The Grind

Website

The Grind is a game being created by my good friend, Dan Taylor. It started as a personal experiment to make, and I quote:

A Tamagotchi-like sim about a freelancer living in Seattle and working from various coffee shops.

This original incarnation was entirely 2D, and Dan had made it all himself. It featured a pixel-art aesthetic that purposely resembled the classic Pokémon games on the original Game Boy. The idea is inspired by his own life, and the character in the game reflects this (it’s essentially a caricature of himself).

Eventually, he completed his initial version of the game and started getting feedback. This, along with time away from the project, continued to generate more ideas about what he wanted it to be.

# I joined onto the project

While working together on BullShoppe, Dan started sharing some of his new ideas for his title, which was now becoming “The Grind”. He wanted to move away from the purely 2D aesthetic to a 2.5D one, with a 3D environment that still conformed to the rules of conventions of pixel art.

His ideas and excitement sold me (and our friend, Griffin Dziok) on participating on the project.

I (re)implemented a number of gameplay systems, like object interactions, dialog, player skills, and began implementing a small framework for creating Wario-ware style “micro-games” that represented the jobs that the player character would take on.

# A difference in creative vision

As we started developing the new idea together, something kept happening. Griffin and I would push for adding more “gameplay” and Dan became less and less enthusiastic about the direction that the project was heading towards.

  • For Dan, this was a personal initiative; one he wanted to see come to fruition come hell or high water. His income didn’t depend on the game’s success.
  • For Griffin and myself, it was an investment of time into something we hoped could be a fun game that people would want to purchase and play. After all, we were trying to create a product that could be sold to sustain us as we pursued a career in game development.

It was subtle at first, but it became quickly grew more apparent. Eventually we decided to try and better understand Dan’s underlying goals. He really wanted to convey an “emotional caricature” of his experiences being a designer/musician working in various coffee shops around the city of Seattle.

After talking it out, we settled on a set of compromises that we thought would still make for an interesting game while protecting Dan’s original vision.

# We created a trailer to get feedback

Eventually we hit an awkward phase in the project. We had a collection of ideas and gameplay systems that we were trying to fit together, somewhat clumsily, while still trying to preserve the original intentions of the project. Having just learned the importance of getting feedback early on with BullShoppe, we knew we needed some.

But we didn’t really have a playable build yet… at least not one that showcased all of the various systems we had been designing and implementing. We decided that the best way to demonstrate our ideas was to make a trailer that combined the completed components with the ones that were still being developed.

# We got the feedback we needed

The trailer actually turned out to be a great strategy and even allowed us to collect speculative feedback from potential players. We quickly got a laundry list of ideas, desires, and opinions from a decently sized sample set.

There were 2 common themes forming:

  1. They really enjoyed the calming, pixel art aesthetic.
  2. They didn’t understand what the “game” was.

Although you could argue that some of point 2 was due to the trailer approach, we were also struggling in figuring out how to make these various systems a cohesive and fun gameplay experience.

So we looked even harder at the feedback people had given us about what they wanted the game to be.

  • A full city to explore, not just coffee shops.
  • More variety in objectives and gameplay.
  • Greater emphasis on the narrative with dynamic story events and some maybe even some moral dilemmas.

None of this was the game we were making. It was becoming clear that we needed to pivot our idea further if we wanted to create something that was more likely to succeed in a commercial marketplace. Less of an art piece and more of a traditional game.

# A decision had to be made

As we continued to discuss the various avenues we could take to try and accomplish these goals, each one presented a mutation that further moved the project away from what got Dan excited about the project in the first place. In the end, we decided that a better direction was to allow it to just be a project and not a product.

# I stepped away from the project

In the end, it was decided that Dan could continue to develop it in his spare time with the level of creative control needed to make the experience that he wanted to see, rather than something we were collectively hoping to generate some of our livelihood on.

I had only spent a couple months on the project in total, so there weren’t any hard feelings about how it all turned out. Dan (Pedestrian Tactics) is still working on the game, and it’s come a long way.

If you want to learn more about the game, you can check out the official website or follow the game on Twitter.