Hi guys,
My name's Alex, I'm a developper in a team of ... two members. Should we say a duo ? I'll be the one writing those articles.
Today's topic: Who are we? Where is this project coming from? How far are we? Where are we trying to go?
PLEASE READ THE GAME DESCRIPTION BEFORE COMING HERE.
Either on our game page on this very website or on our official website here : Official Website
THANK YOU
Where it started : Team of two
More than five years ago, when I was doing my stydies, I wrote a story made to be a video game. It stayed on that old flashdrive for more than three years.
Then two years ago, I've met Thibauld while I was going to the gym (he was my coach ^^). Turns out he was a pretty good designer too.
Then, one day, I don't really remember why, I gave him this old story I wrote. The next day at the gym, I had my daily training on my A4 paper with the character from this story drawn on the top right corner. He came to me and said: "You have to tell this story to the world." Now that I think about it, it sounds kind of cheesy. "Craziness up to 100%"
Believe it or not, a few weeks later, we both ditched our jobs and started to work full time (in my apartment) on our first game: "Initiation". "Craziness up to 200%"
Main character's evolution
What engine, What softwares
We're using Unity Free Version for our development. Since I didn't know any C#, that's the language I've chose. "Craziness up to 235%"
Regarding drawings softwares, it goes from Paint to Gimp to PhotoShop to Manga Studio. My knowledge extends to the first two but he's telling me that each of them can do precise things more easily than others. That's why sometimes, he changes the one he uses.
Since we're in 2D we've decided to use a bone based animation system. Even if Spine looked great, Spriter was cheaper and good enough for what we need to do. Thibauld's the one doing all the animations. It's funny how fast he learned. Little example below.
His first walk ^^ He was proud of it -> Second try -> And now
We now have more than 130 animations for this character! For a better showcase of all of them, check the trailer below.
We use sprite2Unity coupled with a lot of little programs I've made to import his work into the engine. We had a few problems at the beginning but now everything's working perfectly.
For those wondering, I used Lightworks for all video montages like trailers, Dev Bits... It's not easy to learn but it's a really powerfull tool for free.
Where we are now
First of all, BETA'S COMING SOON.
Six months later, our first level is coming soon. We tried a lot of things along the way and we took time learning most of what we need to know but now we're at a good pace. Parts of this first level (out of 5) can be seen in this trailer.
Currently we are working on the very last part of this level. We're just missing a few drawings, some line of codes and some audio. Then we'll launch an alpha with friends and families with hope to find most of the bugs.
Once all of this is done, we'll release a free demo for everyone to play. If everything works perfectly, all of this should happen within a month but since it's never the case (Programmers will know), let's say five weeks.
A week ago, we started to communicate about this project. We launched the trailer and the website. For the moment we've got a lot of good feedbacks and some really helpful critics. We're working real hard on letting people know that we exist and I agree with what people say. It's hard, really hard.
Even if we got a post on 9gag that worked very well, getting people to follow you and show interested is a gargantuan (Love this word) task.
For those interested, we're posting daily on our twitter and our Facebook.
We've started a youtube series called Dev Bits. It's a series of short format videos that we'll keep people updated on our latest development.
After
Regarding the game... Well, colours will come. Part of the idea of the game is to let the character go through emotions. Each of them is link to a colour. Making this little guy going from sadness to a bunch of feelings both physical and psychological.
We're hoping to have enough followers near the end of summer to launch our crowdfunding campain giving us enough money to lead this project to the finish line.
Any last words?
Well that's a pretty long article. I hope you liked it.
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PS : 've tried to correct as much misspellings as I could but since english isn't my native language, you'll probably find some more.
