In hindsight, what was the hardest part of Wawa’s development? Did the majority of the work come up front with programming, user interface design, etc., or did you spend way more time in the polishing and bug squashing phase than you thought you would when you started out?
Wawa was really a huge work! I spent more than 12 hours per day over 15 months to make it. And it is not finished yet! The hard part was almost everything — I had to write the platformer engine from scratch, and Wawa Land includes a lot of different levels, characters and features that all have different physics and behaviors. The three most complicated things were the wall jump, which gave me headaches for months; the artificial intelligence system of certain critters; and the water physics, which were not originally planned to be present at the release of the game. I can’t say whether I spent more time on the core programming or on the polishing phase, because all of this came together in the development process.
The thing is that the game was ready to be released a year ago, with a complete level and almost the same technical quality as nowadays. But I didn’t want to release a game that would have great gameplay for only one level and then just copy-paste the same features in 60 levels… As a player, I am quite bored with this kind of “false gameplay.” That’s why it took me a lot of time, because there is a minimum of one new thing per level on Wawa. And the debugging was quite a big thing too, but thanks to my girlfriend and my nerd friends, I had a lot of great feedback!
How did beta testing go? Did players pick up on issues or make gameplay suggestions you might not have seen otherwise?
It was really important, and showed me a lot of small boring things that are now removed. The players enjoyed Wawa as far as I could see, and they had a lot of suggestions! Some of them are already in the game and some others will be added with updates. The majority of their ideas, as most of mine, were just too big to be added to Wawa Land! But we’ll see about it in the future.
And now that Wawa Land is finally ready for release, what’s next on the Play Fripp agenda?
There is still a lot of work left to do on Wawa. The game includes four hours of gameplay with 16 levels for now, but it will be updated to 12 hours and 48 levels by the end of the year. There are also features to add, like Game Center, a customizable D-pad system, new powers, etc. I will also make an iPad & Mac version of the game. So yeah, I will still be working on Wawa for almost a year I think! But that’s all pleasure! I just can’t wait to see the players’ feedback, and to talk with them to add more great things in the game.
And then, if the game does well on the App Store, I will try to find a way to port it to other platforms like Android or Steam. We’ll talk it over a year from now, and thanks again to everyone for their support of Wawa Land!
Big thanks to Yann for taking the time out to talk with us about Wawa Land! The game is literally on the verge of release and should land on the App Store April 17. Keep an eye on the game’s official site and the Play Fripp blog, Facebook page, and Twitter account for all the latest.