Monday, 11 March 2024

Killing two birds with one deck in Dawnmaker

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.

Continue reading...

Thursday, 8 February 2024

Dawnmaker a une page Steam ET un trailer

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 !

Thursday, 18 January 2024

L'état de l'Adrian 2023

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 !

Continue reading...

Monday, 27 November 2023

The ruins of Dawnmaker's lost continent

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?

Continue reading...

Tuesday, 10 October 2023

Removing Dawnmaker's 3rd dimension

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.

Continue reading...

Thursday, 3 August 2023

Dawnmaker's endless conundrum of infinite replayability

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.

Continue reading...

Tuesday, 4 July 2023

How much does it cost to make a game like Dawnmaker?

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.

Continue reading...

Wednesday, 8 February 2023

L'état de l'Adrian 2022

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…

Continue reading...

- page 1 of 20