Why We Made Task Time

Have you ever wondered how and why Task Time came to be? Well, you're in luck! Todays blog, written by Sam Read-Graves the creator of ReadGraves (the studio who developed Task Time), explains just that!

We wanted to play it and it didn't exist:ttgreentriangle:

That sounds like something every developer says before prototyping a farming game with a fishing minigame, but we mean it very literally. Task Time came from one question: “What would WarioWare look like on PC in 2026?”, which morphed into an FPS Mario Party, with Garry's Mod physics and the energy of Taskmaster X Batsu No Gaki, for the audience of Gang Beasts and Fall Guys.

We wanted to make something fast, strange, and competitive, that players recognised but was like nothing else. A game where you are given a task, dropped into a space, and immediately have to work out what is happening before your friends do.

A lot of multiplayer games are about mastery, Task Time is about panicked problem solving. It is about misreading a sentence, picking up the wrong object and accidentally helping your rival.

We wanted the gaps between games to disappear:ttredsphere:

One of the big design goals was killing the turnaround time between tasks.

Most party games have a rhythm: play, wait, load, explain, wait again. That can work brilliantly, but we wanted Task Time to feel more like someone throwing jobs at you faster than you can properly process them.

That speed is important. It means failure doesn't sting for long, because another chance to play is already arriving. You don't have time to sit there and dwell on the fact that you lost by doing something silly. You have to move on and do something else silly somewhere else.

Not knowing what to do is part of the design:ttyellowcylinder:

This is the bit we have had to explain the most, because it breaks a basic design rule: players should understand the objective immediately. Task Time doesn't always want that.

We want you to understand enough to start moving, but not always enough to be certain. The task itself might be simple, but the space, the physics, and the other players will complicate it.

Players work out the logic and strategy mid-solution, offering uh huh moments in every task.

Embrace the jank:ttbluecube:

At some point, maybe 2013 with Gang Beasts, "embrace the jank" stopped being a joke and became a production philosophy. That doesn't mean we don't fix bugs, we fix un-fun bugs.

If an object launches into space, ruins the round, and everyone feels cheated, that's broken.

If an object launches into space, everyone screams, changes plans, and the round somehow becomes better because of it, that is funny.

A perfectly polished version of this game, where every object behaves properly and every player moves gracefully, would be cleaner. It would also be less chaotic and infinitely more expensive.

The comedy lives in the failed throws, the terrible jumps, the desperate last-second grabs, and the body language of someone who knows they are losing and has decided to become everyone else's problem.

So why did we make Task Time?:ttgreentriangle:

Because there was nothing quite like it, and now there is.

See you in the next task,

• Sam :ttbluecube:

Task Time