archeangames

Our journey with Heralds of The Order

Hi, ya! I'm Pavel from Archean Games. We're a small team of mostly students based in and around the city of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. With the launch of our first DEMO I decided to leave a record of our misadventures, so if nothing else comes of our game at least future historians have something to laugh at. The fist installment of our devlog I thought I'd give a quick summary of where we started, where we are now and the bumbling frenzy that got us here.

Where we started

We've wanted to make games ever since we were in high-school. With that goal in mind we started learning the basics like programming, working with various engines like Unity, participating in local game jams and working on several game projects which will never see the light of day, at least not if we can help it. As our second year of university started looming over the horizon we were hit by a horrendous realization: "We're gonna have to find a real job soon!". With that macabre threat over our heads it was obvious that we were missing our last chance at this indie game shtick. "We'll just have to make a game before it's too late then." OK smart ass! What game!? And so the headaches began. After some deliberations we decided we wanted to emulate the turn based strategies of old, where you have more units than you know what to do with and the levels are more than a flat plane with a pretty back drop. So it was settled. We had our concept.

Commence the bumbling

In the first several weeks there was an unpleasant possibility that we would have to do a large part of our project without an artist. He could probably lay some ground work and give us some concepts we could build on, some pretty good ones if you ask me.

But we we're still faced with the gruesome fact that most of our game would probably consist of the aesthetic abomination which is programmer made pixel art. Fortunately for us, maybe not so much for him(depending on how things go), he did stay with us and we could instead make a game with the more aesthetically pleasing option which is hand drawn line art.

And since that was settled we actually had to start the "making" part. Well we knew we wanted to make a turn based strategy game but that's a pretty broad term there was so much you could stack on top of that, or so we said. As the weeks went by we started work on the core features we knew our game would have for sure and thought we'd work out the bells and whistles "next week".

This went on for about six mounts. We experimented with resource management, equipment crafting, match three mini-games and several more gimmicks, all of which were "put on the fridge for later". In the end we decided to keep it simpler, making games was fun and all but we didn't want to be making the same game all the way up to retirement. And so we focused on the basics, positioning, unit to unit interactions and counter play, we even threw in global player abilities, or God Powers, to spice tings up a notch, but only a notch.

Where we are now

Well after almost a year of headaches, with varying degrees of severity. We finally have a DEMO to show for it all. You could say that we're in late alpha. Most of our features are implemented and a lot of our levels have been pretty much built. All that's left is fleshing out our story, maybe programming some cut scenes, and replacing all the place holder doodles with actual art. Considering we only have one artist that may take longer than we thought.

In the next several weeks I'll go into more details about each of our individual bumbles in a desperate attempt to bide my time until we finish the game. If you're interested in hearing more you can sign up to our mailing list and we'll send our heralds directly to our inbox, along with some free treats in the following mounts. Or if you have a passing affection for us you can pay our social media pages a visit: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, GAB, yes GAB. Don't forget to check out our DEMO, it's free so what do you have to lose, and consider filling out this survey to let us know what you thought.

Next week I'll give a detailed account of our first rotoscoping misadventure. Here's a small teaser: