Birth of a game

Creating a game is hard work… You have to get art, programming, game design, sound, music all working together to form a coherent, expressive work… And all of these have their own stages of development, different for every developer and creator…

For example, art begins with the concepts, then goes onto the modeling, texturing, skinning, animating, world placement, etc…

But all games begin (or should begin) with an idea…

The idea for Grey started in August 2010. At the time, I was entering the Ludum Dare 18th 48-hour game development competition. The idea of these competitions is you are given a theme at a certain time, and you have to make a game from scratch with that theme, in 48 hours. You can’t use pre-built assets of any sort (graphics, sound, music), and the use of code is limited to some established engines or small frameworks without any game code in them. I really love participating in these, since I learn a lot about streamlining game development processes.

That time, the theme was “Enemies as Weapons”, and I did a game called “Conquest” (which you can download here – it’s buggy like hell, but it includes the full source!). The idea of the game was to take the old “Tower Defense” theme and use the creatures that are attacking as defenders. You have a castle and you have to defend it from hordes of enemies until the “super-spell” is ready and it wipes all enemies… Enemies have different types and move in predetermined ways. You can “possess” an enemy (by spending some mana) and he will attack nearby enemies in an automatic fashion…

The idea was crude and I didn’t have much time to implement it, but it got my brain thinking, specially three days after the competition ended: I was at the dentist and she was late, so I started writing down some notes:

Doesn’t seem like much, but at the time my brain was on overdrive… “What if I add a player character that has to be protected?”, “What if that player can move in a game world?”, “And if I add a RPG-type leveling system to the creatures?”, “What if we can control the creatures with more detail?”, “What if…”.

At this time, I was just thinking on improving the existing game, adapting it for the new things I wanted in it…

Unfortunately, I was starting a new job at the time, and I didn’t have time to actually implement any of the ideas I had, but they were kept in the backburner…

Some months later (can’t say exactly when), I was thinking about this game again, and I was planning a story that could support the game mechanics I was musing about… After some hours of thinking, it hit me: Grey (the character, not the game) was born! I won’t say what exactly attracted me to this character (that would be a huge spoiler), but I felt the character, he was powerful in my mind… I wanted to make a game with him! What was just a support for some game mechanics had become a strong concept by itself, and I really wanted to work on it. The idea was so strong, I was loathe to even share it (and the spoilers) with my closest friends, so that I could implement it and then could see their expressions when they found out the depth of the character!

I soon dropped down from the clouds and started “recruiting” some of the old Spellcaster Studios team, so that we could go back into game development. This was easy, since we all worked together at the new place, and we all still love games!

The main problem was that we only had our after-work time to work on anything, so we decided to start small… First we started designing an episodic shoot’em up game called “Ray Gunn” (similar at first glance to titles as Alien Breed and Shadowgrounds); while we were still in the concept/design phase, we had to do some iOS applications for work, we found it nicer than we expected and we shifted our focus from the (already megalomaniac) shooter to a more iOS/Android-friendly game: “Cell.Action”.

We completed the main code and art for the game when our artist fell ill for a couple of months… Needing him to progress on the game, and the fact that this kind of “casual” game doesn’t appeal that much to me, I started dabbling with my world editor application again…

All through this, I never stopped thinking about Grey (at the time, I thought of it as “The Summoner Game”), and I was musing about doing the game by myself, just as a proof of concept.

In the meantime, the rest of the team was looking at the lack of progress on “Cell.Action” and were considering about quitting (finishing an indie game is hard work, from a motivational standpoint), but we decided to do a last try.

We decided to do it a bit differently than most times: instead of thinking of a game that we could actually build and sell (in essence, a “commercial game”), we decided to think about a game that WE actually WANTED to build… a game WE wanted to play… a game WE wanted to see!

The rationale behind this was that we spent a lot of time on Spellcaster Studios trying to play it safe (we had other responsibilities), mixing games (that nobody paid us to develop) and applications (that we had clients for) : we had to put bread on the table…

That got under our skin, and made us have difficulty in thinking in any other way, and more importantly, stopped us from thinking like we did when we weren’t “professional”…

But now, we’re not professionals anymore: we have a normal paying job, and games are something we do for fun, so we should have fun developing them!

From this process, I decided to divulge my idea for Grey, and oddly enough, everybody loved it (oddly because normally the selection of a development idea is not unanimous by a long shot). We saw this as a good sign, and we proceeded to cull the idea so that we could actually implement it… from there, came the episodic nature, ideas for process streamlining, etc…

But the important thing is that an idea that I had for more than one year was finally underway to be implemented!