QuitIt already!: QuitIt Tech Review

The design department was primarily ran by art director, Christopher and Lead Programmer Benjamin Lee. However 2n Productions believes that everyone at the company are considered designers, this results in each member having an opportunity to voice their input and concerns into all aspects of the game.

On the Production side of things Ben managed a majority of the tasks and was assisted by Yas and Herman. Yas primary role was that of designer/writer and Herman mainly handled QA in a lead role.

The art department consisted of Christopher and two additional animators, Boyd and David. Boyd responsibilities lied with the pokers and gifts while David animated Lumpy, the coins, and the signs. In addition each artist worked on the three rooms within the game.

On the audio side, everything was outsourced to SFX engineer (Andrew), and the VO talent, music was then composed and produced by Rama.

Quite a descent size team with a few cross-over jobs, so when asked if any members where poked repeatedly for say… reference material, Ben had this to say;

“It was a requirement that everyone be poked repeatedly. Lumpy considered it a team building exercise.”

We also can’t forget Lumpy, the star of the show, whom after I poked repeatedly to collect my winnings appeared to be made of money, but I was assured by Ben that he wasn’t.

“Hahaha … we think Lumpy is rich as well. And trust us, his Agent keeps telling us that. But in terms of his finances here on Earth, he’s no millionaire. Lumpy’s an ex-child star. So he unfortunately suffered many of the same problems that malign child stars on Earth. When he was in his prime, he certainly was a millionaire. But now? Let’s just say that due to some unfortunate economic events on his home planet, he owes lots of money.”

Once released the real work begins

As any developer worth their salt knows, is that a project is never truly “finished”, especially when there’s a fresh fan base waiting to be entertained, and going forward listening to that fan base is the key to your success since there will always and I mean “always” be room for improvement. If you’re not looking for ways to refine your code or tighten up the memory footprint of your art, there can be many missed opportunities to carry everything to learnt over to your next project. In addition this is not the only thing that a small dev can learn from, there’s a tiny issue of marketing that a small developer needs to get acquainted with and quickly, because no matter how flawless and entertaining a game maybe, if your potential audience is unaware of its existence, the end result is simply just a bunch of 1′s and 0′s.

“The other part we found ourselves scrambling about a bit is the whole “self-publishing/marketing problem.” We’ve worked on a lot of product for other people. Once we were done, marketing was their problem. But now that we’ve gone indie and are on our own, we’re faced with challenges that we don’t have a lot of experience in. We’re hoping Lumpy’s Agent will give us a few pointers…”

In the closing paragraphs I give the floor to Ben to let all of the fans of QuitIt know what’s to be expected in the next weeks and months ahead;

“With version 1.0, what we put out was just the Pilot Episode. We have a bunch more features we will add to the game over the next few months. For example, mini games will be added. Our next update should have at least two.

We’ll also be adding a Happiness Meter into the game in the 3rd Episode. This was a feature left on the cutting room floor. We simply didn’t have time to build the animations, so we cut it. But some of the feedback we’ve gotten from people was that they felt too guilty for making Lumpy feel bad. So we’ll be addressing this soon. It will become possible to make Lumpy happy. Although “happy” in a way where he still may actually want you to Quit It!

A few of the features we have in mind will take a few episodes to be supported properly. Achievements are a great example of that. The game already is recording your pokestats. Future versions will start to show you what your pokestats are and rank you against others.

The Pilot Episode is exactly what it sounds like. We’re using it to introduce Lumpy and the world of QuitIt! to everyone as well as to get feedback on the features they’d like to see. So I’d like to add that we are always happy to hear everyone’s comments. They can always poke on over to our blog or website to let us know what’s on their mind!

The last thing we want to mention here is that we’re trying to do something a little different than other developers out there. With QuitIt!, the entertainment doesn’t stop with the app itself. For example, we’ve created Lumpy, a character with a personality and a whole backstory. We decided to do this early on in development because we wanted to entertain people when they weren’t using the app. Right now, Lumpy’s blog (http://lumpyspad.blogspot.com) is the primary outlet for his character, backstory, and other quirky stories, but hopefully, we can get Lumpy into different kinds of media as a unique brand in the future.”

I would wholeheartedly like to thank Ben and his team at 2n for really taking the time out to conduct this lengthy albeit informative tech review, I believe it’s one of my largest publications to date. So as you can see, even something that may appear simple on the surface can be an illusion to just how much work is really involved.