EyeMakeGames

Greetings. I've been working on and off on Clash of Wizards for a while now, 1 year on January 2017 if I survive *o*!
I suppose I'll introduce myself. My name is Matias E. Vazquez, I am from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
I've been working as a 3d artist/animator since 2008. At first in a studio, and after their bankruptcy, as a freelancer from my home sweet home. I was thrilled to work from home, yet, something wasn't quite right. It was the fact that I worked re-skinning simple mobile games most of the time. That means, getting one game, changing the art assets, and calling it a different game. That, for as many times as you can imagine... The original game itself, most of the time was itself a copycat of a popular/successful game of the time. One of my clients sent me tons of assets from the asset store and my job was to go through them and come up with different themes and optimize them for mobile. Sounds like easy money, and I guess it was, until your artistic skills start to deteriorate from lack of practice, and your brain starts shutting down from the repetitive nature of the process. Sounds like a shitty deal to me, and it doesn't sit right with my moral/ethic code either, no thanks.
Anyway, at some point I found the time to do an "Intro to Programming" course, which set me on my way to learn C# for Unity. Next, I made my own crappy mobile game:
Play.google.com
Thanks to which I grounded my programming knowledge, and gave myself confidence to tackle something a little bit more ambitious. It also helped me debunk the naive notion that making a free game and monetize it with ads on Google Play gives you money. With millions of active users perhaps it does, but hey, look at how many people read this blog, not too many I'm sure. Getting millions of active users is totally beyond me, and I'd be out of my element attempting such a thing.

Clash of Wizards started as my second attempt at the android mobile market due to my ignorance of the fact that there existed other options for game developers. It was hard to resist the vast asset library I had, so aside from the environment, wizards, and the power crystals, I thought I would use store assets for everything else. When I started this game, I didn't even know about Steam Greenlight, and the whole indie world. That's correct, I did not know about the existence of indie developers. I watched "Indie Game - The Movie", and then the whole world started making sense to me.

After discovering "indies" and Steam Greenlight, I'm going for a PC game now. I've been polishing my zBrush skills and learning Substance Painter with one of the new characters as my guinea pig:

Seems to me that Steam is the way to go for new indie developers nobody knows nor cares about.

It'll take me longer, but yeah, I'm going to use PBR materials and model/animate the rest of the models even though I have a ton from the asset store. I believe a good character also helps sell the game.
Here's the environment re-textured in Substance Painter:
It's coming along... I should try different HDR maps to bake the global illumination with. Here I'm using a forest HDR because it looked great on the Viking Dwarf model. The greens reflected on the volcanic ground on the right seem a little funky to me, yet the grass looks pretty good... I wonder how I could mix 2 HDRs to bake the GI.

Here's the old mobile friendly version:

The Viking Dwarf will take up four squares - he's a big dwarf this one ;)


The tree was made following this technique. Best tree I ever made :)

Well, you can try the first demo version I uploaded, but many things are changing.
The biggest gameplay change is that the characters move and fight automatically - no more zooming in and clicking desperately. Thanks to Hindsight (50:00) for that suggestion..

I'm going to make a large world map for the level selection. It'll start out on the wizard's humble cabin location, and end on the evil wizard's dark huge castle. Each location will consist of 10 levels. 5 locations for a total of 50 levels? I think that's ok, is that ok?. I also want to add multiplayer. Honestly, I'm terrified of engaging the multiplayer development since I've never done it before. However, I think nothing is impossible with the awesome unity community out there - always present, killing every bug, every step of the way.

I will also add a nice introduction with a "story". It'll be a very simple story like: After 1000 years, the evil wizard is back to enslave the world in darkness. I want to tell it using an interactive comic type of story-telling technique. Here you can see an example of what I'm talking about. I'll use different cameras for each frame and in each piece you can point and click for stuff to happen, and immerse yourself in the tale. I think it'll be a nice little challenge, and if it works out as I envision it, I'll make a web build of only that to use as a teaser.

Well, I'll be doing that for some days, and some other days I'll be adding stuff to the game:

The list of spells for the first location is as follows:
Level 1: What you start with:
Power Crystal: Mana collection (equivalent to Plants Vs Zombies Sunflowers)
Knight: Attacks + Conquers enemy squares
Level 2: Archer
Level 3: FireBall - (up to here currently developed on present date).
Level 4: Catapult
Level 5:
Wall: Takes a lot of damage to destroy - able to spawn an archer or catapult on top.
This completes the 6 slot spell UI.
Level 6:
The Store is introduced (presented as a funny character with a horse wagon store - something like this)
In the store you can use the coins you've been picking up to purchase temporary upgrades for your summoned characters. Things such as:
- Berzerker mode (one hit kills for maybe 10 seconds)
- Greater speed
- Heal unit or units in area
- Special attack (unique for each unit)
- Invincibility - receives no damage for x time.
- auto-collect mana
- Triple fireball
These abilities run out, you can only use as many as you buy, so you'll want to collect those coins ;)

Level 7: "Viking Dwarf" - Slow movement, but devastating hammer hits/conquers 2 rows at once.
From here on you select the spells you'll use for each level - max 6 (as in Plants Vs Zombies).
Level 8: Meteor Shower
Level 9: Dragon flies in and fries enemies.
Level 10: I may add a special boss for each region's final level - one giant monster taking up the entire evil grid area (5x4 blocks). You'll have infinite mana for this one and no need to spawn power crystals.
When you defeat him you beat the region, the evil wizard retreats, you follow.

The final final level (Level 50), is the evil wizard's castle. The grid will be huge for that one. One long battle where you siege the castle and break the wizard's staff as he begs for mercy.

Estimated time to get it up on Steam Greenlight? Don't even ask, I don't want to think about it really - it's unreal to make an estimate really, anything I say will be bs. I'm enjoying every single bit of the process, lets not spoil it with dates and pressure :) Slow and steady is my motto.
I'm also a music aficionado, so I'm making the music as I go too. The quality of the drums on the demo soundtrack is crappy, but I'll fix that using drumagog which I recently discovered. Fixes, fixes, fixes...
Yup, I got me a hands full, but I'm happy with my vision for it and taking my time and really doing my best on everything is what at the end of the day feeds some motivation back in. When you yourself approve of how it's coming along - that's quite gratifying itself. I believe this will be a good game, and surely, the best I can do with this particular idea, which I must finish before moving on to the next one.
I thank you for reading this far. And I hope to deliver a good game for your delight and amusement :)
Cheers!
Matias