My name is Dalton Hutchinson, I’m one of two programmers on the game. Currently we are a team of 3 (2 programmers/designers, 1 artist/writer). We’ve all been doing game dev for about 3-4 years now, almost all of that time spent working on The Newton Mystery.
The Newton Mystery actually started out as our senior thesis project back in college. Our team used to be a lot larger back then, with around 6 people working on the project. When we first started on the game we wanted to play to our strengths in writing and art direction. After a lot of brainstorming, we ended up with a weird blend of Night in the Woods and The Cave (2013). We basically wanted to create a game where you could swap between characters, but each character felt like they had their own personality.
We wanted to create a game where we could build characters for the player to get to know, and expand on their relationships between each other throughout the game. Using different abilities each character also lets you solve puzzles to progress, making them feel more significant. In general, we’re also super inspired by cartoons we watched growing up. Our goal above all else with The Newton Mystery was to make it feel like you’re playing an episode of a cartoon with each chapter of the game.
The development journey has definitely been a bumpy ride for us. We all went through big life changes with graduating school, finding jobs, changing careers, etc. and development on the game definitely went on the backburner for a bit. We delayed the release of the game twice and we’re super happy to be releasing this Halloween.
We ended up choosing Unity as our game engine. This is the engine we learned in school, so it made the most sense for us to continue using it, since it’s what we knew best. However, since we mainly focus on 2D games we’re thinking of switching to Godot for future projects.
I think we’ve had two pretty major development hurdles throughout this project. The first hurdle we encountered was working with a lot of our early code. As the project grew larger, this code really slowed us down. We started The Newton Mystery when we were much more amateur developers, and a lot of the early code was sloppy and did not allow for easy expansion or editing. Eventually we decided to go back and refactor some of the major systems for our game, such as the player movement. This pretty much halted development, with no new content being made. However, after we finished this, it was much easier to continue development and creating new further content was much faster.
The other major hurdle I’d say we encountered was our main design philosophy. After working a while on the game and designing levels, we started to realize that our character swapping idea was not as intuitive and fun as we had originally thought. We found it extremely difficult to design levels using the mechanic and had a lot of trouble making the puzzles using it fun. To try to amend this, we tried relying more on puzzles utilizing the environment rather than the characters and their abilities themselves. Our level design philosophy shifted more into something you might find in a Banjo Kazooie or Lego game. We also added a bunch of minigames such as a rhythm based card game, and an infinite runner to try to break up the gameplay loop.
To mimic the words of many other game developers, my advice to others would be to start small. When starting out, I feel it’s best to have a well defined design philosophy that you know you can iterate on. Since this is something we struggled with, in our next ventures I think we’re going to try making many small projects to increase our skills. So don’t necessarily take my word for it, but that is our plan going forward!
Thanks so much for the opportunity to speak about our experience. I don’t think we’ve been a perfect example of what you should do on your game development journey. However, hopefully people can learn from the things we’ve done wrong and right, including ourselves!
-Dalton
❤️
