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A Third Person Fantasy Adventure game where you explore an alien world using Light and Shadow Magick.

Report RSS Development Update - A Dev's Journey with Character

It's Character Monday here at Mechanical Box Interactive, as we continue to bring you bi-weekly updates for our latest title currently in the works.

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Hey Guys! What's up? today we wanted to bring you a short tale of adventure, encouragement and slice-of-life from our lead dev and CEO, Angelo, in which he discusses how the game was born, as well as stuff any other indie development team might deal with while making games:

Angelo wrote:

Well, it has been a long journey since the first stage of development. It all began around early 2012, when we started to design a game in order to enter the Square Enix Latam contest for best game.

We managed to assemble a team of capable men and women, but then life got in the way and some of our former members had to solve personal and bussiness problems. We couldn't manage to focus in the goal, so the contest got wrapped up, and we ended up having a bunch of great ideas. But without a polished and playable demo, we were dealt a huge morale blow, since we were so invested in it, but fortunately the story doesn't end there.

As life has it, things go on and we managed to continue, just two guys with a vision and not enough free time. Slowly the development got moving again throughout the year with some of the ideas and concepts. The team back then, expanded the main idea to make something more approachable: we wanted to make an interactive videogame for tablets.

Diligently we found some people that wanted to work in the project, but then once again, some of those members left the team during September 2012 for personal reasons. Luckily some acquaintances stumbled upon our path wanting to work in the game. We were thrilled and thus development was re-ignited. Funny enough, although one of them had to leave yet again early 2013, the other one stayed for good! Now this time domestic responsabilities got in our way, the development got stuck a little bit, and we even had to work heavily in other non-related jobs to pay bills.

Sometime in April 2013, an invaluable friend returned to our team and we have finally managed to establish a solid core team (¡that continues to this day!) and so the development took a new turn. Thanks to that, development got even more steady than we ever hoped for, things were getting taken care of, and progress was unfolding. The type of game changed anew, this time we focused on creating a single player, third-person experience aimed to PC (Win, Linux) and Mac.

A lot of time had passed by now since the contest was held. We had to make a difficult choice which would make us reconsider the scope and guidelines for the game in order to better incorporate our vision: a science-fantasy adventure game for desktop computers (and if things go well, ¡consoles too!). Granted, in early 2014, we gradually increased the time dedicated on our beloved project and it's almost a full time project now. We changed some development tools (mostly assets for unity), added new features (like gamepad support) and we set ourselves what has been an ellusive, but now viable goal: the making of a playable prototype for the world to see.


The rest will be history, or so we hope! Now with this brief intro, we want to continue showing you some of our progress :)

Character Concept Art

With an almost final concept for the main character, we also began exploring the colour palette for it. We wanted it to bear ressemblance to the main idea of the world itself, which was full of elemental qualities. So after a lot of experimentation we got some earth colours on them which we enjoyed.

And here are the final Character Concepts with their updated colour palette!

The male version of our protagonist is called Tarek ...

And our lady version here was named as Malek ... :)

Both will have the same skills and picking one or another will not influence the story in any way.

3D Modeling

We've also been getting more and more familiar with our 3D design tool, the amazing open-source software Blender. We've known the software for many years but it has prove challenging to synchronize some of our crew previous 3D knowledge with Autodesk Maya and apply that within Blender. But in the end it's just a tool! so after getting properly acquainted with it we began modeling our characters.

And here's the first one we did! although the shader's not final (i.e. material + texture), we just wanted to show all of you how the low-poly version of one of our characters will look like! :)

Thanks for stopping by once more! Next time we will update you guys with some more Art & Dev entries!

Mechanical Box Interactive

Tune you later!

J. Moreno
Co-Founder & Animation Director @ Mechanical Box Interactive

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