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In 2013, CGSociety and the Tornado Twins ran a game challenge. Teams had three months to build a game.
We found out about it two months in.
The sensible move was to wait for the next one. We entered anyway, with one month left on the clock, and the game we built in that month won the award for Best Story-sense.
That’s confidence.
Wake Up
The game is called Wake Up. It’s a short first-person shooter, and it opens the way the title promises: you wake up in a hospital bed.
You don’t know who you are, and you don’t know how you got there. Outside your room, things have gone very wrong. All you have is a picture of some people you presume are your family, and the only plan that makes any sense is to find them.
That’s the whole hook. A stranger in a hospital gown, a world in chaos, and a photo of people you can’t remember but can’t stop looking for.
Two People, One Month
The team was two people: me, and the 3D artist Jon Young. I built the game in Unity, and Jon brought the art that gave it its look.
Our secret weapon wasn’t a secret, and it wasn’t clever. It was late nights and coffee. A lot of both.
A month sounds like plenty of time until you list what a game needs. A player who can move and shoot. Enemies that hunt you and react to you. Levels. A story. Menus, sound, and a beginning, middle and end that hang together. Every one of those has to exist, work and feel right, and every one of them is competing for the same thirty days.
Why It Worked
What won it for us, I think, is that everything came together into one cohesive experience, exactly the way we meant it to.
That’s harder than it sounds, and rarer than it should be in a game challenge. With a deadline breathing down your neck, it’s tempting to build the cool parts first and tape a story on at the end. You end up with a pile of mechanics wearing a plot like a costume.
We went the other way. The amnesia, the hospital, the chaos and the photo were the idea, and the setting, the look and the play all pointed in the same direction. Nothing in the game was there just because we had time to add it. We didn’t have time to add anything.
I’ve always liked that the award was for story sense. It wasn’t for the most features or the flashiest graphics. It was for making something that felt like it meant something.
After the Challenge
I didn’t want to stop when the contest did. Afterward, I kept working on the game’s core systems and built Corey’s AI Training Ground, a more polished demo of what was going on under the hood. You can also watch Wake Up itself.
What I Took From It
Scope is a story decision. The fastest way to finish in a month is to know exactly what experience you’re building and to cut everything that doesn’t serve it. When the idea is clear, the cuts make themselves.
A good partner multiplies everything. Two people who agree on what they’re making can move astonishingly fast.
And coffee is a legitimate engineering tool. I won’t be taking questions on this.
Thanks again to Jon Young. One month, one game, one award, and a lot of very late nights.