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What is your game developing "routine"

A topic by WIM Games created Oct 03, 2017 Views: 871 Replies: 7

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I created this topic just to discuss how different developers make their games.

How do I do it?

WIM games is a two man team. The developer (me) and the marketing manager. As the only developer I have to thing about everything. I think that every good game should start with a good marketing plan. This is the job of the marketing manager but we discuss together about different ideas. After choosing what the game is going to be about I start with designing some basic and the most important models. I like to work with low poly 3D models because it is easier and I find it really interesting because of it's simplicity. After making the main character and a few objects I start animating and then scripting. After having everything basically set up I make some prototypes of how the game will work. What comes next is totally based on the ideas I will get while developing. I usually get the better ideas at the end of the development so the days before the release are really busy.

How do you do it?

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Paolo Fassin6 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

But I also deal with marketing, but with moderate success. While I have to have a good idea to create a video game. Find it in my head is almost always impossible. When I created the first version of a video game, the idea was came from the need to flirt witht a woman. I represented a message with colorful three-dimensional scrolling text over an image in motion, with an Assembler language program. She was a painter and did not have much interest in the computer, so I failed; but I kept the source code. Then a my animalist friend, complained of a colleague who do hunting on Wednesday and told me: "Let you do him a joke, paint him as many hunters who shoot him." I also merged sliding text with the demo for a final goal. In a month I built the first 16 Bit version. Then I had to create a sort of editor to define the levels. I invented the screenshots, which I draw AutoDesk Animator, unite images with my own program to create, in about three days, a game-level. After about 3 weeks the graphics were OK. I have programmed the sounds and the music with a language invented by me. Finally, I made the conversion to 32 Bit. In about 3 months. Et voilà, les jeux sont fait!

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WIM Games6 years ago

That's interesting. Bonne chance avec votre travail! ;)

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Mitron6 years ago(+2)

I do everything solo - dev, art, design, PR, blog etc. That means a lot of bottlenecks, especially since I have a full time job - I only do game dev as a hobby in my spare time! This means focusing on efficiency: simple art, simple game design, and any shortcut I can take in general. I found PR is a definite bummer, so you're a good spot if you have a friend handling this. The more time you can focus on game dev, the better!

No idea if working solo is a recipe for success, but enjoying it to date. I've got quite a few blog posts early on my website, for anyone interested to read straight into my brains :) A few months back I was frustrated that every development blog I was reading always started with what seemed a complete game to start with, so I decided to build a blog that would focus on the inception of building a studio + game. I came to understand why indie website always seem to start towards the end of a game creation: most devs leave it to the last minute to work on PR!

So my website is an attempt to document everything I have done from scratch - company logo, how I work, projects I was working on etc. My latest game Holey Suit has posts about it from its inception. Hopefully it's not too dull to read, but is relevant to your this post I guess ;)

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WIM Games6 years ago

Doing everything yourself is hard but I think that it's more enjoyable working with a game this way. I want to do the development myself because I love doing it and I consider it like a piece of art. I'm a student so I do indie development on my spare time but I see it like something more than just a hobby and I hope I can go further.

That's true that a lot of indie devs do the PR at the last minute, I've done it too. I've understood that doing the PR along with the development is much better and helps building an audience and a playerbase. Now my friend helps me with this sort of stuff but I also tweet a lot related to the development progress of my games. We've been quite busy this time but soon we'll have a website to and we'll post weekly blogs related to the development.

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Paolo Fassin6 years ago(+1)

What you said, from what I could understand, it seems to me true. Alone it is very difficult. Having at least one support person is what he would want. It would give us more successful. If I understood you, you believe that many games are published within a short time and are not complete, as for the potentialities of the original idea that are not fully exploited or perhaps because we was in a hurry to conclude. I'm partially agreed on this. It is also true that if you want to have a medium gain it makes no sense to spend a lot of time developing an idea without being sure that the public like this idea. Sometimes it is better to produce more in less time than to employ a lot for a great idea, but only for what we believe it to be.

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criacuervos6 years ago

I work alone, I'm still learning. I don't have much expertise, but a lot of time. I usually start with a very rough story idea (I make RPGs), then I create the maps, the ambience, and add music and sound effects. Out of the maps then comes the detailed story and the dialogues. Then I go back and develop the main thread of the story further. It's sort of a cycle, until the game is complete, but it always starts with the maps. For "Benji's Tale" (release on itch.io January '18) I used the "Journey of the hero" as a narrative structure. For "Moonstone Deep" (https://criacuervos.itch.io/moonstone-deep) the story was mostly inspired by the maps I created. Unconventional, but it works for me.

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Fasold Publishing6 years ago

I do everything solo as well! But I have found I just can't do some things at all (I can only draw stick figures) and I use freelancers for these jobs. Sometimes tricky and difficult, but I have found several freelancers with which I have a long standing relationship, which really make things much easier.

I always start with a map, to get a general overview of the game world, and then I start writing. (I make RPG's as well)

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