Gearbits Postmortem

It’s been a little over a month since Gearbits launched. And I'm very happy to say that the reception from players has been positive. A small but passionate group of players seems to have found the game. And luckily for me, the release of Armored core 6 brought some new interest towards mecha games. So the amount of players who will discover Gearbits will likely keep increasing.

But I feel like I should clear up, that Gearbits was not an attempt to cash in on the success of Armored core. Gearbits was in development before the first (reliable) rumors of a new Armored core even appeared. It’s undeniable that older Armored core games had and influence on Gearbits but they weren’t the only influence. Some have correctly fingered the Earth defense force series as an inspiration. But there is one more game that only few have managed to point out. Ace combat! There isn’t and obvious overlap, since you don’t pilot planes in my game. But the influence is there. The way the campaign and missions are structured was inspired by Ace combat. Likewise, the way the weapon selection works is more Ace combat than Armored core.

I started working on the game about two years ago. Before then, I had no experience with Unity or much experience with game development in general. Gearbits started as a 3D demo, where I tested importing 3D models and animations to the engine. Then I started looking into adding more features and eventually I had enough pieces to start putting them together into a real game.

I wanted Gearbits to be an arcadey mecha game. A game where you wouldn’t have to rely on, or be restricted by a lock-on system. Where the controls would have some complexity without being so obtuse that a new player couldn’t figure them out in a few minutes. I felt that there weren’t any mecha games that would give the kind of experience I wanted, or if there were, I didn’t know about them. So I set out to make that game myself.

Now, anyone who knows anything about projects like these, knows that the #1 thing you should never ever do, is to make your first game your dream game. I’ve learned a lot in the two years since I started working on the game. I’ve learned about programming, 3D modeling, the Unity editor and much much more. Right now I’d be much better equipped to make ”The dream game”.

If I were to make Gearbits from scratch now, with everything I’ve learned since I started, there would be a lot of things I’d do differently. First of all, the game would be programmed better. I still feel quite ashamed about how there were bugs in the game at launch. Even worse, when I hurried to fix them I ended up making more. This isn’t as much a programming problem, as it is a planning problem. It was dumb of me to still add new features so close to launch. I should have focused on QA more. The game needed a period before launch, where no new features are added and all the effort is spent on testing the game diligently to sniff out any bugs. No matter how tempting the new features may be.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can come up with a lot of criticism for the game design. I’m quite happy with the pace at which the story progresses, but I feel that I could have done better with the mission layout and introducing the gameplay elements.