lunarkingdom

A bit of history

It was 2012 and, after many years of failed projects with other people -remote teams all of them-, I decided to go for something small, realistic, to be done alone. It took me several years to leave behind all that crazy ideas of creating the next 3D RPG and things like that. I don’t even know how many stupid projects I started (or joined) the last 10 years. It is also very complicated to find people willing to spend time and efforts into creating something that is obviously too big for a bunch of newbies, and every time those stupid projects failed, I got more and more demotivated.

It was March 2012 and I wanted to create something small but interesting enough to raise my motivation up. I also was intrigued by mobile development, so I came up with an idea of a game that made use of touch based control, called Mindwars. I started to create a prototype of that game, during around 2 months -maybe a lot for a prototype, but I was combining that with a full time job, so I didn’t have all the time I wanted…-. It didn’t work. I really liked the idea behind it, and I really believe with some more time and giving it another try, I could come up with something interesting. But at that moment the prototype just didn’t feel right.

And this surprised me: I didn’t get demotivated. Any time a project didn’t work for some reason, I used to get demotivated, forget about gamedev and start thinking in another thing. But not this time. Maybe because I did it right: you have an idea, you make a prototype, and then you decide whether it works or not. This one didn’t, and is not a big deal, is part of the process.

Right after I decided to leave Mindwars, I started to think in new ideas. Then I came up with the idea of a simple game consisting on a platformer where you can change the gravity to four directions to pass through different situations or puzzles. That is the basic concept of Invertium. I didn’t know if it was original or innovative, I was not very updated about the community and gaming in general. But it sounded interesting to me, the kind of game I could spend time making. I created a very basic and simple prototype, just to feel how fun was to play a platformer without jumping, just changing the gravity. And I also thought: what if not only the character, but other objects, are affected by gravity as well? I put a bunch of barrels in the test level I created, and saw them failing and colliding between them. I thought it was really cool.

A game was born

Even thinking the idea was good enough to be made, I didn’t start to develop it. I focused in other things the next months, mainly in becoming a father. But, from time to time, I used to review the documents I created, adding new ideas, items, concepts, enriching them.A game was bornIt was early 2013. Almost a year had passed since I created the first prototype of Invertium. At that point, I thought I had enough free time and was full of motivation to make it work. I gave it a name: Graviteen. My initial idea, since the game was targeting mobile, was to make it colourful, a bit childish. I wanted it to be a very casual game at that point.

Even being a relatively small game, I thought I needed help with graphics, so I could focus on programming and sound. I contacted the girlfriend of a workmate, who was a graphic designer, and she accepted to collaborate. She does the kind of style I wanted then, something colorful and casual. But soon we realized she didn’t have time enough to dedicate to the project, so finally I decided again to go alone. I used to draw a lot in my childhood/adolescence, it was my only hobby for a long time, but since I started to focus on computers and music, at the age of 15-16, I progressively abandoned it. It was a good moment to go back to it and revive a long forgotten passion. And it was great!

When I decided to go solo, I realized I didn’t really want to create something others like, but something I really like, even sacrificing the possibility of selling more or whatever. I thought: I have a full time job that allows me to live, I want to make something I’m really proud of, something I enjoy, no matter if it sells or not, or receive good reviews or not. That’s why I decided to change the look and the story behind the game. I wrote a rough sci-fi plot to give it more soul and meaning, I changed the drawing style to a darker and more adult one. And I gave it a new name, based on the story I wrote: Invertium. Then, and only then, I saw my personality being part of the game itself.

NOTE: My workmates making jokes about the old “childish” character has definitely nothing to do with my decision of changing the style :-p

The good thing about doing everything in a game is that is hard to get bored. When you feel you did too much programming or you get stuck, you can make some graphics, or compose a new song.

So I seriously worked on the game for around three months. With a good design document, I organized the work in tasks, prioritized them and put them in a project management software. After several years of professional programming, I realized this is very important for me and my productivity. I programmed almost all the game mechanics, a touch based input and a first version of the UI. I also designed the main character and created the basic animations, draw the background of the first level and created a lot of assets and game objects, and even compose a song as main theme. That really started to look like a game!

A new halt, a new direction change
After several months of great progress, I had to stop for a while. The official version is that I helped one of my brothers with a project he started -it was actually true- but the truth is that I needed a pause. There were around four months of intense development, combining a full time job, 3 or 4 daily hours of gamedev -more during weekends- and my responsabilities as a father. It was really exhausing. Rewarding and funny, but exhausting.

I stopped all summer 2013. After the summer I started again, but at half throttle. I fixed some bugs, made some minor improvements, some graphics and not much more. I realized something: my drawing workflow was really really slow. I wanted to give a cool art to the game and I went for a hi-res 2D handmade drawings and animations. It was a total mistake. The results were cool, I was very proud of them, but being realistic the time I had to spent to create such an art was huge to finish the game in a fair amount of time. With that problem in mind, I did a few tests trying to make low-res versions of these graphics.

But, once again, I had to stop. I changed my job and moved from Granada -in South Spain- to Madrid. That meant a lot of time wasted looking for a flat there, all the relocation stuff, the accommodation to a new place and job… This leads this story to the phase where I am right now.As a New Year’s resolution for 2014, I decided to go for it again and finish the game. But I took some decisions I was thinking about during the last months. The first one was to replace all the graphics with pixel art versions of them. It was obvious that the hi-res graphics were too much for a one-man studio. Another decision was to change the platform. My idea of a mobile game, coming from past years, didn’t make sense with this project at this stage. I felt like the concept of the game, and its playability, was better for a PC or console game. I didn’t completely like the touch controls, I felt that a gamepad or a keyboard would be more appropiate. The good thing about all of this is I was creating my game using a multiplatform game engine -Shiva3D- so switching platforms was not really painful. I decided to release the game for PC, and then think if I could port it to another platforms.

And the last one: I needed to create a custom level editor. The Shiva3D tools, oriented to 3D games, weren’t very productive for my purpose, it used to take me a long time to create simple things. It took me a bit more than a month to build the level editor, also using Shiva3D. Well, it’s not really finished, there are things to improve, but is usable and works. The idea was to make it really simple and fast to create levels, what is really important for the project.

Current status

At this moment, after two and a half months since I continued the development, I think the game is ready to be shown to the world. Is not a lot what you can see in these screenshots though, but I hope is enough for you to have a general idea of what is this game about, and maybe to awake some interest.

Right now, I’m working in creating a few levels good enough to show the potential of the game, thinking in releasing some videos and a beta really soon. Programming is quite advanced, graphics for the first zone are almost finished, and I’ll be working the ones for the second zone in the next weeks, so I can show something a bit different. I also composed a few songs and created some sound fx. I really can see the end of the tunnel, and that gives me strength to continue.

Do you want to know how this comes to an end? Stay tuned

Cheers