The Horse’s Name is Friday

The Horse’s Name is Friday was a short and (very) simple survival horror shooter that I worked on during my junior year in the Game Studio at Champlain College. It was some of the first experience I had with more formalized agile development, and was the first longer-term project that I worked on in my time at Champlain! And it shows. But while this project may not have produced a supremely polished end product, it was immensely valuable as a learning experience in team-based agile game development.

The earliest stages of development involved creating an early proof of concept demo in order to present the game for greenlight. I— the sole designer— designed and programmed the first demo largely alone, including implementing art, sound, and a few already-programmed mechanics in about two days in order to present to my faculty and peers.

Following being chosen to move forward, I onboarded a second designer and helped to onboard a second artist, and began to iterate based on feedback received from faculty and from testers about the original greenlight build.

Friday was, to put it kindly, an early learning experience in my journey of undertaking longer-term game dev projects. There are myriad design issues with the eventual final product— game feel is lacking, the player is directed solely through straightforward text directions, the player is actively disincentivized from interacting with most of the enemy types, the three ranged weapons are pretty interchangeable, the final “boss fight” was woefully rushed— there were a lot of problems.

But, however rudimentary the game ended up being, it was an immensely valuable learning experience for me to have as a designer working interdisciplinarily with other developers. It was an early opportunity to screw up art pipelines, to underthink player feedback and tutorialization, to VASTLY over-scope, and to crunch to fix it all as best we could. Friday was a trial by fire, and I learned so, so many lessons from it that I have been fortunate enough to carry forward into future projects.

Would I have designed the game differently with the benefit of hindsight? For sure. Would I have executed the game’s production differently? ABSOLUTELY. But would it be worth losing the lessons learned from my numerous stumbles and mistakes on the project? Probably not.