Classic 2D quest or how our two years of development went. Part 1
In this not very big post I will tell you about how we made ours, as it seemed to us, a small projector, and what we got from this.
Attention! Under the cut there are pictures and vidosiki, carefully, traffic!
For a start, a small digression: this article does not pretend to be the ultimate truth, but in it I will try to share all that we have encountered during development, and I hope that some of this will be useful for you. The story will be conducted on my behalf (I mean the programmer of the project).
')
Go!
The courtyard was late autumn of 2013, the train was slowly doing chukh-chukh and carried me along the tracks back to the place from where I went to serve a year ago, the service with each kilometer of the road remained farther away, and it only pleased me - finally everything debts paid and now you can do the real business! The idea to make my game has long been in my head, and I was hoping to put it into practice immediately upon returning home, the benefit of time for that now seemed to be plenty.
But I always had a problem: I couldn’t come up with a good background, the gameplay that would suit me, and which I would consider acceptable for the player, were thoughts to copy something, but I often threw them aside, because thousands even me, a player with experience, have become boring up of identical projects in the markets, and definitely did not want to do something the same. So in thought it took a couple of months. And fate intervened in the case ...
The fact that I am going to be engaged in the development of games, knew in principle many of my friends, in our places in Siberia it is an infrequent profession, I would say even a rarity, but as they say, if it occurred to one person, it means that it will come to mind something else. And on a happy tip from one of my friends I knocked on my friend in the future, with whom we created our joint project in the future.
Sanya Subbotinov also long ago wanted to create his own game, and the story began a long time ago, when he was still in school. The first version of the future game was collected on a flash and was a parody of quests in the game "Space Rangers", only in the castle and even with a built-in 3d scene, collected in Maya.
Now, Sanya, many years later, returned to the old topic and decided to sip a remake, and even made a story, designed in the form of about 60 pages of printed text, describing all the intricacies of the castle. It would seem that there is even a design document, and the matter remains for small, Sanya thought and decided to make a company on the newfangled system of a kundfand, namely on its Russian branch - boomstarter.
Vidos from those times remained in the depths of YouTube. Let's get a look:
Unfortunately, then, and probably now, bumstarter can not be called a place where you can collect the amount relevant to the development of the game. The fundraising company, having collected a couple of thousand rubles, has, alas, failed.
But Sanya decided not to give up and make the game on his own, and one fine day, on the advice of a mutual friend, he knocked on me in PM.
A huge plus was the fact that Sanya made a whole 60-page document with full texts of scenes and even built a tree of how the action will develop in the game. To be honest, this surprised me a lot, because I didn’t see the design of documents, and, frankly, I thought it was sensitive nonsense, from the time of examples 1C and their “The Ryaba Revenge”, but the availability of this material greatly facilitated the construction of the game in further.
At first we planned to make a game for mobile platforms, namely Android, I already had experience of building and releasing this system by that time and I knew about what was happening. iOS was also planned, but not primarily because of the high cost of development and the lack of the necessary hardware.
So, the plan was simple - you need:
a) do art because it needs a lot (there should have been 300+ scenes in the game)
b) take and try to make a game on some engine
With paragraph a) everything was more or less clear, but since neither he nor I really knew how to draw, it’s understandable that learning what I’d never done before is stupid, and Sanya began searching for the artist while I tried to dig in with different engines.
Engine Considering the features of the game that were supposed to be in it, the requirements were simple - this is a short story with its own gadgets. I dropped all new engines right away, because of possible problems with embedding droid, ios lotions at the launch stage, was angengine, but it was only under the droid. I tried libgdx, which at that time was still damp, cocos2d scared C ++, which I owned, but after using C # at the university, to which I no longer wanted to return. And finally, CoronaSDK was tested, which had quite a handy reference with examples and plug-ins that promised to be cross-platform. The engine at that time was paid (about $ 100), but for the sake of convenience it was possible to spend some money. The programming language used by Corona, too, I basically liked its simplicity - this is a well-known scripting language Lua.
In the meantime, in search of an artist, Sanya has climbed all the freelancing exchanges and sites related to game development themes, such as gcup.ru, gamedev.ru and others. Topics Ă la we are looking for talents and we make a super-game called tons of srach and comments from the sofa experts, who showered Sanya with their clever conclusions and diagnoses. However, Sana'a managed to successfully send them all to the forest and spam-spam-spam ... After some time, we still found a couple of talents and were able to get started.
At first, of course, we needed to create a vision of what our future character would be, and by about February we had the first sketches:
After a couple of samples, we finally came to what approximately corresponded to the desired:
A start was made and we proceeded to the construction of scenes of the game itself:
Sketch scene
Monochrome scene
Ready scene of the game
The first version of the main screen of the game, it will change much later
Then something happened that we did not expect, namely, the human factor. We worked with two artists: at first they drew scenes, interacted with us, and everything seemed to be going well, but at one point the artist just disappears and no longer communicates with us. After waiting some time, we began to search for another artist to continue the work, the situation repeated again. Belissimo!
The only thing that perhaps unites these two cases is that the artists were girls - creatures, as is known, with their cockroaches in their heads. At this interaction with individuals of the opposite sex as artists, we decided to engage.
In the meantime, we still added a little art, from which I have already collected a demo in CoronaSDK:
Run in embedded emulator
Running the game on the phone
Impressions about the engine? Well, in general - an interesting thing, but now, already looking at this engine in retrospect, I understand that you can do this only with a fairly simple project: neither normal class management, scattered data on a bunch of separate .lua files, wrappers for the interface and. etc. In general, this is a working system, on which, if you dodge, you can make a project, but this does not compare with how to write in a normal good OOP language like C # or Java. Thus, having scored a couple more demos, having run a couple of times on the phone, I still realized that I didn’t want to write a whole project on CoronaSDK.
In addition, Unity3D was tested (at that time it didn’t support 2D work, it would take a lot to cut it myself and try to wrap it in 3D space, having missed a couple of days with the camera and doing a couple of tutorials, I abandoned the case) Construct for games on the newfangled HTML5, but this engine was very sharpened for its components and also thrown to the side.
In the end, I realized one thing for myself: I want to have such a tool that would be flexible enough for a specific task and potentially have a supply of opportunities for more. From the point of view of a particular game, this, of course, was an exaggerated demand, but in general one thing can be said: I needed not just an engine, but an engine with a bias in the framework for creating games, and so at that time for me there was only one - LibGDX.
Sanya, continuing to spam the forums of all that is possible in the search for an artist for the game, was finally able to run into, as I would say, a real brulyant. Zhenka Shantarin - a very talented artist - decided to join our company. All the subsequent art that is in the game is the creation of his hands. The first sketches he made really pleased us: he was perfectly able to convey the atmosphere of the game that Sanya saw. I would call it fate.
Well, the truth is not exactly the fate ... Zhenya already had sufficient experience of working not only with games, but also with other projects of game themes, including card games, where he also acted as an artist, won and marks for participating in competitions, well etc. In general, he was and is a man advanced in terms of graphics!
Interface Sketches
One of the new art
And one of the training videos created by the same author:
Sketches
In general, Zhenya could! At that pace, we moved on: Sanya Napara and Zhenya discussed what and how to draw and put in the game, I wrote the code and tried the LibGDX engine, time went by slowly, and by the end of 2014 we had enough graphics and skills to release our The first small application in GooglePlay, namely the demo version of our future game.
Although at that time we didn’t even have half of what had to be done, and there was still a lot to do, we still decided that we should do so for the following reasons:
- we wanted to get experience publishing applications in the market
- we wanted to see how the players perceive the game of this genre (after all, text quests and short stories are a rather specific niche)
- we wanted to look at advertising revenue in the free app, and how players will react to it
In the end, we just wanted to have at least something whole, in order to evaluate our own work, because a whole year has passed already.
And in general, everything was successful, the reviews on the market were quite positive, and the average rating at that time was 4.4 points, which did not seem so bad.
Next time I will talk about how we moved to the greenlight, how they passed, what they did, how they promoted, and what 2015 brought us.
To be continued…
Attention! Under the cut there are pictures and vidosiki, carefully, traffic!
For a start, a small digression: this article does not pretend to be the ultimate truth, but in it I will try to share all that we have encountered during development, and I hope that some of this will be useful for you. The story will be conducted on my behalf (I mean the programmer of the project).
')
Go!
Prehistory
The courtyard was late autumn of 2013, the train was slowly doing chukh-chukh and carried me along the tracks back to the place from where I went to serve a year ago, the service with each kilometer of the road remained farther away, and it only pleased me - finally everything debts paid and now you can do the real business! The idea to make my game has long been in my head, and I was hoping to put it into practice immediately upon returning home, the benefit of time for that now seemed to be plenty.
But I always had a problem: I couldn’t come up with a good background, the gameplay that would suit me, and which I would consider acceptable for the player, were thoughts to copy something, but I often threw them aside, because thousands even me, a player with experience, have become boring up of identical projects in the markets, and definitely did not want to do something the same. So in thought it took a couple of months. And fate intervened in the case ...
The fact that I am going to be engaged in the development of games, knew in principle many of my friends, in our places in Siberia it is an infrequent profession, I would say even a rarity, but as they say, if it occurred to one person, it means that it will come to mind something else. And on a happy tip from one of my friends I knocked on my friend in the future, with whom we created our joint project in the future.
Sanya Subbotinov also long ago wanted to create his own game, and the story began a long time ago, when he was still in school. The first version of the future game was collected on a flash and was a parody of quests in the game "Space Rangers", only in the castle and even with a built-in 3d scene, collected in Maya.
Now, Sanya, many years later, returned to the old topic and decided to sip a remake, and even made a story, designed in the form of about 60 pages of printed text, describing all the intricacies of the castle. It would seem that there is even a design document, and the matter remains for small, Sanya thought and decided to make a company on the newfangled system of a kundfand, namely on its Russian branch - boomstarter.
Vidos from those times remained in the depths of YouTube. Let's get a look:
Unfortunately, then, and probably now, bumstarter can not be called a place where you can collect the amount relevant to the development of the game. The fundraising company, having collected a couple of thousand rubles, has, alas, failed.
But Sanya decided not to give up and make the game on his own, and one fine day, on the advice of a mutual friend, he knocked on me in PM.
Winter - Spring 2014
A huge plus was the fact that Sanya made a whole 60-page document with full texts of scenes and even built a tree of how the action will develop in the game. To be honest, this surprised me a lot, because I didn’t see the design of documents, and, frankly, I thought it was sensitive nonsense, from the time of examples 1C and their “The Ryaba Revenge”, but the availability of this material greatly facilitated the construction of the game in further.
At first we planned to make a game for mobile platforms, namely Android, I already had experience of building and releasing this system by that time and I knew about what was happening. iOS was also planned, but not primarily because of the high cost of development and the lack of the necessary hardware.
So, the plan was simple - you need:
a) do art because it needs a lot (there should have been 300+ scenes in the game)
b) take and try to make a game on some engine
With paragraph a) everything was more or less clear, but since neither he nor I really knew how to draw, it’s understandable that learning what I’d never done before is stupid, and Sanya began searching for the artist while I tried to dig in with different engines.
Engine Considering the features of the game that were supposed to be in it, the requirements were simple - this is a short story with its own gadgets. I dropped all new engines right away, because of possible problems with embedding droid, ios lotions at the launch stage, was angengine, but it was only under the droid. I tried libgdx, which at that time was still damp, cocos2d scared C ++, which I owned, but after using C # at the university, to which I no longer wanted to return. And finally, CoronaSDK was tested, which had quite a handy reference with examples and plug-ins that promised to be cross-platform. The engine at that time was paid (about $ 100), but for the sake of convenience it was possible to spend some money. The programming language used by Corona, too, I basically liked its simplicity - this is a well-known scripting language Lua.
In the meantime, in search of an artist, Sanya has climbed all the freelancing exchanges and sites related to game development themes, such as gcup.ru, gamedev.ru and others. Topics Ă la we are looking for talents and we make a super-game called tons of srach and comments from the sofa experts, who showered Sanya with their clever conclusions and diagnoses. However, Sana'a managed to successfully send them all to the forest and spam-spam-spam ... After some time, we still found a couple of talents and were able to get started.
At first, of course, we needed to create a vision of what our future character would be, and by about February we had the first sketches:
After a couple of samples, we finally came to what approximately corresponded to the desired:
A start was made and we proceeded to the construction of scenes of the game itself:
Sketch scene
Monochrome scene
Ready scene of the game
The first version of the main screen of the game, it will change much later
Then something happened that we did not expect, namely, the human factor. We worked with two artists: at first they drew scenes, interacted with us, and everything seemed to be going well, but at one point the artist just disappears and no longer communicates with us. After waiting some time, we began to search for another artist to continue the work, the situation repeated again. Belissimo!
The only thing that perhaps unites these two cases is that the artists were girls - creatures, as is known, with their cockroaches in their heads. At this interaction with individuals of the opposite sex as artists, we decided to engage.
In the meantime, we still added a little art, from which I have already collected a demo in CoronaSDK:
Run in embedded emulator
Running the game on the phone
Impressions about the engine? Well, in general - an interesting thing, but now, already looking at this engine in retrospect, I understand that you can do this only with a fairly simple project: neither normal class management, scattered data on a bunch of separate .lua files, wrappers for the interface and. etc. In general, this is a working system, on which, if you dodge, you can make a project, but this does not compare with how to write in a normal good OOP language like C # or Java. Thus, having scored a couple more demos, having run a couple of times on the phone, I still realized that I didn’t want to write a whole project on CoronaSDK.
In addition, Unity3D was tested (at that time it didn’t support 2D work, it would take a lot to cut it myself and try to wrap it in 3D space, having missed a couple of days with the camera and doing a couple of tutorials, I abandoned the case) Construct for games on the newfangled HTML5, but this engine was very sharpened for its components and also thrown to the side.
In the end, I realized one thing for myself: I want to have such a tool that would be flexible enough for a specific task and potentially have a supply of opportunities for more. From the point of view of a particular game, this, of course, was an exaggerated demand, but in general one thing can be said: I needed not just an engine, but an engine with a bias in the framework for creating games, and so at that time for me there was only one - LibGDX.
Summer-Autumn 2014
Sanya, continuing to spam the forums of all that is possible in the search for an artist for the game, was finally able to run into, as I would say, a real brulyant. Zhenka Shantarin - a very talented artist - decided to join our company. All the subsequent art that is in the game is the creation of his hands. The first sketches he made really pleased us: he was perfectly able to convey the atmosphere of the game that Sanya saw. I would call it fate.
Well, the truth is not exactly the fate ... Zhenya already had sufficient experience of working not only with games, but also with other projects of game themes, including card games, where he also acted as an artist, won and marks for participating in competitions, well etc. In general, he was and is a man advanced in terms of graphics!
Interface Sketches
One of the new art
And one of the training videos created by the same author:
Sketches
In general, Zhenya could! At that pace, we moved on: Sanya Napara and Zhenya discussed what and how to draw and put in the game, I wrote the code and tried the LibGDX engine, time went by slowly, and by the end of 2014 we had enough graphics and skills to release our The first small application in GooglePlay, namely the demo version of our future game.
Although at that time we didn’t even have half of what had to be done, and there was still a lot to do, we still decided that we should do so for the following reasons:
- we wanted to get experience publishing applications in the market
- we wanted to see how the players perceive the game of this genre (after all, text quests and short stories are a rather specific niche)
- we wanted to look at advertising revenue in the free app, and how players will react to it
In the end, we just wanted to have at least something whole, in order to evaluate our own work, because a whole year has passed already.
And in general, everything was successful, the reviews on the market were quite positive, and the average rating at that time was 4.4 points, which did not seem so bad.
Next time I will talk about how we moved to the greenlight, how they passed, what they did, how they promoted, and what 2015 brought us.
To be continued…
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/338074/
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