I personly don’t play a lot of clicker games, but when one of my good friends got me a little game called “Forbidden Clicker Party” from this small indie team named OneShark, I was hooked. This has to be one of the best clicker games out there and I mean it. The great presentation to the addicting gameplay it’s a blast to play and cheap too. In any case, I was able to contact one of the developers named Logan via the team’s Discord server to conduct a short interview…
Gumshoe: What made you want to make video games?
Logan: I made video games on paper my whole life. As a kid, I first played Final Fantasy 1 on NES and was very much attached to it. I liked to know how all the intricate parts worked and imagine how it would be built if I were to do it. So that game pretty much lit the fire for me.
Gumshoe: How would you describe the process of making a game?
Logan: The OneShark way is pretty unique. Here’s how we do it… Designer + Artist + Coders talk about projects that make us excited and have an “anything goes” brainstorm and start to figure out the grand picture of it. From there, the first prototyping takes place with single characters and simple stats to try and see if we found any fun mechanics. This part can go back and forth for awhile as the ideas in our heads don’t always translate perfectly to the game. Once we do have the fun mechanic and theme down, we go and apply what we call our “Game Template” this is all of the base scripts for our tools and everything we’ve generated along the way from creating multiple games. This template gives us basic functionality for Saving, Audio, Animation, Character Controlling, Text/numeric formatting of all kinds, etc. So the rest of the process is basically week sprints where we add features+content in bite-sized chunks and test them out. We develop very rapidly so there is little downtime in our process. Each member of the team is going full speed from day 1 of the project. We love the team and the stride that we have going here!
Gumshoe: There’s a good number of games One Shark has made, what would you say is or was your favorite to work on?
Logan: Always the latest game is our favorite because I learn so much from the last project that the code is kind of “out-of-date” to me. I would say the strongest built game so far is certainly The Terrible Beast from the East. With a Skill Tree, Multiplayer, Crafting, and so many unique features – it is the biggest and best effort we have ever put into something. We are happy to finally be working on multiplayer projects and have people who can play along the way with us.
Gumshoe: On that note, you are now working a new game titled “The Terrible Beast from the East”, a 2D Side Scroller MMORPG. How would you describe the development of that game?
Logan: We originally were aiming to take a multiplayer approach to a successful past game Chicken Assassin. So we did that and we started to test out with players and it seemed like the action was dull after awhile. So we wanted to try going a bit further and introduced running in the dungeon environments and then it started to get fun. We then began to see ourselves as a dungeon crawler and decided to aim higher for this game. Now we have players putting countless hours into it and exposure is starting to build. The development was completely gutted after that first round so we lost a lot of time, maybe 4 months of work that we just stripped away and rewrote. If you know our team, that means we could have built 2 more fun minigames in that time. So we weren’t happy about that but in the end, the process and discovery was important. So we are coming up on a year of work with this game and it’s glowing. We are very happy with our process now that we know exactly what we’re doing and where we are headed.
Gumshoe: What are some of the difficulties or challenges would you say comes with making a game?
Logan: The biggest difficulty is all of the Unfun that creeps into a project or team. Example: Starting an LLC, getting the bank acct set up, trying to write + return invoices, tracking it for taxes. Other than that, it’s the best career in the world if you can make enough money at it to be stable!
Gumshoe: Lastly, do you have any advice you could give to other indie devs?
Logan: Find a team of people who have similar ideals, values and most importantly work ethic. Don’t worry about skills as much as personality because by the end everyone wears many hats. Friendship and respect will build more than genius will.
Overall Logan and Oneshark are making some amazing games and there is even a mobile port of Forbidden Clicker Party in development! If you want to keep up to date with Oneshark I recommend joining their Discord and following them on Twitter. There is also a link to their next project “Terrible beast from the East” which is still in development and playable! They update frequently and have a great community of players all on their discord. With that said, my name is Gumshoe and thanks for reading.
Terrible Beast from the East: https://oneshark.itch.io/terriblebeastonline
Forbidden Clicker Party (Steam): http://store.steampowered.com/app/783200/Forbidden_Clicker_Party/
Oneshark Website: http://oneshark.com
Oneshark Discord: https://discord.gg/T48a2Y5
Oneshark Twitter: https://twitter.com/onesharkcom
Awesome interview! The advice about finding a team with similar ideals is vital. I had to re-hire a whole team because of no-one believing in the project just because they don’t like point and click… now I have a team that lovery the genre and we are doing an awesome job with our game.
That’s wonderful! I hope the development goes smoothly!
Jan – I hear you. It’s very rare to assemble a team that is all pulling in the same direction. Sometimes you have to “compensate” those who didn’t choose the direction by letting them take the reigns on some important features. We do a lot to keep all of us engaged 🙂