The Making Of Stick Man Rescue, Out Tomorrow On PSN

Stick Man Rescue was born of a conversation with my 12-year old son, Colin. He had just discovered the freeware Pivot Stick Figure Animator and, like any 12-year-old boy would, he was using it to make hilarious death animations. Given that game designers are perpetual 12-year-olds at heart, I joined in. This prompted visits to various stick man death websites which provided a surprisingly long-lasting source of giggles that attracted my younger son. Soon the three of us were pondering how to make stick deaths into a video game.

Dusting off my rusty programming and non-existent art skills, I co-opted my kids to start making animated gifs of stick deaths and created a prototype game bent on seeing how many of our most ridiculous ideas could be worked into it. So, I had a prototype as you can see, but had a long way to go to turn it into something that could be useful for a real game design.

Nothing gets fun by itself. In the end, you have to play your game. When you’re done playing your game, you tweak it, tune it, polish it, and then do the whole process over and over and over. This is where game developers find out just how much they actually LOVE games.

Tuning can’t happen properly without a very important set of people… friends, family and random strangers who you can con into playing your game. These people are needed because by the time a game is getting ready to be tuned, every member of the team has played it for literally thousands of hours. If we tune the game to our own skill level, no player on earth, no matter how talented they may be, can hope to play the game and have fun. Now that the tuning is done, I hope everyone whose so inclined will laugh, swear and scream their way through this irreverent homage to the art of stick man murder.