home // text // multi-media // misc // info

[ video-games internets ]

Skrud or Pizza?

PREMISE 1
My friend Skrud is awesome.

Now, a few weekends ago, I had a group of friends over to play video games, board games, and have some beers. The crew had mostly gathered except for my aforementioned friend Skrud, and it was at that point that I decided to order some pizza. Some time later, the doorbell rang, to which one of my friends reacted:

“Is that Skrud or pizza?”

Several guffaws and handshakes later, we agreed that this question would be probably the best thing to happen to games since “Tic-Tac-Punch in the nuts” was rewritten in its more contemporary incarnation.

Time passed.

Then last week, it occurred to me that Manmas was just around the corner (I’m non-orthodox and celebrating tonight). Knowing that Skrud would be in attendance and proceeding from Premise 1, I decided to make the game in the space of a week. Yet another opportunity to play around with Unity (huzzah for iTweens and Coroutines).

Once again, this is a complete bloody mess—the idea being to gather up to four willing/drunk competitors to survive an assault on the senses and morals, and identify whether a rapidly-progressing series of images is either Skrud or Pizza. If this doesn’t sound like a grand ol’ time to you, clearly you’ve never taken part in a clinical study for compensation of up to $27.

As per my methods:

The Good

  • Hahahahahahaha

The Bad

  • Not enough user testing from the start.
  • It was done in a week, but even then I think I took too long.

The Ugly

  • My code. It’s a ball of delicious spaghetti. Learning new possibilities in Unity as I went along meant I often ripped apart or hacked open segments of code to fit the new bit. More design from the start == good idea.
  • The game itself. I often aimed for higher production values, but time constraints made me abandon some ideas (e.g., a doorbell ringing and a door that opens every time one is presented with an image). In this case though, I think “thrown together with disdain and held together with duct tape and disdain” is an appropriate stylistic choice.

Maybe it’s a party game. Maybe it’s terrible (definitely).

Whatever it is, it’s either Skrud or Pizza.

x