At 5:53pm today, Paper Cup Games submitted a complete GBA game, entitled “Aura” to the gbadev.org development contest. In a month and a half of our spare time, five of us created a music-based puzzle game that not only looks good, is relatively stable, and polished, but most importantly, is fun. I’ve now been part of three videogames – Seaman, The Urbz, and Aura – and by far, my proudest accomplishment is collaborating with this small team, to start from scratch, and release something that is *really* excellent.

I think for me, the two things to take away from this are that 1.) we managed the scope of the project well from start to finish. In all of our previous endeavors, despite efforts to keep things as simple as possible, they’ve always spiralled out of control into these really elaborate, incredibly difficult to implement schemes. This was simple – something that seems *almost* trivial at first, but then is substantial in the details of the implementation. Having something that we could make substantial progress on with the resources and time we had was absolutely critical, and was a huge part of the difference between finishing a program, and not. 2.) Colin approached the issue with the assumption that it would be done on time, provided we just got to work on it. This is something that we’ve *always* had a problem with, for PCG – the simple fact that we all have other lives to attend to as well has always pushed the PCG projects to the back burner. However, because of the ever-looming contest deadline, and the *assumption* that it would be done, if we simply *worked* on it made a tremendous, and vital difference. Because we’ve always been busy – or someone’s always been busy, in the past, I’ve always been hesitant about asking for deadlines, or making people commit to certain tasks.

Because of that simple agreement, though, things got done. The programmers (Max and Stephen) simply started working. Once there was a base to work on, I got did the art. When we could have sound, we made sounds. Sometimes, I was late – maybe habits are just hard to break. But then the last week and a half, the majority of my free time, every night, was devoted solely to getting Aura as finished as possible. We ended up with three four puzzles, but they’re good, and for someone who hasn’t solved them, they’re probably a minimum of a half hour of gameplay. Gameplay that is consistently fun, and challenging in a wide variety of ways.

One of the other things that I think I took away from this is that the details make a huge difference. Small graphical tweaks in the last week took the project from looking like a good amateur project, to something that I’d be willing to show publishers, in the efforts to actually get this commercially published. Are we done? Of course not. There’s a zillion other good ideas we didn’t have time to implement. There’s thousands of new puzzles to be made, and with additional sample space, we could have a tremendous variety of musical styles to work with, not to mention an endless construction-set environment where users can create their own puzzles. We’re about a third of the way towards that last goal already.

Congratulations to us. I’m astonished at the quality, and the magnitude of our achievement. I’m proud to have been a part of it, and I’m proud to have worked with such a brilliant bunch