The developers of InSomnia role-playing game talked about the creation of their complex RPG game. It’s a great project with an awesome look and incredible design.
The developers of InSomnia role-playing game talked about the creation of their complex RPG game. It’s a great project with an awesome look and incredible design. Check it out!
Introduction
We gathered with my friend few times a week to discuss some ideas, as we were very impressed by the potential of video games. This is how we started the studio and began searching for members of the team, learned the tools we needed to develop the project etc. We are not geniuses or something like that, I don’t believe in things like that. We worked hard month by month, found each and every member one by one. Yes, our project is very ambitious, and we learned to live with that. Sure now I understand it would be more logical to start with something simpler, but now it’s too late. Thankfully everyone in our team shares my views and together we are ready to finish what we have started.
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Insomnia
Visuals were always very important to me. I always wanted to create things like that. Sure, story, plot, combat and other mechanics are very important as well. So basically yes it’s safe to say we concentrate on visual aspect, dialogs, and combat.
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Visually our project is very strong. We were inspired by industrialists and futurologists of 20-40 years and art-deco style. And of course Metropolis movie had a huge influence as well. We had a goal to create a unique visual style and I believe we have succeeded in this.
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Going to UE4
We started out with our own engine but this appeared to be a very complicated and non-effective way to develop the game. We spent more time working on tools we could use than on game itself. By that time U4 became very accessible and we decided to switch to make the whole process easier and faster. U4 is perfect for all our needs.
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Production Process
This was very hard in the beginning – the lack of experience and right people didn’t make it any easier. Now we have 4 people developing assets for levels layouts and 3 people to design the levels themselves. Both our lead designers are very professional and talented. I talk to them, they give tasks to other designers and then we discuss the results together.
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Useful Tools
Articy: Draft SE, U4, Trello, Tortoise SVN. These are the ones we use a lot.
Building Gameplay
This is probably one of the hardest tasks that we are occupied with right now: testing, iterations and even more testing. Achieving this goal seems to be rather difficult: everything should click correctly including animations, surroundings, AI and other mechanics. The amounts of things we need to test is tremendous – sometimes it takes up to 100 tries to test one given quest to make sure everything works the way it should. More than that we still need to optimize this process generally and I see this as our primary goal right now.
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Crowdfunding
The main thing to do is to have a good detailed description of your project, and start making people know that you are going to Kickstarter. Send letters to game journalists, let’s players, prepare presentational materials etc. And you know what? It’s just a first part of work, as many people think it’s already enough and when their campaign goes live they think that money will just flow and do nothing more. And that is a huge mistake.
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Challenges
The main two problems most developers face is the lack of time and resources, at least this what happens in our studio from time to time. You should plan things and in the same time to be ready that there is always a chance that something will require more resources and effort than you have expected initially. Sure everyone wants to work being performed as fast as it is possible and in best way, but in reality this doesn’t always happen this way. So whenever you plan remember about this extra time you might need. And of course hard work and belief in what you do is crucial at all times.