Realignment

Posted on by dusklightstudios
Today marks a slight reboot of my company’s work. For the past weeks, well over 2 months time, I’ve spent almost all my time on external work, getting hired for an assignment to work together on creating a game for Manus VR. It was an experience I needed, but it was also an incredibly hefty reminder why I’m here, and why I’ve started this little company.
I won’t, and actually can’t just dive straight back into game development just yet. I need to figure out for myself what it is that I really want to accomplish with DuskLight Studios. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time now, and it will always be something that will evolve as time goes. The core of it I’m pretty sure of.
What I want to do, with my life, with this little business, is to create.
Creating playful experiences for others and myself to enjoy. Whether it be exploring something on your own or playing together, either with or against each other. Whether on mobile, PC or anything else. I’ve always loved creating something interactive and I’ve loved seeing people run through it, letting me know what they think, what they feel, what’s good and what can be better. I’ve done this since I was a kid, and it’s exactly that which I want to spend my time doing.
To start with, I’m still going to develop for mobile devices. I know the market is oversaturated, but I feel this type of touch based interaction is what I want to create for first.
To get the game to whoever wants to play it, I’m going to drop the manual emailing list and move over to the Google PlayStore. Kind of like a public pre-alpha for mobile games, and I hope a lot of them. To get feedback, I’m going to drop the google forms I used, and I’m including something directly into all prototype apps. With that process streamlined, it’s my hope I can provide everyone with something to try out and gather the data I need to improve the games and my way of thinking on the development of these games.
Create, show, improve both the games and me. I guess it’s exactly what I’ve always done, and what I’ll always love doing. Let’s use that to reach something great.

Prototyping

Posted on by dusklightstudios

At DuskLight Studios, mobile game prototypes are being developed before an actual project is started proper. There are so many ideas and so many mechanics to play and create with, it’s impossible to know what works, and what fails, without trying them out.

Prototyping stands at the core of the company’s plan. Experimentation with different mechanics and sensations, brought to and tried out on the mobile platform. Even when a full project is in development, prototyping will remain a important part.

Ideas

Idea List.png

At the time of writing, there are a total of 24 gameplay ideas. Not all are great, some are already abandoned. Each idea is ranked by two estimations. An estimation on their ‘value’ (how much impact it delivers, or how fun it is to play) and an estimation on their ‘scale’ (how long does it take to develop with current available resources).

The ideas with the highest estimated (value : scale) ratio are generally the first to be prototyped. Smaller scale games take priority, though, since in my opinion taking on gigantic projects would be unwise for a one-developer team.

Prototype Art

NodeGuardian Small.png

I’m a game developer mainly in the form of programming. Luckily, I can draw and put together somewhat of a matching style, but I’m no artist.

Because of my limited ability to create art assets, and the generally long time it takes to create art, I aim for an ‘abstract’ style for the prototypes. Something easy to change and adjust to proper art when it’s turned into a proper project. I feared the abstract style would be a problem, but it’s been working great for every concept so far.

Modules

Every prototype is the same in the most basic sense. There is a lot of functionality that all prototypes end up using. For ease of development, improved performance, persistence, sound, time, etc. Little bits of tech I’ve developed to more easily use the Unity engine.

It’s not rare for prototypes to have matching gameplay mechanics as well, such as the spawning of enemies or world segments of a scrolling view. For that, modules such as a parallax background, wave spawning or even a complete 2D weapons system are very useful to save precious development time.

Testing

Development of prototypes is great, as well as the development of tech modules to support the prototypes. But it’s useless if I don’t get some proper results on which prototype works, and which does not. To get to know that, I need people to test them.

In the first week, I collected a list of volunteers that wanted to help me test my games. From this list (~35 people), about 4 to 8 actually test and respond. The feedback is useful, but far from conclusive.

Far more useful testing results come from face-to-face playthroughs. Directly observing the actions of the player and his or her responses deliver far better results. With family, friends and strangers at networking events, I test my games to see what they think of them, often with concrete information on what can be improved or added.

My next step in testing is to open up the Google Developer Console, and use it’s Alpha test functionality to send the games directly to everyone involved. I will combine this with an in-app feedback report functionality for each prototype, so people can easily tell me what they think.

And that’s what I do with DuskLight Studios. Develop mobile game prototypes and test them!

DuskLight Blog

Posted on by dusklightstudios

The DuskLight Blog has finally been opened up and is all set to go. With mostly everything I’ve been working on, it took awhile to get to this point. There’s a lot more to figure out in theme, tools and style than I initially expected.

But now it’s here, and I’m quite glad it is. Simply put, this blog will be dedicated to the game development of DuskLight Studios. I’ll look back on every prototype iteration, reusable technology development, game jams and more, and write a bit about each of them.

This also marks the start of the DuskLight Studios website, which is still a work in progress. More will be added as soon as I learn how to properly work with WordPress.

Hopefully I’ll manage to capture your interest, whether you’re a fellow game developer or just curious about the prototypes and games in development.