By Adrian on Tuesday, 8 October 2024 at 16:00 - Dawnmaker - no comments
About a year ago, I wrote a piece explaining how much we estimated making Dawnmaker would cost. Well, Dawnmaker is finished, so as promised, I'm going to revisit that and show you how much it actually cost to produce our game! Yay, more money talk!
We released Dawnmaker 18 days ago, and I'm due for a report on numbers. Everybody loves numbers, right? Here are ours!
We are 5 days away from the release of Dawnmaker! It is a time of excitement, of stress of course, but also of regrets as we realize that there are so, so many things that we will not be able to add to our game. Let's introduce today's topic with a short video that is very à propos:
When I was 13, my mom bought me Civilization III from a retail shop, then went on to do some more shopping. I stayed in the car, with this elegant box in my hands, craving to play the game it contained. I opened the box, and there discovered something magical: the Civilization III Manual. Having nothing better to do, I started reading it…
Let's face it: Dawnmaker still has some important flaws. We're aware of that, and we are working on those flaws. One of the biggest remaining problem with the game was that one of its core mechanics, the oppression of the Smog, was… well, not explained at all. If you didn't have a developer behind your back to tell you, there was almost no way you could understand it.
Dawnmaker, le jeu sur lequel je travaille dans le cadre d'Arpentor Studio, depuis plus de deux ans, a désormais une page Steam et un trailer. Je vous laisse découvrir ça :
Ça vous a plu ? N'hésitez pas à ajouter le jeu à votre liste de souhaits sur Steam !
By Adrian on Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 14:00 - Actualités - 3 comments
L'année 2023 est terminée, donc comme depuis trois ans, c'est l'heure de dresser un bilan de ce que j'ai fait ces douze derniers mois. Je démarre cette retrospective avec la sensation de n'avoir « rien » fait, mais c'est parce que je me suis concentré essentiellement sur un seul et unique projet, notre jeu Dawnmaker. Vous allez le voir, l'année a en fait été bien chargée pour moi. En route pour le bilan !
Today we are releasing a new version of Dawnmaker, with two big changes. The first one is the 2D board, which I talked about in my previous blog post. The second one is a new feature called "Ruins and Rewards". That feature… adds ruins and… changes rewards. Yeah. Pretty good name, right?
If you've played Dawnmaker in the last 6 months, you will have noticed, hopefully, that the board was rendered in 3D. After having received a lot of questions and criticism about that feature, we've decided a few months ago to redo the whole board rendering in 2D. After two months of work, I am proud to announce that Dawnmaker will soon have a new version containing only two dimensions! Today we're going to dig deeper into the why and how of this transition.
Over the last few months we've had the opportunity to show Dawnmaker to a lot of people, and notably a few publishers. We had the good fortune of receiving very valuable feedback on the game, which allowed us to identify two important problems with it, or at least, with its demo. The first problem is that our artistic direction isn't compelling enough, but that will not be today's topic — though we are, of course, working on it.
The problem we're going to discuss today it that of replayability. Some of our players, and most of the publishers we talked to, have expressed that they do not feel inclined to restart a game after they lose. Once you've understood the patterns of the game, restarting a new game feels like doing the same thing again, and it is boring. That feeling was especially pronounced for players losing in the 2nd or 3rd region of the demo: you have to restart at level one, a level that you have already mastered and don't feel like going through again.
This is a pretty big problem for a game that wants to have a high replay value, which is what we're aiming for. So today, I'm going to tell you about the key thing we're currently adding to the game as a first step to solve this issue.
By Adrian on Tuesday, 4 July 2023 at 10:00 - Dawnmaker - one comment
While we were preparing for this year's Game Camp in Lille, we had to work on our pitch for publishers. Part of that was refreshing our budget and making it as accurate as we could, so that 1. we know exactly how much money we need to ask for in order to comfortably finish our game and 2. publishers can see how much the game would cost and compare that to their revenue estimates.
By Adrian on Wednesday, 8 February 2023 at 15:00 - Actualités
Il est l'heure, tardive, de faire le point sur mon année 2022 ! Vous allez le lire, l'année a été chargée, ce qui explique que j'ai un peu de retard dans la rédaction de ce billet… Mais pour me faire pardonner, je vous ai mis quelques recommandations culturelles à la fin !
Voici donc un résumé de ce que j'ai fait en 2022…
Since we released Phytomancer in October 2021, my associate Alexis and I have been working on our next steps: building our second game, and building the company that will make it. Today, I want to share the process we went through to create that company, and explain why we went through each of those steps. I will not discuss administrative tasks, as that is quite specific to France. Instead, I want to focus on what makes our company unique: who we are, what we do, where we're going.
Oh, and, there's a little announcement at the end of this post… ;)
By Adrian on Tuesday, 8 March 2022 at 17:00 - Souls - 2 comments
Late last year, my associate Alexis and I started working on our next commercial game. Our goal being not only to make games, but also to build a company and make it financially sustainable, we did market research very early in the process. Today I want to walk you through how we did that specific market research.
My goals with this article are, of course, to share my current knowledge with others, but also, hopefully, to learn from people who know better than I do. You see, this was my very first market research, and I've used what tools and knowledge I have to make it as solid as I could. But I'm just a beginner in this field, and I'm sure there are tons of things I've missed.
So, fellow junior game developer: here's how you can get started doing your market research. And dear senior developer: please share your tips and criticisms about my method! :)
By Adrian on Tuesday, 28 December 2021 at 15:00 - Actualités
J'ai du mal à y croire, mais l'année 2021 se termine déjà. Voici donc le moment de faire le point sur cette période qui marque concrètement un tournant dans ma carrière : je suis désormais officiellement créateur de jeux vidéo. Pour preuve : des gens ont dépensé de l'argent pour jouer à un jeu que j'ai créé !
Au moment de faire le bilan de cette année, je me rends compte que ce premier jeu, et sa suite, m'ont pris toute mon énergie et tout mon temps. Si l'année dernière j'ai pu être créatif, prototyper des jeux, apprendre énormément sur la conception de jeux, en 2021 je me suis au contraire focalisé sur des choses beaucoup plus terre-à-terre. Voyons donc ensemble ce que j'ai fait ces douze derniers mois…
I am very proud to present the trailer for our first commercial game! Phytomancer will be released on October 6, 2021 on itch.io, for 3€. It's a small strategy game about restoring the balance between nature and humanity. Plant magical seeds on an automatically moving board, remove pollution, surround human factories and bring back harmony!
By Adrian on Thursday, 16 September 2021 at 10:00 - Souls - 2 comments
About 6 months ago, I posted a call on this blog to find folks who would be interested in building a game in a non-hierarchical organization [fr]. This led to the assembly of a team of 7 people, and to the creation of the game Phytomancer, soon to be released. This is a post-mortem of our production period, looking back on all the mistakes we made and rejoicing about the few things we did correctly!
By Adrian on Friday, 30 July 2021 at 10:00 - Développement
This year, for the first time, I took part in the annual jam organized by Mark Brown from the YouTube channel Game Maker's Toolkit, aka GMTK. It's a game jam that is focused on gameplay and trying out new mechanics, it's had more entries every year since its creation, and it has fierce competition. So, together with a team of excellent people, we rolled up our sleeves and made a game!
Bonne nouvelle : la création de mon studio de jeux vidéo en coopérative va bon train ! Après de multiples péripéties que je raconterais peut-être ici, j'ai constitué un tout petit groupe de trois personnes : James, Mathieu et moi-même. Nous avons commencé par nous échauffer en créant un petit jeu sur deux jours — Q, l'As du volant — et nous passons maintenant à l'étape supérieure. Nous allons créer un jeu, commercialisation comprise, en trois mois.
[This is part 5 of my Study of Digital Card Games series.]
As I mentioned at the beginning of this series, I have been working on a digital CCG for several years now. As a lover of the genre — I've been playing Magic for about 20 years, and I tried as many other CCGs as I could — I want to create a game that is truly special, and different from its competition. Time will tell if I can succeed at that! Until then, here are some lessons that I've learned working on my game.
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