Our First Ever Devlog
Hi Cake Bashers! This is our first ever devlog, where we talk about all the delicious treats we’ve baked so far, our inspirations and some of our process too.
It all began in April this year, inspired by the question - “What about a game where you’re a doughnut and you have to be the tastiest?” We were looking for something fun and easy to understand in a short sentence, so it certainly fit!
Before then we’d worked on a bunch of other prototypes, like a herding game where you play as dogs chasing birds, and a shoot-em-up in space but also underwater. Both were cool and we had a lot of fun making them, but we had trouble imagining how they could evolve into full games.
We planned to spend two weeks on Cake Bash as we had for the previous prototypes, then discuss if it was worth going ahead with. As our first indie game, it was important to us to find a concept we all thought was great. I’m really glad we took the time we needed at this stage and weren’t too precious about our ideas.
Just one week and many laughs later, we had a game which looked like this:
It looks empty, and it was, because we were still working out what the game would be! The beautiful cylinder in the middle was either oil or icing, depending on the switch. This stayed in for a long time before we realised it was pretty boring to just stand still to win!
At the beginning we went for a much more stylised approach. The ‘tasty’ mechanic was the core of the game, and making other players gross was much more important than it is now - we even had a seperate state for them when they were really stinky, but after some playtests with friends and family, we realised it was just too complex and confusing. It could always return in a future game mode though!
Here’s what it looked like after two more weeks:
After another month working on the core gameplay and evolving the art style, we decided to show the game publicly for the first time on the 14th of July at a small local event. It really helped with our planning to have an immovable deadline, because we knew everything had to be good enough to show.
After testing it out on the people of Newcastle - who are more likely to tell us our game smells than our friends would - we knew it was a game that players really enjoyed. Another developer at the event told us, “it was quiet before you got here!” Seeing people have fun made all the hard work worth it.
Here’s our first finished level, the Bakery, as it looked at the event:
Now we’ve moved into full content production! After our event this month we made sure to implement some of the top feedback:
- Stun mechanic was too confusing
- Charge attack needed to show the direction and impact
- Basic combat needed a complete rework
Big thanks to everyone who shared your ideas - we think the game is already much better as a result!
If you have any questions or suggestions, please send us a tweet!