Hell of a Birthday Dev-log

Thank you so much for joining the Patreon. Hope you enjoy looking behind the veil of MyGrandfather Games and going oh god what a mess this place is! For my first post I thought it would be fun to dive deep into Hell of a Birthday, my newest Game!

Fair warning there are spoilers about Hell of a Birthday in the post below so I would recommend playing it first.

What is Hell of a Birthday

Hell of a Birthday is a comedic horror game about a derpy loser who is celebrating his birthday that nobody is coming to. As he’s getting ready for the party a bunch of strange things start happening in his house until finally a magician shows up and starts harassing him. There’s nothing the player can do to fight back against his magic… or is there?

How’d Development Went

Hell of a Birthday originally started out as a small idea that I thought would be fun to make into a 10 minute mini game and maybe later on I could publish it in something like an anthology of smaller games. I remember even messaging my friend and saying alright I’m going to try and make a full game in 48 hours… I was definitely wrong.

The original idea that I thought would be funny is to have a magician show up and start bullying the player by using magic and the player wouldn’t be able to do anything to fight back. Then to give it context I decided maybe someone hired the magician to harass the player and slowly it became the players Birthday.

I knew I wanted the main character to be derpy and a bit of a loser and that’s how the stuffed animals became a thing as he needed someone to come to his party. Which is crazy to think of because the stuffed animal fight I feel like has become the center point of the game and took a ton of time to animate but I think it came out well.

It was fun to weave more elements to the game as development went on. I think that’s the blessing of a longer development time is I can have the idea roll around in my head more and come up with unique stuff that fits well.

Brad is a good example. I added him randomly near the end of development to the dialogue with Mikey Dean when he comes to take your present back. Then later I needed the player to do something while microwaving so I decided to add him prank phone call the player as Britnay Anime. Lastly he shows up at the end of the game during the surprise party. 

Overall I think this is definitely the most solid game I made. I feel like all the elements connect really well and while still wacky and goofy there weren't many things that felt disconnected from the rest of the game.

What’s New

Fully Voiced Characters

This is the first game that I decided to fully voice-act the main characters. I wanted to do it because I wanted there to be action happening while characters were still talking. Plus some of the jokes would have landed differently if it was just a text box.

There are a few issues I have with the characters being fully voice-acted. The first one is I can only do so many voices. While it works for Hell of a Birthday it might not in games with more characters. The obvious solution is to get more people to do voices. I could do that but I’m worried it would add to development time and while I’m working on it, it’s hard to express what exactly I want in a voice to someone else. 

The second issue is it’s a bigger barrier for non-English speakers. For my first two games I had lots of international people playing my game, many who were not native English speakers. For text it’s a little easier for them to translate and also the game pauses until they’re ready to continue. I watch many streamers translate for their audience while playing but with Hell of a Birthday it may be a lot harder if they have to translate while the characters are also talking out loud.

I’m curious what people think about this subject. If you have an opinion please leave it in the comments.

Quick Time Events

I made a Quick Time Event system to the game to make the animal fight scene more interactive and engaging. I think I did succeed with this. However, I didn’t make it the same way as Quick Time Events Traditionally are. 

I didn’t slow down time. This was because I wanted the fight to be an action pact and be on beat with the music. I thought it would have been strange to be high energy and pause basically every second or two.

You can’t lose. I wanted it to be almost more of a rhythm game section than a section where I wanted to punish the player for losing. The only effect on the game is your score changes the dialogue you have with the magician right after. Which is nice because I now know how to do that and can expand on that in future games.

Script Optimization

This is definitely the biggest improvement I made and it’ll mostly go unnoticed by the players but I improved on many of the scripts I used. I made a lot more of the scripts universal and reusable. This means for stuff like item interactions I can now quickly set it up and flip a few values around to get what I want. I also swapped doors from using animations to be controlled by a script. 

The biggest benefit to all this is it speeds up future development on all my games allowing me to make more.

Used Premade Level

I used a premade map for this game. I did modify things as I went along but I’m sure some people may have recognized the level from other games. I wanted to see what it would be like to work in the confines of someone else’s creation and because the game was meant to be made quickly it would cut down development time. 

While the map itself was nicely decorated and made the house feel lived in there were some annoyances like doorways being a little small. 

The level worked well for this game because I just needed an area for the player to walk around in but I could see in future games it might become more of a headache then its worth if I needed to heavily modify it to fit my needs.

I’m afraid it might come off as being cheap or lazy if people recognize the level and go oh this guy didn’t actually make any of this.

I honestly am curious about peoples opinion on this. 

Mini Improvements

• Learned how to use variables to affect dialogue branches.

• Made NPC head track the players.

• Played with environment lighting a bit.

Questions For You?

What did you think of the voice acting in the game? Did you like it? Do you want future games to have more voice acting or keep it limited to something more like Invasion of The Halloween Fiends.

What do you think about using pre-made levels? Do you think it’s good because it speeds up development time or do you think it takes away more from the game than it’s worth and should be avoided in the future.

Thanks For Following MyGrandfather Games