The Evolution of Satu Lagi: Shots
Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 03:32PM
Satu Lagi: Shots started years ago. My cousin (Craig) had an apartment and I would go over practically every weekend to drink and hangout. I was commuting to college (one hour each way) and had just finished taking a 2-D graphics class. It was winter break. We were watching television and had this concept which we transformed into a 2-D platforming game. We create characters, back stories, gameplay and the entire plot to this game. Without giving away much of the story of that game (which I still hope to make) one of the side characters was somebody named Satu Lagi (Malay for "one more"). We decided early one that Satu Lagi was a heavy drinker. In the game, Satu Lagi had a mini-game associated with him where he could drink alcohol.
While still in college I was very interested in getting into the gaming industry. I started to program on my Motorola Razr. The first game I created was called "Drinkmaster: A Satu Lagi Story". It was a 2-D game with Satu Lagi sitting at a bar and mugs of beer being slid down to him and he had to grab them and drink them. The more beers he would have the more he would start tilting on the stool to one side or another and you had to press buttons to sit him upright again. It was simple and there wasn't much game involved in it.
Last year I started fooling around with the idea of making an iPhone game. My first idea was to take my previous game and port it to the iPhone. However I knew that I wanted to make changes to make it more interesting and I wanted to make as little art as possible. I changed the concept to a shot glass sliding on the bar top and having to catch falling drops of alcohol. I did this because making circles and making a shot glass didn't seem like much of a challenge. I also had the idea of using the tilt features of the iPhone to control the shotglass. The game (like most of my ideas) started simple but quickly ballooned. My original plan was to have a set number of drops and depending on how many the player caught there would be a different ending. I also wanted each drop to represent a different percentage of alcohol. That idea quickly changed to multiple characters. I figured that if I wanted to charge any amount for it I needed a certain level of content. I settled on 4 selectable characters all from the same original game that Satu Lagi was from.
It was around the time where I needed the art for the endings that I started to realize my problem, I wasn't that great of an artist. Sure I could draw an interesting picture or two, but when it came to consistent art I was in trouble. I was also playing a lot of Drop7 at the time. So my idea changed into a never ending high score type of game. I thought I was making less work for myself. I realized now I needed to make sure that my program could save states if the iPhone got a call or the player "HOME"d out. I also need high scores, most likely global high scores, but I could settle on local ones. My other issue is that when I'm thinking of a game I get a dozen other ideas and write those down. Occasionally I'll get an idea that I start running with and lose focus on the other one. I also was getting annoyed with updating my Mac programming environment every time my phone updated.
It was right around this time that Unity3D Indie went free. I was very excited because I had messed around with the 30 day trial, but couldn't afford the whole program. After downloading it I wanted to use it. But that also had it's own issues, mostly involving how can I possibly make any money? I decided to shelve that until it was necessary. To me "Satu Lagi: Shots" was not a game I wanted to charge for. It was meant to be my first game, something to prove to myself that I could do it.
Developing on Unity3D was a breeze. The amount of tutorials and the community behind it are all amazing. I got a version of "Satu Lagi: Shots" up and running in a day or two. My first hurdle was what to do about the shot glass. On the iPhone I had created a generic shot glass that filled with a brownish liquid regardless of the color of the drop. On Unity I was using 3-D models for everything and the 2-D shot glass art looked out of place. I downloaded Blender hoping to use that, but wasn't in the mood to learn another program. I wanted results. I went online and looked for free 3-D models and found a lot, but not what I was looking for. One of the issues I had on the iPhone was that I wanted to create bonuses for drinking shots of a specific color combination, but since you couldn't see what was in the shot it was difficult. I thought about putting a stylized shot glass on the screen, but it would take up too much space. However because I had to start over I could create from the ground up a shot glass that shows the contents correctly. The shot glass in the game is a tall cube with a gradient texture that you can see through and a cylinder for a base. The drops in the glass are all cylinders who's materials change depending on what is in the glass.
One of the largest hurdles I had was what to put in the background of the game. My original idea was to draw the background of a bar. However with all the 3-D objects that now populated my game it didn't fit. I tried downloading some free bottles and mugs from a forum online but didn't end up using them because they all looked out of place. I added the Single Malt VS poster and decided to just populate the back with posters. Instead of doing an "Instructions" section I posted them on the back. The "Cheng is a bitch" part is an old inside joke from high school. I would explain it, but it turns out the origin of that phrase isn't nearly as funny as it should be. Just know that it isn't a malicious statement, it's a statement of love.
I went back and forth on the name of the game, it was either "The Single Malt: Shots" or "Satu Lagi: Shots". I went with "Satu Lagi" because it sounds better.