First of all – thank you all so much for welcoming us so warmly yesterday! We were kind of overwhelmed by all the comments and words of advice. We still have a lot to learn about Steemit but you guys make it much easier! So yeah, thank you. We totally fell in love with this community ♥ So I (Angela) will definitely keep on posting various stuff here in the future.
So after introducing ourselves and giving an overview yesterday I will try to go a little bit more into depth about how we work today. Talking about how an idea evolves into an actual game I guess. I don‘t have a plan on how to do that but let‘s just go for it and see where we end up.
I like to seperate the games we make into two categories: Game Jam games and actual™ games. For those of you who might not be familiar with the term – a Game Jam is basically an event where people make a game in a very short amount of time, like two days just for example. In most cases there‘s also a given theme the game should (but must not) match. But that‘s not the kind of stuff I want to talk about today, let‘s save that for another post (we participated in three jams last month so I have a lot to recount :‘D)
Let‘s focus on the latter – the actual™ games.
We‘ve made two so far. Intra-System: Trust Issues, our very first game, and Flufftopia. When it comes to the work process these two have nothing in common though. That‘s because we were a three person team when working on Intra-System. Not long after we started working on the next project (which was Devastated: Andrew‘s Dictaphone, the one I showed you some unfinished stuff of in the last post) we parted ways with our former programmer due to some personal stuff. Also Devastated was meant to be a completely different game at that point, but I‘ll save that for another post too (damn, while writing this I get so many ideas for future posts :‘D). And at that point we decided to put Devastated on ice because we needed to restructure the team. I only made the graphical stuff for Intra-System and Daniel wrote the story, made music/sounds and coordinated the overall workflow. We decided to stay a two person team and not search for a new programmer simply because we realized that doing everything on our own seemed to work best for us. We also wanted to be as independent as possible. Well, that meant that one of us needed to start learning something programming related though.
At that point I sat down and basically spent two months doing nothing else but gathering as much knowledge as possible about the Unity engine. We decided to pick Unity for various reasons:
1. Real™ programming, a framework etc. wasn‘t an option because I had no programming background at all and it would have taken too long to learn that much. We wanted to be able to continue with games ASAP.
2. We were mostly focusing on 2D games at that point and Unity seemed to provide everything we needed. We of course could also have chosen a more 2D focused engine like GameMaker or RPG Maker but we wanted something that was capable of 3D too because we knew we would want to make 3D stuff in the future and learning different engines for both seemed redundant.
3. Unity‘s pricing policy was the one we most likely could live with. So that’s why we didn’t end up using Unreal and whatnot.
So yeah, I made a very small very shitty clicker/idle/incremental game (why are there so many names for these?) in the learning process which really isn‘t worth talking about. Let‘s just say that Daniel was bald at that time and I took this as a theme for the game. The game is completely in German though because I didn‘t think that I would ever show it to more than 10 people.
And around that time we came up with the idea for Flufftopia. We really enjoy experimenting with existing genres so we thought of ways to mess with the clicker game thing a bit. Eventually Daniel came up with the basic idea for the story and the twist. I don‘t want to tell too much because it would take off a lot of the experience – you can check it out yourself if you want to. It‘s free and should only take you 20-40 minutes.
The first thing I wanted to have was an artstyle. When talking about the idea I imagined something supercute and I think I didn‘t fail that too hard. First of all I drew a background to get an overall feeling of the direction I wanted it to take. At that point I didn‘t really know where the background would eventually end up. Now it‘s the main menu.
The designs for the unlockable buildings and the basic idea for the Fluffs, the residents of Flufftown (I still love how fluffy all of this sounds ♥) followed.
After that I felt all of the fluffiness deep in my heart and was ready to start putting things together. Fortunately I was able to reuse some code from the first clicker game thing so I had some basic stuff going on pretty fast. But then we started putting in the story aspects and more features… and that‘s when everything started to go south. Let me tell you one thing: simply following tutorials and trying to figure stuff out on your own are two very different animals. Especially if you basically don‘t have a clue of what you are doing there.
It‘s working! But why?
It‘s not working! BUT WHY?!
I‘m glad that I don‘t have that struggle that often anymore. I still do, but I sometimes think I know what the problem is. I‘m wrong most of the time, but that‘s how learning works I guess. Also: Another reason for choosing Unity! The community is huge and it‘s very likely that someone has had a problem you are having right now before. There are thousands of entries in the forums and up until now I always found something that could help me out.
Back to Flufftopia. I really like to run off the track. We managed to finish it somehow. The last weeks before release were pretty tough though. We needed to delay the release and cut many things we initially wanted to have in the game. A save system for example. And a second game mode. And much more. I simply wasn‘t capable of these things at the time. Especially in the short amount of time we had left. Lesson learned: Try not to bite off more than you can chew. You most likely will anyways, but at least try not to.
But nevertheless the feedback we got for the game was unexpectedly positive – with over 3000 downloads it was our most successful game up until now. We also definitely want to make a large update somewhen in the future to hand in all the stuff we wanted to be in the game later. If you want to know even more details about the development and release, I recommend you to read this article Daniel wrote some time ago.
Is the stuff I‘m telling you even interesting? I don‘t know. But that‘s it for Flufftopia. There‘s one more thing I‘d like to talk about in this post.
When people ask what our specific tasks are we often answer with something like „Angela does art and programming and Daniel does the rest.“
And that often seems to confuse people. They assume that it’s me who‘s doing all the work. And that‘s absolutely not the case.
First of all – Daniel is the idea guy. I wouldn‘t consider myself a creative person when it comes to coming up with game ideas, concepts and stories. I like being creative in graphical art for example but I need a base to work with. Also sound is something that shouldn‘t be underestimated. Many people don‘t realize how much of the atmosphere rises and falls with sound. And even though I kind of make music from time to time (up until now I made the title track for Flufftopia and that‘s it X‘D) it‘s mostly Daniel who‘s taking care of these things.
Also he‘s the one coordinating everything. And when I say everything I mean everything. I‘m a total disaster when it comes to anything related to organization. So yeah, that‘s something he‘s taking care of too. All day. Every day. Thank you, Daniel.
He also started to learn 3D modeling because that‘s of course something you need when making 3D games. And he‘s doing pretty well. And I‘m pretty thankful for that because I wanted to learn using Blender once and I rage quitted because it‘s… well, let‘s just say it‘s a very special program and I can be a very impatient person sometimes. So Daniel started making sinks and toilets for some reason. But hey, I think they look pretty cool!
And then there‘s also marketing and PR of course. And all the other stuff I don‘t want to take care of. And he makes amazing coffee! I know, I know. I already mentioned that in the last post.
That‘s going to be it for today. I guess for now I will try to post at least once a week. Oh! I could also mention: We‘ve been running a „Dev Diary“ video series on YouTube for a few months now and we are currently reuploading it to our DTube channel too! Once we’ve managed to upload everything we’ve made in the past the series will be coming on a weekly basis. We also definitely plan on making some DTube exclusive stuff in the future :) Check it out if you want to!
Also feel free to let me know if there are some specific topics you‘d like to read more about. Have a wonderful weekend, see you next time ♥
Please follow and I'll follow you back (make sure to reply to a post so I can verify). Great to get "behind the scenes" of a game developer.
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