Imagine you’re enjoying your day watching the Summer Game Fest, and after a streak of let’s say underwhelming trailers, you’re delusional enough to think to yourself “I bet I could do better than that” even though you have no experience as a video game developer. Yeah, that’s the story of how we decided to embark on this game-developing journey and how these past couple of months have been some of the most humbling yet enjoyable and fulfilling experiences we’ve had.

Hi, we’re Apamate Studio, a team of two brothers based in Caracas, Venezuela. We’re both artists with years of experience working on filmmaking; Wilmar, the oldest, as a film director, and Wilderman, the youngest, as a video editor. Together, we’ve worked on many filmmaking projects ranging from music videos and filming live shows to short films and documentaries.

We both have extensive experience working on animation as well. We’ve worked mainly on graphics animation and corporate work, but we thought our knowledge in animation could help us ease into making a video game.

We’re also big into video games to the point that it might have turned unhealthy sometimes (We’re looking at you League of Legends), so we thought we could make use of our artistic needs and knowledge to make a video game like the ones we enjoy so much playing.

Now, this might sound somewhat arrogant. Why would we think we’d be able to just make a video game out of nowhere when we have no experience? Making games is hard. It’s a titanic task. But we’ve decided we want to take this journey very seriously and treat the art of making games with as much respect and care as we would treat filmmaking. Even though it might be a bit delusional, from the moment we decided to pursue the idea of making a video game, we also decided we’d try to make the best game we could. We’re artists after all and no matter the art form, we want to make good art. But we know just how much effort goes into making great art. We know we start from a point of no experience, having to learn many aspects of game development from scratch, but we’re willing to put in the work because we love games.

This whole journey started with an idea for a game that would combine a bunch of aspects from different games the two of us love. But we quickly realized we weren’t prepared for the development of the game we had in mind just yet. So, instead of spending years in development hell for our first game, we decided to make a different game first, one that we could finish in a few months. And after one month of active game development of our first-ever game, we want to share what our experience of getting into this world has been like for us.

But before that, we would like to explain how we divided the tasks between the two of us. Because even though we’ve worked together for a long time in roughly the same career, the path we followed before landing on our current career has been wildly different, meaning we’re both interested in different things when getting into game development. Wilmar is in charge of writing the code for the game and the game design, and Wilderman is in charge of all of the art and music for the game.

Wilmar — Game Design and Programming

Hello, I'm Wilmar, the older brother. I will be in charge of programming and game design for our game. Before talking about the game, I'll tell you a little about my background.

At the age of 16, I started studying Systems Engineering. Although I also had a great inclination towards the art world, especially cinema, I believed that studying a "real career" was a much safer economic option. After three years, in which I did not manage to make much progress in the career, I finally made the decision to leave it and jump into the art world. I started coursing a Bachelor's degree in Arts, specializing in Film, and began to learn various skills that have been shaping my professional career so far: directing, photography, editing, animation, 3D design, among others.

Interestingly, during the career, I had my first exposure to video game design when, for the final project of one of my classes, we decided to create a very basic video game instead of a written work or a video. It would be the first time I used Unity, although I wouldn't have imagined that years later I would take it much more seriously.

After dropping out of art school (in the last semester, because I thought it was a waste of time to spend a year doing a senior thesis), I have worked as an editor, animator, director, and cinematographer. Our most recent focus has been on the music world, and we have made several music videos for different musicians in our country.

But well, let's get into the development of our video game. For this, I had to learn a bunch of new skills. I already had some previous programming knowledge (mainly javascript, which I had regularly used to make expressions and scripts for after effects), but a video game is much more complex than anything I had done before, so I had to learn practically everything from scratch.

Regarding this first game we're developing, we have defined a series of pillars that should guide all our creative efforts. Mainly, we want to create a 2D action game, shoot'em up, with fast and fluid gameplay, and that is extremely satisfying (even addictive) to play.

The first step to approach this was to ensure that the main character's control is fluid and responsive. Our character has three main actions: move, shoot, and dash. After many tests and refinements, we believe we have brought the character's control exactly to the point we wanted, and it's super satisfying to handle.

The next step we worked on was the movement of the enemies, which presented us with several new and quite complex challenges. We wanted the enemies to have a "swarm" behavior, which was not achieved by simply moving toward the player in a straight line. We tried various options so that the enemies could detect what was around them, move away from other enemies, and have a certain level of randomness in their behavior. But here we began to collide for the first time with performance problems, so we had to be ingenious and try many different methods until we found a way to have a large number of enemies on the screen without generating any lag.

Other systems we worked on this month include the infinite background system, the enemy spawn system, on-screen controls for the mobile version, and the leveling system, among others. Each new system presents a new challenge, and as the project grows, it becomes more and more complicated to maintain the balance and proper functioning of everything, but for now, we believe we have done a good job. We will continue to share updates on how everything progresses here.

Wilderman — Art and Music Direction

Hi! Wilderman here, I’m the youngest out of the two and I’m the one in charge of everything art-related in the team, as well as music and sound effects. I have no professional experience or formal education in these areas but drawing has been my biggest hobby for a long time. One day when I was 14 I picked up a pencil and said “You know what? I’m an artist now”, I’ve loved drawing ever since that day, and I’ve always wanted to use my drawing skills for something I’m proud of. Here I’d like to share my vision for what the game should look and sound like.

Since day 1, I had 3 ideas for the looks of the game that I wanted to try mixing:

-Neon cyberpunk setting

-80s anime color schemes.

-Body horror but make it cute.

Okay, let me explain. First of all, I have to come clean, I’m a big anime fan, so when we started considering the idea of making a game where you control a giant robot I said “Oh man that’s so anime”. More specifically, I thought of that retro 80s anime look where even though colors were pretty toned down and washed out, somehow they were very vibrant at the same time. It’s a look that even feels cozy to me, that no matter how horrifying the thing on the screen is, it invites you to keep on watching. It feels unthreatening.

That’s more of a vibe than a specific color palette or anything, but it’s a vibe I want for this game because even if the game is difficult we want you to be enticed to try again.

For that same reason, the concept of the enemies had to be toned down on the horror aspect of body horror. I’ve always been fascinated by body horror movies. I think the feeling that body horror awakes in you is the most visceral kind of terror, and I love it. Therefore, I want that for the enemies in our game. The idea of fleshy beings that feed on machines and become symbiotic beings with the machines was born out of my fascination with body horror. But I reckon absolute body horror makes you want to turn off the screen and stop watching, and the last thing we want is for people to stop playing. So I had to spend a lot of time drawing concepts for enemies that would look freaky enough but not terrifying. Enemies that would give you the chills but wouldn’t make you want to look away.

Finding the right balance between inviting and threatening has been the hardest thing so far and it’s been what I’ve spent most time on. In this month of development, I already learned something important; making designs that are both aesthetically appealing and functional for the gameplay experience is difficult. That’s a problem I ran into on the first day of development when I started working on the design for our main character.

We knew we wanted it to be a mecha-like robot, and at first, I thought that making a normal mecha with traditional proportions would be good enough. You know, like a Gundam or Mazinger Z type mechs, or maybe more biological-looking like in Evangelion. But when we put a 3D robot in the game as a placeholder I realized that, from the view of the camera, a traditional mecha just looks like a block of metal, you can’t easily differentiate between different parts of the character, and the silhouette isn’t clear at all. So I had to play around with the proportions. In the end, I came up with the idea of its torso being a second head. This solved the problems of clarity in-game for two reasons. It gives the character more personality because you can always see his face since his whole body is a face, and the torso and limbs of the character are clearly separated because they have a very distinct shape language.

This also gave us a path for more rounded shapes in the game which helps it feel unthreatening to play without being wholesome or cute. Remember, we don’t want it to look so threatening but we don’t want it to seem cute either, you’re in a war for survival after all, so it should feel somewhat serious.

As for the setting of the game, that’s where the neon cyberpunk idea comes into play. We want the background to be subtle so it doesn’t call for the attention of the player and allows the player to focus on the action. But I still wanted it to feel like a cyberpunk city packed with buildings and bright lights all around. Why? Because cyberpunk is just cool, that’s why.

On the side of music, I haven’t done anything specifically for the game yet. Music is one of those things we’ve had to learn from scratch, so I can barely produce anything yet. I remember I watched an interview with a musician once (I think it was FINNEAS), where he said that if you want to produce a good song, you have to produce 100 bad songs first. So I’m trying to roll out the bad songs before getting to work on music for the game. I can share my vision for the music of the game though.

I’ve spent some time this month thinking about what the game should sound like, and I listened to a lot of different music until I finally found what I think could be the sound of the game. Techno. It is a genre of music I used to listen to a lot when I was a teen, and I think it’ll be the perfect soundtrack for a game that’s all about getting into the trance of playing. There’s also a genre called raptor house that’s close to techno and was huge in our country when we were younger, and we would like to mix some traditional Venezuelan percussion into the music as well. So there could be some exciting blend of genres if I’m able to make it right.

Music has been such a big part of my life ever since I have memories. I remember my favorite thing in school was sitting in class and listening to music on my headphones while I pretended I was paying attention to the teacher. Music helped me become the person I am today, and I always wanted to try making music as well, so I’m taking this crazy idea of making video games as an excuse to finally do what I’ve wanted to do for so long but never managed to work up the courage to even try.

And I’d like to close on that note. The reason why we’re so excited about this crazy idea of making video games is that we realized the art of making games puts together a combination of skills that we either already have or skills that we’ve always wanted to learn but never had a way to justify spending so much time on it. Now we’re able to use the skills we already have and learn the skills we’ve always wanted to learn, and on top of that, we get to make our own video game? It sounds like a pretty good deal.