One S'More

DEVELOPMENT

One S'Mores Development began with an already tested and established game concept we created in our bachelors second semster. This time however, we were focused on creating a first polished version of the game to found our company with.

The Original Concept

Biscuit Breaker

The original concept was based on a basic resource farming game of some sort. We had the idea of Islands or planets to bound them together and collect there resources. We received several feedback of that the concept really was too ambitious for our current experience level and we had only a few months time for the whole development. 

So back to the drawing board, we came up with a split mechanic and took this as the base of the game. If it was going to be a puzzle game or a platformer wasn't clear at that point but after creating first fake screenshots to just iterate through different ideas, we settled for a puzzle game, where you have to connect different islands or certain blocks.

 

For the theme and setting, we hadn't really any plans yet but as we pitched the conept to our class, someone gave us the feedback to maybe try something sweet and candylike.

 

We all hated the idea at first as it might be too Candy Crush like in the end, but everyone of our class got really hyped up to the idea and so we tried it out and in the end, we got excited ourselves as well!

Prototype & Project Management - One S'More

Back to our Masters Degree, we planned on remake our own game and make it a real, marketable and polished game. That would mean, we have to found a company and search for an option to work fulltime on this project.

 

The first year was only focused on creating a visually and mechanically interesting prototype to try our luck to get funded by Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg to have a financial foundation to develop the game.

 

For the development, the first thing we changed was the visual direction. Instead of a 2D hand drawn style, I recommended we try 3D, as with that, we would have much more possibilities and people that can help creating assets. Daniel was our only artist back at Biscuit Breaker since nobody else was really good at drawing. 

 

Now that we all gained much more experience in creating games and especially ones in 3D space, we tried out multiple ideas. 3D and 2D mixes, 3D with an orthoraphic camera, 2D looking like 3D etc.

 

In the end, we settled for a 3D world with an orthographic perspective. However we definilty needed to do some custome lighting and shader magic to remain a cute cartoonish look for our game.    

Level Editor & Level Browser

One key feature we planned right at the beginning of our prototype was a fully functional level editor. It had to be written pretty early as it should not just be an editor for the players but the very one that we would use to create our entire content with as well.

 

However the final editor would definitly take a while and so I was assigned to create a prototype editor within unity's inspector so we could test around with the main mechanic. It was ugly and had quit some issues with the default unity serialization but it worked out for the first year quit okish.

 

With the second year, I and Philip worked together hand in hand to create the full extended new editor including a new save and load system as well as the foundation of our level browser. 

 

Overtime, we had quit some communication issues for what scripts should have what purpose as we had to scale up things more and more. The core worked really well, but during development we had to refactor a ton of code as our main mechanic changed internally a few times. Especially due to the way a level and an editor level are stored. In the end, we found a well working solution that we wouldn't dare to touch it if it wasn't necessary.

Overworld

The overworld was our new way to select levels to play. It was one of my ideas and besides im still proud how it worked out in the end, it has huge design flaws and I would have wished we scrap the idea compleatly.

It was certainly one of those nice on paper ideas which resulted in way too much headache and waste of production time then the worth and value it added to the game.

This is given to the reason, we all had very different ideas of what the overworld should look like, feel like and it's functionality. 

The main problem:

We couldn't create an overworld just within unity's or our own level editor. The reason was our unique movement system for the marshmallow character as well as the visual style we established with the grid aligned cookies.

So what followed was me, trying to find a visual style for the overworld, creating an entire new editor and movement system for our character all at the same time. 

With the first iterations I found a few possibilities to solve many of the issues with just ripping out some code of the level editor and re-use it for the overworld. The same I did with the shaders for the overworld-tiles. The core idea was to have a cake like overworld with lots of decorative elements like different kinds of cakes.

The big advantage of this idea was, I was able to create a new shader that with some custom lighting that would make use of the squishy cake shapes of the environment, so that it would like a thick layer of marcipan.

 

After multiple iterations that followed with the editor and the overall style and biomes, it got to the point were I could create our entire final overworld within just 3 weeks including asset production right before the release of the game. Because of the huge chrunchtime and effort I put in, the lack of intelligent level design and testing still resulted in an overworld, that was way too large and empty for it's own good.

 

This experience however teached me many lessons of which the biggest one truly was "less is more" 

Overworld Editor

User Interface

Like in our original game, I was also assigned to create and maintain our entire User Interface system as well as creating the core style of it.

For this, I took my time to really invest into a custom animator system which we could use to easily combine and configure how the UI reacts to inputs and events.

The great thing about this system was, we could easily hook up multiple of this animators together, chain events and just easily reference each element.

It was a better solution then individually animate each panel and variation with Unity's own animation system. However, for our animator, I did inspire myself by Unity for this, but way more simple to use. 

Conventions

For the last year of development, we planned out to visit and exhibit at different conventions as far as our budget allowed.

The key problems besides finding good oportunities and organisations to exhibit with, neither did we have any equipment nor safety concepts which conventions like the gamescom definitly require.

 

As we dig deep into what we wanted to do in the first place, we found ourselves getting in touch with the Creative Games Area for the upcoming Dokomi 2024. We got told, tables and seats are no problem as well as banner, but we would have to get our own pcs, monitors and whatever additional decoration we wanted.

So, I started digging for low budget pc builds, monitors, safety cases and other possibilities to secure our equipment with a budget of just 1000€.

 

First things first, since we already had showable demo, I took this to messure our performance and benchmarked different hardware setups with everything I could find at home. Our game had really low requirements when it came to CPU and Storage. However, the graphics required a bit more power then just an internal graphics unit. So I figured that we needed some graphics cards in a market, that still is really bad for this. Since I knew, the game runs smoothly on my old GTX 1060, the first thing I looked after were the GTX 16 series and began my usual hardware comparisons.

 

In the end, I really got lucky with our ecuiptment only paying 100€ more then our budget was set at. For that however, I managed to get 2 equal old HP G2 with new GTX 1650, 2x new BenQ FHD 120Hz monitors, 2 sets of mouses and keyboards, 2x usb hubs and usb-a extensions, 2x multi cable ports, a 10 meters stainless steel chain and the materials to craft and much more.

 

Now just 2 weeks before Dokomi, I had to test out all tech, craft our security box and prepare additional banners for the dokomi. In the end, I was also the one, setting up our booth and going through the logistics chaos at Dokomi but even tho it was a whole different level of stress, every moment really was fun. Except the last day, were the security at the gates wouldn't let us drive to the hall to dismantle. 

 

At Dokomi, we talked to the people at Creative Games Area, which gave us the hint to exhibit at Gamescom 24 with them together. Since they gave us a very fair offer and it already worked well with the Dokomi, we did apply and got in.

 

For the Gamescom, we wanted to give out some goodies too. The idea was to have a small plushie to giveaway for those who achieve to play through our demo, which unfortunatly took quit a long time.

 

We looked for people at Etsy and companies who could do a small Marshmallow with a face and our game logo. Unfortunatly we didn't found anyone who could do this within the time and budget we had or the materials and scale we wanted.

In the end, I and my sister bought simple materials and did sew them all by ourselfes. We achieved to sew around 50 small Mallows for giveaways and all that while I was the one orchestrating the entire logistics again.

Since I was attending Devcom 24 as well, I got informed by other exhibitors, that we would be required to fullfill all fire regulations too, which we haven't been informed before unfortunatly.

So in a last minute attempt, I tried to organize a B5 spray to coat our giant marshmallow mascot and the pc security case because it was made out of wood.

I was really fortunate that even the head of devcom and multiple other organizers tried to find somebody who could borrow us that spray. In the end of the day, we got in touch with the cosplay village which told us to just come by at the next morning.

So the Gamescom really started out quit messy and in full panic mode already but the next morning, we got the spray and we were ready to go. For all the help we received, I gave out everyone that helped us a handmade plushie as a thank you ^_^

 

The Gamescom itself was much like the Dokomi, except we received some visits from content creators who enjoyed our little game. With that, the gamescom was over and now, it was time to finalize our game :3 

© 2025 Roman Wiegand