Day of the Devs 2017 - UFO 50

Day of the Devs Post Preface:
     Thanks to a very impromptu invitation from my friends, I was able to attend this years Day of the Devs (DotD) event in San Francisco. I treated DotD as I have the past few speakers and events I've taken part in and took notes on the games being showcased. A huge thank you to all of the developers I spoke with for being so open to my questions!

UFO 50 - MossMouth
Interviewed - Derek Yu

     UFO 50 is a collection of 50 smaller games developed in Gamemaker 1.4 (they were mid development when Gamemaker 2.0 released and didn't want to interrupt their workflow). Derek Yu, the representing developer best known for Speklunky, said that every game in the collection is meant to be a "complete game experience" and each one had its own director. While the game was worked on by several people, he said that they didn't use Git and actually had a main build of UFO 50 that the smaller experiences were simply added to. However despite this he said that when there were mechanics that would crossover with each other the team made a point to reuse scripts and objects from other games to expedite development and increase efficiency.

An example of the one of the 50 games available!

     I was also told that there were several ideas that were thrown out simply because they weren't fun and the selection of games that were enabled for the demo were certainly strong showcases. Not only that but the games range from being singleplayer, score-attack, and can even have cooperational or competitive goals in mind. For instance one game was a turn based unit versus unit game where attacks were dealt by sliding one's unit represented by a puck into another player's puck dealing damage. Another was a Micro-Machines styled racing game with--appropriately enough--UFOs. Another had a physics enabled soccer ball and each player knocked it around into each other and enemies. The wide gamut of game archetypes definitely shows how differently everyone on the team likes to design their games and from a design standpoint seems like a great exercise in experimenting with new game mechanics.

A picture of the puck-and-slide game.

     Reiterating what both Yu had told me and what each of the games had convinced me of: for $5 no one would buy these games separately because they don't stand well on their own on a store page despite being fully fleshed out and refined experiences, however together as a collection there's a lot of value here.