Launching Pad blog
Fashion Star Postmortem
This is a blog about how I came to develop a game about dressing up in different outfits, and how it consumed 12 months of my life. Read all about what went well, what went terribly, and everything I learned from the experience!
It still seems strange to think that I spent a year of my life developing a video game based around dressing people up in clothes and assembling photo shoots. But life can be funny like that. So how did this all come about? Read on to find out…
First, a little bit about me. I’m an English Lit graduate in Wellington, New Zealand, and have spent the last few years as the editor of NZGamer.com, alongside other publications and projects.
But off and on over the past 15 years or so, I’ve been tinkering with game development in the background. A friend and I spent all of our university years, for example, designing a role playing game that will probably never see the light of day. Of course, that’s a typical situation for so many gamers – it’s easy to conjure up ideas and scenarios, and spend ages building up complicated back stories and genealogies for titles that eventually get left by the wayside. As so many people say in this industry, ideas are cheap – but turning them into a reality is extremely hard.
So in the background of other activities, I would come up with ideas, and begin making them in Multimedia Fusion, a game maker-type program that lets users more easily create 2D games and applications. I should say at this point that I’m not a coder – I grew up with this line of products, and they’re all I knew for a very long time. You’ll hear more about the challenges and limitations this caused later on! But suffice to say, I had never finished a game in my life, and it didn’t look like that would change any time soon.
How it all started
In December 2006, however, I had a conversation with my brother’s partner Janina. She was playing around on my DS (shoving certain games into the hands of non-gamers is a hobby of mine), and casually remarked that she’d love to play a game where she could dress herself up.
This lit up a lightbulb above my head. Had I finally found an idea I could be confident enough in to fully pursue? I set about investigating various casual game sites, to see if this kind of idea had already been done. But all I found, for the most part, were clothing-related time management games, which weren’t the same thing at all. So I wrote up a little design document, and gave it to Janina and my friend Lisa (who has a fashion degree!) for their thoughts.
The key idea we had was that the outfits you created would be judged by characters within the game. This would be clearly based on a person or group’s own biases, so we could avoid players getting resentful towards the game – it’s obvious the stereotypical goths didn’t like your preppy outfit, for example, because they favoured black and…well, that’s about it.
In early January 07, I had resolved to actually do this thing. It helped that the idea had originated elsewhere, and that the girls thought it was a goer – as people around me know, I can find it pretty hard to maintain confidence in my own ideas. In this case, it was easy to grab as much blind faith as I could and run with it.
Pretending to have a plan
There were several immediate obstacles in the way. I knew I had to commit some money to this – developer graphics weren’t going to cut it. I also wanted to get a publisher on board, if possible – not only would their support help me get through, but the game itself could probably be built on a slightly larger scale. Oh, and I also had very little money around then, and had a nagging feeling that I should give all this up and get a real job.
So here’s the plan I made, and what I did to try and make a good impression with whatever publishers I could find:
1. Several months were spent building a prototype/demo to show off. I knew that the more I could actually implement into this, the better – it’s far easier to write a design document than to actually create what you’re talking about. With this in mind, I made rough versions of the character creator and wardrobe parts of the game, so you could try dressing models up in various outfits.
2. Having said that, I still made that design document. In this case, I wanted to show that I knew precisely where I was taking the game, so having a textual map plotted out helped display that I knew what I was doing. As it turned out, I had no idea whatsoever what I was doing, but more on that later.
3. I knew I needed an artist to draw some initial graphics, and therefore needed to spend a bit of money to get this going. It was probably the most important move I made here – proper graphics gave the demo a much more polished feel, and probably sealed the deal.
4. Finally, I grabbed the launchingpadgames.com domain name and had web developer genius Shaun Hunter create a good-looking splash page for the game, where I could direct any publishers who were good enough to reply to my emails. It’s all about the smoke and mirrors!
From January through to late March, the demo actually came together without too much fuss. As far as I can remember, the title ‘Fashion Star’ – which caused part of me to shudder for months afterwards – simply came after playing too much SingStar. It was meant to be a working title that poked fun at what I was doing, but then it stuck, as these things do.
The biggest stroke of luck I could never have hoped for was finding Vin Rowe (www.vinsdojo.com) to do my graphics. Things would have been a lot worse if Vin hadn’t come along – up to this point, the best offer I had was an ex-Disney artist charging $500 for a single concept sketch. Vin was an amazing combination of great value, great talent, and – perhaps most importantly – a really good work ethic. That last one can’t be stressed enough – when you’re dealing with someone you’ve never met on the other side of the world, there are all sorts of things that can go wrong. Thankfully, things never did, because Vin rocked. To this day, I’m extremely sorry I made him create graphics for over 300 items of clothing – surely that can be defined as cruel and unusual punishment.
The publisher
So by the end of March, things had come together for my sales pitch. I found as many casual game publishers as I could, and sent off hopeful emails inviting them to check the game out.
Only one replied.
It’s lucky they were interested, then. The publisher was Oberon Media, and after talking to my soon-to-be producer Gabe Carter over in Seattle, it turned out they were on the lookout for aspiring casual developers to help out.
We had a couple of conversations over the phone, where there was one moment that simply oozed foreshadowing. Gabe said he couldn’t quite see how the actual game part of Fashion Star was going to play out. I thought I did, and reassured him about this, but the lack of clear planning would come back to bite me.
Other than that, things went smoothly – a contract was (eventually) in place, and away we went. Through the rest of the development process, it was great having Gabe there as a producer. The advice he offered, and the knowledge he brought to the table – not to mention the beta testing resources available through Oberon – ensured that this game would be better than if I had gone through with it alone.
I also got Janina and Lisa on board, and the game really belongs to them. Knowing nothing about fashion (and refusing to learn), I would have been screwed without their input. They made sketches of all the clothing items in the game, made sure the final products looked right, and helped create all the necessary opinion data that the game is built on.
Design woes
Through the rest of the year, things developed more slowly than I thought they would. By around July or August, it became clear that I really hadn’t thought things through nearly as much as I should have done. While the character creator and wardrobe modes were locked down, coming up with a solid, clear idea of the game around them was proving hard. Initially, there wasn’t actually much of a focus on the gameplay – the big focus was the dressing up. But it became clear that the outfit modes could only be the facilitators to something bigger.
So we came up with something bigger. Too big, as it turned out.
Without going into too many specifics, the game design changed into a pseudo-adventure game, where you guided your character through high school, university, and into the workforce. Along the way were various social groups (jocks, artists, etc) who you could become friends (or enemies) with. These groups would in turn invite you to various events, where you were judged based on what you wore. By the end of the game, you would have carved out your own path, and would be offered one of several jobs depending on the choices you made.
This was a huge idea – far, far too huge for one man to develop in the space of about three months. Levels couldn’t be tweaked and repeated to add more content – there had to be reams of unique dialogue at every stage, alongside a lot of graphical content.
This was probably the low point of the development period – I was hitting my head against a brick wall every day of the week. I got little done, but was too inexperienced in game design to step back and assess what needed changing – and mistakenly believed that I couldn’t change things.
A change of direction
All this came to a head in September of 07. I had just given a guest lecture at university, and was having a talk with Janina on the way home. We talked about the game, and the major thing we found was that it just wasn’t any fun. Too much focus was being placed on a terrible adventure game, and not enough on what people would actually want to do – namely, dress up in different outfits.
What followed was a resolve to change things up – and the girls came up with a much better idea for how the game should play out. In this new version, you play a fashion stylist (I still don’t know what that is, but the girls assure me it’s fine) who must assemble models, dress them up in outfits, and take photos – all based on the whims of several magazine editors. If they judged your collection was good enough, they’d feature you in their magazine – and you’d get paid.
Suddenly things came together. I talked it over with Gabe, and we went full steam ahead. The next couple of months leading up to Christmas were frantic, but at least things were getting done. Levels could now be made without having to write a lot of custom dialogue or get in new graphics. And it put the focus squarely back on different outfits – there was actually some fun in there again.
I really wanted the game to be out before Christmas, but that didn’t happen. We rushed the game into beta, and unsurprisingly users found a lot of bugs. Unfortunately, Gabe’s wife played the game over the holiday break, giving him little escape from it. Poor guy – we were both getting pretty sick of Fashion Star by this stage, and just wanted it done.
Bug hunting really filled up January and even February, when the game finally started getting sent to various casual game portal sites. However, it was here where we encountered the biggest problem with using a tool like Multimedia Fusion. Portal sites ‘wrap’ the game in a program that dictates whether you’re playing the trial version or the full thing – you pay them the asking price, and this wrapper is lifted. However, Multimedia Fusion didn’t like this, and a lot of the wrapping programs just refused to cooperate. We eventually got the game working with most places, but it was a pretty soul destroying process. I do want to take a moment to thank the guys at Clickteam (the makers of MMF) – they did their best to help out, and the game would have been in far fewer places without their advice.
After the release
By the time the game came out, I just wanted to forget about it. I could see all sorts of flaws with the final product, and knew it would have needed a total remake to get it up to a standard I would have actually been happy with. I really believe there was a good, fun game in there – it just didn’t live up to what it could have been.
With that in mind, I wasn’t surprised when the game didn’t sell very well in the first few months. I was just glad it was over. The whole experience taught me a heck of a lot about designing and finishing a game. I’m still very glad I saw it through – the things I learned are invaluable, albeit mostly of the ‘what not to do’ variety.
Still, it made me very cautious, and proper game development took a back seat for a while. Then I met Tim, and we eventually got our act together and get a proper website set up at launchingpadgames.com. It’s great actually working alongside someone else – one thing I found working on Fashion Star for 12 months was that it made me feel so isolated. Having someone else there to egg you on is invaluable.
As I said, there’s a lot I learned from Fashion Star. Maybe all this stuff is obvious to other people, but having the following things rammed forcefully into my brain will serve me well for future projects:
1. Plan everything out – and then plan some more. Obviously there’s so much you can’t plan, and it’s hard to correctly predict what will and won’t be fun. But it’s so, so essential to do as much as you can.
2. Content creation is a bitch, and too easy to forget about. Later on in development, I was suddenly up to a stage I had never reached before – moving past creating the engine, and actually making all the levels in the game. It was a weird shock, and I don’t think I had sufficient energy to do this process justice at all.
3. Finishing a game is really long, hard, and tedious. If you’re a developer, you’ll have heard the cliché that the last 10% takes 90% of the time. Well hey, turns out it’s true. All the bug hunting and tweaking, and wrapping up all the myriad little tasks you were planning on doing ‘later’, are drawn out affairs, and shouldn’t be underestimated.
This story does have a nice ending, at least. Around mid-September 08, I checked my bank account and found a lot of money there. Fashion Star had released a couple of months late on Big Fish Games (unsurprisingly because of wrapping issues), thanks to the persistence of Gabe. It seemed to sink without a trace, so I put it out of my mind.
But it seems it did okay – certainly very far from brilliant, but a fair number of people liked it enough to buy the game. It was a wonderful surprise – I never expected to see a dime from this thing after it fell off the radar at all the portal sites.
Through this whole saga – which really felt like a 12-month crash course in game design and development – I was lucky to have the support of some really awesome friends and colleagues. I simply couldn’t have done this without the help of Janina, Lisa, Vin, and Gabe. And to all my friends who soon stopped laughing at me for making a game about fashion: cheers guys, you kept me sane. Well, saner than I would otherwise have been.
Also a big thanks to my brother’s band Mercury Crowe, who provided the music for the game. Go check out their website and listen to their music!
If you’re an aspiring indie developer who – like me – feels completely uncertain just how to fit into this industry, I hope you found this vaguely helpful. I’m not sure how encouraging it is, but simply getting a product out there into the wide world is a stupidly cool thing to pull off. If you don’t mind a lot of stress and poverty, I heartily recommend it.
Next step: making a living off of this crazy enterprise.
