In Unlocking the Vault, Game Developer editor-in-chief Danielle Riendeau dives into the rich archives of the GDC Vault in order to uncover timeless game development advice, anecdotes, and hard-learned lessons tucked away within the hundreds of talks from decades of GDC shows preserved within the Vault. Every other week, this curated overview will feature key takeaways from a vintage or classic GDC Talk with the goal of helping today’s developers unearth new lessons from the past.
A Short Hike creator Adam Robinson-Yu’s 2020 GDC Virtual talk Crafting a Tiny Open World: A Short Hike Postmortem is one of my all-time favorite videos to show my own game design students. It truly has it all: advice on taking broken dreams and cobbling the pieces into something special, fun design tidbits, cute gifs, and an entire section on production tips for a solo endeavor.
A Short Hike is a small, narrative-driven open world game where the hero, vacationing on a gorgeous mountain, needs to get to the peak to make an important call. Robinson-Yu details the game’s many inspirations, including a previous RPG project, the wide-open wonder of open worlds, as in Breath of the Wild, and the gorgeous colors of the Canadian forest in the fall. He used plenty of handy tools (like Yarn Spinner) and spends a portion of the talk extolling the virtues of working within limitations, which got him towards the game’s colorful, pixelated 3D look.
Then, comes the fun part: Robinson-Yu was able to find finishing funds (for a Humble Original launch) but he had to commit to a 3-month deadline.
Robinson-Yu shows a slide here with the core game scope and “Stretch Goals” for extra features and niceties. Notably, the core game was not treated as just a minimum viable product, they were aiming for “good” here. “It would still be fun and playable if the stretch goals weren’t made, but it kind of allowed me to naturally scale the size of the project to the rate at which work was actually being done.”
He noted that several of those extra features did not make the original release (though some, like secret areas and more tools, items and quests, did)—but “I think the game still worked well without them, and I ended up adding some of those for the later Steam and Itch.io release.”
He was also able to add some of those tasty stretch features in later versions of the game.
Production fun for a team of one
On a slide titled “The Scrum Board You Know and Love (?)” Robinson-Yu extols the virtues of working under tight deadlines and thinking keenly about production process, even as a solo dev.
“I used a simplified version of the scrum process,” he says. “I would usually re-estimate all of my tasks for every week, and also at the beginning of every day. This helped me have a good sense of what features I would have time for and helped me plan ahead.”
“I think it’s tempting to skip this step when you’re working by yourself, but when I started doing this, I found it really useful to keep myself on track.”
The next slide, titled “Deadlines… misunderstood?” brandishes the infamous mug of Majora’s Mask‘s terrifying moon (a universal symbol, at least among my generation, for “deadline”). “I also had an external deadline to hold me accountable on this project,” says Robinson-Yu. “For me, personally, that helped keep me really focused on finishing something rather than trying to make something perfect.”
Robinson-Yu goes into some excellent design tips after this—with one story about a cave that I won’t spoil here, but it’s a banger—and leaves the viewer with some very positive and pure vibes.
Unlocking the key takeaways
In case you want the sparknotes version of the talk—or you’re just outlining some of the major lessons in your notes—don’t worry, I’ve got you!
The key takeaways here are: Lesson #1 Use smart shortcuts, and embrace your limitations. Robinson-Yu re-uses tools and assets from previous projects, and even finds a unique, appealing art style from working within his means on art and animation. Lesson #2 is to embrace smart production methods: even when working solo. Robinson-Yu used what worked about scrum for his own purposes here, and it allowed him to finish a very robust little game in three months.
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