Grave Danger

Heads Up!

There’s a YouTube video for this project! Rather than repeat the same parts of the story, the rest of this article will focus more on my personal experience.

I watch a lot of YouTube videos… and one YouTuber I particularly like is Jack Sather. His videos are (largely) focused on his thoughts and feelings towards different games. While there are many creators in this space, I find Jack’s personality and editing style to be pretty distinct.

As I was working on a project, I decided to pull up YouTube (as I often do) and saw he had posted a new video about trying his hand at game development in Unreal. During the intro he talked about his dream of creating his own games and displayed an email address for anyone who wanted to try working with him.

# It’d been a minute since I worked with someone else

Many of the game projects I have worked on over the past couple years involved at least a couple of my friends. Working with other people provided me with a sense of structure, accountability, and a sounding board for ideas.

The sense of comradery when your working on a project is something that I feel often gets overlooked. Being able to share ideas, celebrate wins, and not endure the struggles alone goes a long way in being successful.

At the time all the people I had previously been working with were busy with other projects and I was beginning to miss the feeling of working as a team. Seeing Jack’s video and his offer to collaborate on something sounded really appealing, so I sent an email.

# I didn’t hear back (the first time)

Unsurprisingly, there was the the initial feeling of did I say the wrong thing? when I didn’t hear anything back after a couple weeks. Until I looked at the view count on the video and saw it passing the 800k threshold…

“Okay”, I thought, “he’s probably got a few thousand emails to go through.”

Around a month later, there was no response… but there was a new video. This time Jack is trying his hand at Godot.

A few minutes in and he brings up the email address from the previous video. As I had predicted, he got a lot more emails than he was expecting. After watching the rest, I decided to quickly send another email before a new flood of responses poured in.

He responded within minutes.

# You got like 15 minutes to chat?

A few minutes later – we’re on a Discord call and going through the initial introductions. Crossing the four hour mark, I began to feel confident that we were both clicking with several shared ideas and interests.

Over the next week we’d have several more conversations before we decided to try tackling a project together. He already had the bones to one idea that he shared in his first Godot video, but expressed an interest in taking a different approach. This new approach was inspired by an old Flash game from the Madness Series.

# We got to work

Here comes the real test: do we actually work well together? Working on a project is somewhat equatable to sharing an apartment with a friend. Just because you get along in a personal setting doesn’t mean you’ll get along in a professional one.

It was a surprisingly smooth process. I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect, but Jack’s personable nature carried through and we found the process to be really enjoyable.

My role for the first couple weeks was definitely that of a mentor, which makes sense. Jack just started his journey in game development and I have 20+ years of writing code and creating software/games.

Thankfully Jack is a better student that he would have you believe. He’ll tell you what he does and doesn’t understand and isn’t afraid to cut you off if your current explanation isn’t making sense.

# Three weeks in and we have a game!

We did it. Jack completed his first game, Grave Danger. The game is a 2D wave-based action game where you play as a medieval grave digger fighting off the hordes of the undead.

Actually seeing an app or game through to the finish line is rarer than most people realize. For every app on the App Store, there’s another 10 that died in development. So seeing us go from some art to a complete game in three weeks feels like spotting a unicorn in the wild.

Completing a project like this in only three weeks with someone you’ve never worked with before is even rarer. I’m not sure what the balance of luck, skill, and personality was that allowed us to complete the project so quickly, but I’m not going to complain!

# There’s a video!

Unlike any of my other projects so far, there’s actually a full video for this one! It’s honestly far more entertaining than anything else I would probably write here, so I’ll let the video share the rest of Grave Danger’s development story.