I will never stop saying how a lot of the stuff I’ve been doing to make Hunter’s Tale a concrete game-
It’s not just a term of learning new tools, softwares or how to animate this or that movement. This has been my first real big project, and facing all that a sentence like that means has been for me the best improvement during the last months.
See how an idea this big has evolved, how we tried to fit the schedule but ending up doing everything with the right time but not in the way we planned…
There has been a lot of changes along the way: even if the graphics always stayed the same, the design of the game has changed a lot from our first draft; in terms of level design, the evolution was from an idea of open sidescrolling world, using depth just like Casle Crashers, then we thought having a traditional sidescrolling game would have been easier ad would have allowed us to build levels just like mazes, so that there would have been hidden areas and stuff like that. It felt wrong, though, and so we changed our mind again and made it for a “middle ground”, managing a way to have an open field with hidden areas. If you’ve seen one of the lastest videos you can see by yourself that it works quite well.
As far as my part, my schedule worked pretty fine, and even if I didn’t actually followed it (it depended on the days and what the coder guy needed) as long as it took me that amount of days to finish the animations for that character, who can concern about the fact that those days were mixed up and I did something different in between? Also, I think it helped not going insane about doing the same element for too much time: for example, it took me 4 weeks to finish all the main character animation, but I didn’t work only on the character for an entire month, I changed my topic everyday. I can say that the method worked very well, as I finished all my graphic work way earlier than I though. That didn’t mean my job was ended, of course.
Another important thing I learned is how you can end up doing completely different things. As for today, I did the graphics, the inengine level design of some levels, looked around the web for sound effects, recorded in a small studio other sound effects, managed the pr for the game so that the more people possible would have heard about it, helped the musician defyning the tone of the music pieces, writtend the dialogues…and that list is still counting! In the future I will edit the trailer and I’m curious, if we will choose to o crowdfunding, to see how we will manage that eventually.
That doesn’t mean that in terms of graphic I learn nothing: as I’ve said million times, I’ve faced for the first time how to animate man, figures, how to deal with a lot of different elements in the world of pixelart, both while I was doing all those other tasks
In the end it was just like running a small studio, and that’s been he most exciting and interesting thing to do. I’m trying to get some rest too.
(not just) Architecture for Videogames 