Anything But A Gun

The Making of Anything But A Gun

For the production of Anything But a Gun, otherwise known as ABAG, I was the producer/team lead and the design lead. The project was our senior project for Game Workshop, a class that lasted two semesters instead of one. That gave us roughly nine months to make a game from start to finish, with a team of 14 people.

The semester before ABAG, I had worked on another project called Thermoflux. One of the biggest problems we had was a lack of leadership. That experience pushed me to take on the role of team lead for ABAG, not necessarily because I wanted to be a leader, but because I felt like somebody needed to do it if we were actually going to stay organized and finish a game. While working on Thermoflux, I realized that I was always the person who knew what was going on with the project and where we were in development. I figured that probably made me the best person to take the reins.

Brainstorming Our Game

Once our group was formed, we had to figure out what kind of game we were actually going to make. I wanted to make the process as democratic as possible, with everyone's vote being weighed equally. My thinking was that people need to actually like the game they're working on if you want them to stay motivated. Looking back, I was probably more right about that than I realized.

Since this was a class project, nobody was getting paid to work on it, and the amount of work required to get an A was surprisingly low. Some people in our senior class really only cared about doing enough to pass with a good grade. Luckily, our team had a lot of people who genuinely cared about the game and were excited about the concept, the theme, and the artwork. I think that made a huge difference.

During brainstorming, a lot of us were interested in making a fast-paced 2D/3D hybrid shooter. We had one team member who was pretty reluctant to make a shooter, though, and our engineering lead kept pushing him to figure out what exactly he didn't like about the idea.

It turned out that he didn't actually dislike shooters. He was just tired of the same generic realistic military setting that seems to show up in so many of them. He said he would be fine with making a shooter as long as the thing you were shooting wasn't a gun. It could be an ink brush, a lava lamp, or basically anything else.

And that's where the name came from.

Anything But a Gun stuck from the very beginning and never changed.

After that, the rest of the brainstorming process went surprisingly smoothly. Sometimes almost too smoothly. Someone would throw out an idea, and three other people would immediately jump into the conversation and start adding to it. There were very few "no"s. Everyone was laughing and getting excited about the weird weapons, wacky lore, and comic book visuals we were coming up with.

That was a pretty big contrast to another game concept we had prototyped, where we were constantly struggling to make the gameplay and lore connect in a way that made sense. ABAG just clicked.

The First Prototype

Our first prototype of Anything But a Gun was pretty barebones. We didn't have the outlines yet, there were only two enemy types and three weapons, and the demo level was small and mostly empty. There was a lot missing.

What it did have was decent gameplay.

From the beginning, we had the floaty jump that let players jump onto rooftops, as well as the fast-paced movement for both the player and enemies. These weren't things that happened by accident. They were some of the most important parts of the game that we wanted to get right early.

Our class had regular demo days where other groups would play our games and we would play theirs. Those became some of the most important deadlines for me during development. Getting an A in the class was relatively easy, but getting the game into a state where we could actually put it in front of other people and get useful feedback was much more valuable.

Because of that, I cared more about being ready for those demo days than I did about some of the actual class due dates.

For that first prototype, we focused on the things that mattered most: shooting, player movement, enemies, and, to some degree, the level layout. The goal was to get the game to a place where we could test if its primary concepts were actually fun in practice, and they were.

Comic Book, Not Cartoony

One of the bigger changes we made during development was moving away from the halftone-heavy art style we originally had.

I put together a presentation for the team explaining how the halftones and some of the other visual elements were making the game look cartoony, but in a way that I didn't really like. I wanted the game to feel a little more serious and mature.

That sparked a pretty big debate.

A lot of people felt strongly that the game was supposed to be cartoony and unserious. After all, the entire identity of the game revolved around ridiculous weapons.

"We have a fart gun for crying out loud."

And they weren't wrong. The game was supposed to be weird and funny. My concern was that if everything about the presentation was completely unserious, people might never take the game seriously as an actual game. At the time, the art style made it look like something that would be marketed toward children, but the gameplay was a fast-paced shooter that required a decent amount of precision. We weren't trying to make a kids' game, so I felt like the art needed to reflect that.

Eventually, we came up with a distinction that helped settle the argument: we weren't making a game that was cartoony. We were making a game that was comic-book-y.

That distinction became a pretty important part of the art direction. The halftones had originally been an homage to retro comic books, but they ultimately had to go in favor of something sleeker and more contemporary.

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