From one month to two and a half year

About what we thought at the start of Attack of the Bugminator development and what happened instead of it.

The whole Attack of The Bugminator story started back in 2018 on HoloHackaton hosted by Microsoft. After two sleepless days, we finally presented the game on HoloLens to the jury. One of their questions was:

When can they play with that?

We answered that we need a month to finish the game. Damn, how far we were from reality. On our behalf, we could make the core game done if all four of us would work on it for a whole month, but not that happened.

Brainstorming and having fun

What the reasons were:

•  We all have our everyday work to be done, and we were working on the Attack of the Bugminator in our spare time.
•  Nonetheless, we made a version 1.0 documentation, new ideas have come, and we couldn't resist them to implement.
•  We started only with the ARKit because the ARCore implementation wasn't ready at that time but after some months it was, so we moved to ARFoundation. It took some time.
•  In those two years, we updated the whole project to a new Unity version twice. Finding the right package versions after a transition like that could be hard.
•  Don't underestimate, how much time can consume to implement all advertisements, leaderboards, and user data syncing on two platforms.
•  The last (and the most surprising) task, that delayed the release was figuring out, how to teach the players to play the game. You can read about that in this post.

An early version of the Attack of the Bugminator

It was a long journey, but absolutely worth it. We learned a lot, how to plan, how to work on a project with several people, how to make decisions when there is no project manager, we are all equal and with gameplay, we always made a common brainstorming with all of us (there was one rule: the graphical artists have the last word on the graphical side, the programmers have in any other topic according to development).

They are the guys, who thought it's done in a month :)

Check out Attack of the Bugminator here: attackofthebugminator.com