybe just this one last thing.
Happy Playing.
Alberto.