We are working in the game industry since 2014, but we didn’t publish any game of our own yet. Well, that not entirely true, because I made a small demo, called Mad Wizard for a Unity contest back then, but that was very early in my carrier. Although, we have a few never-finished projects.
In February (2019) we finally decided we will finish a game. We have a lot of ideas, but we want to make sure we can actually finish it. The first step was to determine the timescale and the amount of work we can spend on this project.
The Time Scale
Right now we don’t have any urgent project or freelancer work going on. We still need to maintain our Asset Store business and make updates for this blog. We want to rush this development, to make significant progress before the next freelance job comes in. After some calculation, we figured out we will have about 3-6 hours per day to work on this project.
The Scope
We used to play with AAA games, and because of this, our expectations were too high. This is a mistake we don’t want to do ever again. As an indie game studio, just two of us, we can’t afford this. We need to think on a smaller scale, that still motivates us.
First, we need to find the MVP (Minimal Valuable Product) of our game and decide if we can make it or not. We can expand the game with more features at any time later, but right now we need a simple, well-outlined concept.
The Concept
You play as a thief who has powers related to shadows. To complete her assignments, you must sneak by enemies. Shadow is where you are safe, and you can use the light sources to create a path to your goal.
We ended up with this short description, and I really like this. We had an idea of a game that involves shadows and stealth, originally we imagined this as a realistic game, but after we discussed our possibilities we ended up with a low-poly, cartoonish style.
Some of our reasons:
- Dotti already made five low-poly packages, that gives us a bunch of ready-to-use environment assets, and also a solid base to estimate the work for new elements.
- Low-poly games are aging slower than their realistic looking counterparts.
- The simple look makes shadow more recognizable, and our core feature will be based on shadows.
- We really love the look of the stylized models with vibrant light emitters together.
Here are some reference images for the art style we want to achieve:
That’s it for this week, hope you enjoyed this article. Next week we will focus on these feedbacks and questions.
We’ll see you all next week!
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