Category Archives: Marketing

43rd Weekly Update : Harder than you think !

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Final version of the Character Sheet & Inventory

Final version of the Character Sheet & Inventory

Ouch ouch ! Creating video games is harder than you think. Creating a good video trailer is harder than I think..! :mrgreen:

So this week, I spent most of my time on the video trailer, which made me realize that I’m no Stanley Kubrick.1

At 1st, I thought about doing a trailer listing & demonstrating all the main features of the game. A lot of Indie games do trailers like that. It’s relatively easy to design, it requires almost only normal game footage, and it’s efficient at presenting the game.

But then I thought it wasn’t the right way for Dungeon Guardians. DG is an adventure, an experience, more than a list of features. So I decided I should do a trailer telling a story, to connect more emotionally with the viewer and let him want to know more about the game afterwards. Ok, it sounded like a great idea, but how was I supposed to do that, especially with very limited assets outside of game footage ?! So with more hard thinking, I designed a decent storyboard, starting with the intro sequence from the game and going into some distinguishable elements of the game (exploration, fights, puzzles).

I found a freelance motion designer to edit all that, but unfortunately, it seems he’s no Stanley Kubrick either. He gave me about 0 idea nor feedback for make the storytelling of the trailer compelling, so I had to do all the thinking by myself. :-?

Fortunately, he has a good artistic sense and he’s able to do nice effects & edit, so the final result should be good.

But with the 1st cut, I discovered a huge issue : basic track shots & rotating shots done manually with the mouse look awfully not smooth & unnatural in a trailer ! So I started by adding mouse smoothing. The result was already significantly better, but any movement done with the free camera mode of the map editor was still awkwardly linear & abrupt. I then added a system of recording & replaying waypoints and added a special curved interpolation between them. Tada, finally, professional camera movements ! :mrgreen:

So now, I’m waiting for the final cut from the motion designer and hoping the result will be good. Once done, I’ll be able to publish the game on Steam Greenlight, as I wrote the long & detailed description of the game this week.

Except the trailer, I wasn’t able to work on the Race bonus because my mind was not set to it (it happens!). So instead, I started to implement the payment & delivery process. It’s based on a Key system like for my tennis games, but with a simplified installation process.

Ok, so here’s the plan for this new week : get the game on Greenlight, do some PR to let the world knows about Dungeon Guardians, polish a few things in the game,2 add the Race bonus (this is one has been running away for weeks, now!). If I manage to do all that, then 1 week later, I should be able release the game !3  :-)

Cya next week.

  1. or maybe I’m the Stanley Kubrick of before he learned anything about movie ; who knows, maybe he’s started by doing crappy videos ! :-P  ↩

  2. mostly: give the possibility to write notes on the map ↩

  3. with the Rogue class missing ; it’ll be added a couple of weeks later ↩

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Advices for 2D/3D Artists looking to work for Indie game studios

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After my busy days looking for 2D artists, which were even busier than when looking for a 3D environment artist 1 year ago, I feel the urge to write a few advices for all 2D/3D Artist Freelancers, especially the ones looking to work for Indie game studios, by answering ads they found on Internet.

Basic Advices

  1. Indie game creators are poor, or relatively poor ; if they don’t have money at all, avoid to work for them, except if you need to get some experience ; and if they do have money, don’t expect them to have AAA budget
  2. when asked for your portfolio and a quote, actually link your portfolio and give a quote
  3. if you really don’t have time to give a quote (and that’s understandable, no problem), then at least provide your hourly rate, your location, and the price for 1 of your creation that somewhat matches what the ads was researching, so your possible future clients will have some idea if you’ll fit in their budget or not
  4. in your answer, specify if you’re full-time or part-time freelance, and how many years of experience you have (1) in general as an artist, (2) in game industry and (3) as a freelance
  5. prepare a list of references : once I want to hire you, I’ll demand the contact emails of a couple past studios who hired you, so they could recommend your work to me
  6. if your quotes or hourly rates are negotiable, or lower with the volume of work, specify it
  7. if you don’t have experience working in the game industry and looking to get a 1st job there, offer to do a test asset for free and then accept to work on low budget ; personally, I don’t have the time for that, but I’m sure a lot of Indie studios would be happy with such agreement ; check the background of the studio, though : if they don’t have any released game, or only poor games, it might not be the best place to acquire experience
  8. Do not offer to work on a hour or day basis if you’re asked for quotes ; in that case, the studio wants to pay a fee agreed upon for a set of tasks, not hire a temporary employee
  9. If you link to a game page to show your previous work, then detail what you did for this game, else it’s extremely not useful

Portfolio Advices

  1. do have a portfolio (there are a bunch of artists who just send a few pics by attachments 8-O )
  2. a blog is not a portfolio
  3. dropbox is not a good portfolio
  4. deviantart is a good portfolio ;)
  5. do have a portfolio with your best work : I won’t presume you’re able to do better than what I see in your portfolio
  6. show your best work 1st ; don’t let me browse through dozen of experiments or old creations before seeing your best work, because I might not do it
  7. if you have a lot of stuff in your portfolio, try to provide direct links to your creations relevant to the job offer
  8. theme your creations : so I won’t lose time trying to look for the kind of stuff that interests me
  9. do not have a portfolio with only a few pics linking to categories with more pics : seeing the homepage, I may think your portfolio is only these few pics, not click on anything and go away ; at very least, write the category name on each picture
  10. date your creations : so I’ll have some idea if you get better with the time
  11. if you want to work in the game industry, you need to have some game ready assets ; doodle, illustration and unfinished stuff can look nice, but they don’t tell me enough about the final product I’ll get if I hire you ; this is a major concern ; most 2D artists who contacted me have _zero_ game ready creations ; this only make sense for concept artists ; anyone else should be able to display finalized stuff
  12. If you even want to raise more your chances to get hired, create game ready assets for different styles : the most requested style is probably the cute cartoon style all mobile games use since a few years ; so you may want to start with that, but don’t end there ; I create game for PCs, cute mobile stuff doesn’t interest me ; so if possible, also create game ready stuff with scifi and/or heroic styles ; these are pretty standard style and you’ll catch the eyes of game studios a lot more ; if you do good scifi stuff, I’ll probably see you’re able to produce good heroic stuff (and vice-versa), but it doesn’t work for cute cartoon vs mature style
  13. if you never worked for game studios before, create game ready assets during your free time ; you don’t need a ton ; only 3 or 4 assets might be enough ; be sure to specify you created them to show your skills and that’s the level of quality your future clients may expect
  14. One advice especially for 3D artists : in addition of the date, specify the constraints of your work (ie: max 2000-polys), the target (mobile, PC, console) & the game or at least the studio who hired you for that creation  ; if you’re showing terribly low poly assets, but you say it was done for mobiles in 2010, then I’ll understand why. Without further indication, I’ll just assume this is your idea of “top” art and I’ll dismiss your candidature right away
  15. Do not prevent right-click ; I’m not going to steal your artwork, but I might want to see it in different sizes, or even maybe saving it in a folder with your name & details, for future reference

Resume Advices

  1. if possible, have a resume with your portfolio : it helps to know who you are
  2. in your resume, list the companies you worked for, with the dates ; if not all, at least the most important ones (by reputation & work amount)
  3. don’t forget to detail your education as well

 

Ok, hopefully these few advices will help some artists to find a job more easily… :)

27th Weekly Update : What’s Next ?

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Character Sheet & Inventory

Character Sheet & Inventory

 

Last week was spent on my tennis game & Steam, so I almost didn’t work on Dungeon Guardians.

This week, I’ll be busy with some stuff and I also need to rest a bit, so I’ll work on DG but not too much.

So this post is a good occasion to ask : what’s next ?

The current goal now is to put Dungeon Guardians on Steam Greenlight, to get a chance to sell the game on Steam ( = a lot more exposure than on managames.com ;) ).

To do so, I need a good video trailer. This means I need a finished GUI. Sound FX still need work, but it’s less important as the music will cover almost everything.

Right now, I still need to design 1 GUI part : the party creation process ; ie: at the start of the game, we’ll have to pick the members to add to our party, or create new ones by selecting their portrait, genre, class, etc…

So I’ll start to work on that very soon. Once it’ll be all designed, I’ll do the complete list of what textures, backgrounds, buttons, icons, portraits in the whole game I need to be done or redone, and I’ll look for some 2D artist(s) to do that.

Then I’ll integrate the result in the game, and I’ll look for a trailer specialist to create the required video, and then I’ll be able to create the game page for Steam Greenlight. Finally, we’ll have to wait a couple of months to see if the game gets enough votes to deserve the attention of the Steam team.

I’m not sure how long it’ll take to publish this Greenlight page, but I hope it’ll be around 1 month and half at maximum, so it’ll give enough time to gather votes before finishing the game development.

That’s all for now, cya next week ! :)

The Story So Far

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Beta 1 Screenshot

It all started back in end of 2008, when I grew tired of developing tennis games. I then thought of a list of games I could create. Several games came to mind, but my real favourite was an Ultima Underworld style of game (ie: an RPG with a single playable character in First Person View, in a dungeon). But I also thought about a classic square based Dungeon Crawler ; it seemed to be a good choice as the square by square movement and simpler settings made it possible for a 1-man team to create it.1

Time & years passed by, where I created updates & extensions for my tennis games, and also later on, I created a couple of game prototypes. One was a simple multiplayer RTS game, and another one was a puzzle game. Both didn’t motivate me too much, even if the RTS one had some interesting concepts in it, I felt I didn’t have the fire in me to spend 2 or 3 years working on it.

In the meantime, I also played a lot at World of Warcraft (the most popular subscription-based MMORPG ever at this date) and had been fascinated by its gameplay mechanisms, especially the tank/damage dealer/healer interaction & its replay value, and really thought it could work well in a single player RPG party game. I looked for a game like that, and couldn’t find any back in early 2011 (except for Dragon Age, but the concept wasn’t really similar as there was almost no healing during combat, nor any strong threat mechanisms).

So the idea of the Dungeon Crawler came back to me, but this time with a combat system inspired from World of Warcraft. My vision was even more enforced after I had discovered Legend of Grimrock (LoG) in middle of 2011, who was also a Dungeon Crawler inspired by Dungeon Master (but with many fundamental differences with Dungeon Guardians, we’ll probably come back to that in a future post). I thought the cautious way to proceed was to wait for LoG to be released and see if its sales were any good, but after a few months waiting, I had finished all my current work, and grew really excited by the idea of creating my own Dungeon Crawler, so I started to work on it on February 2012, just a few months before LoG release which turned out to be quite a success and confirmed that my choice of game was relevant (yes, I hope to sell it, I’m trying to make a living here ;-) ).

A few months of work passed by, which brought a lot of good stuff : a powerful map editor,  a prototype with basic gameplay ; everything was going smoothly and falling into place, and the concepts I wanted in my game were playing nicely together. In October 2012, I had finished an “Alpha 0″ which was containing most of the dungeon mechanisms (door, trap, etc…) and was ready to move on more advanced gameplay parts of the party management.

Unfortunately, some (bad) stuff happened in end of 2012, so I had to put the development of the game more or less on pause for almost a year.

I got back to it on end of 2013, motivation came back strongly, and on end of December, I released the 1st Alpha for public testing2 to be sure the game had a chance to be fun for other people than myself ! :-P

Feedback was good, but as the game was still lacking some important stuff, I did a 2nd Alpha a few months later, in April 2014, with almost all the game features (but missing most of content), which shown that the gameplay direction was good.3

So since then, I have been mostly working on adding content to the game : levels, creatures, loot, abilities, etc… A 1st Beta featuring 4 levels was tested by a few selected Beta testers, although it was not a real Beta, as only a small part of the game was actually near Beta state.4

Now, the Beta 2 of the game, featuring 8 levels, is almost done, and it might be released within the next few days. Stay tuned as I’ll be looking for a couple of additional Beta testers !

  1. The complete list of games can be seen in this Forum topic ↩

  2. some of the 1st Alpha test report has been done in this topic ↩

  3. 2nd Alpha can be found in this topic ↩

  4. Beta 1 screenshots can be seen in this topic ↩