Looking back to 2015 (part 1)

Greetings to all of our loyal and new readers!

I decided to finally dust off our development blog :). Today, I would like to catch up on content for teh blog, and break down everything that happened in 2015 regarding the team.

Last year was a difficult one for all of the members. It just happened that for nearly all of us, it was our last year of high school which ends with very important final exams, so for the first half of the year, we did not have much time to focus on development. Thankfully everything ended well, and as a part of my exam, I created my first project in the Unity engine. It is a game called Mindness.

Mindness

This project has changed in major ways during development, as I got accustomed to Unity. Starting as a 2D platformer, I began to experiment with 3D graphics, and it all ended up as a prototype of a top-down survival game. As far as the story goes, the world is all within the character's mind, represented as an abandoned town riddled with both monsters, and characters that try to help the player. The target is to deal with enemies that are parts of the main character's personality, and find a way back to reality. The gameplay premise is a simple "clear the area and survive" principle.

As interesting as the idea was, due to my limited experience in the engine and the genre I was only able to present an early alpha version of the game, which ended up being made in a rush for the finals. After finishing school, I decided that the game had to be redone, and postponed it. The future of the game is uncertain, although we would still like to return to it one day.

After that, I worked on my 3D graphics skill and just played around in the Unity engine.

Chickendemic

Some of you may know that we used to create games using Game Maker. While we were figuring out Unity, a 72 hour competition called Indies VS Gamers on GameJolt began and we decided to participate, creating our possibly last Game Maker project. Chickendemic takes place in a world overtaken by mutated chickens. The player has a helicopter they use to save as many people as they can, while also using it as a weapon against the enemy chickens. Participating in the competition was a great experience, it was intriguing to see all the games created within three days. I was worried about the results, since we are not good at spreading our products to people, but it turned out competitions are different and we ended up 71st out of 376. All the let's plays that fans uploaded on YouTube were extremely heartwarming for us. It appears creating games for popular competitions is a lot better than trying to self-publish them normally – good to know for the future.

Our last game of 2015 was Warped Christmas. Since it was a conclusion to an entire series we began many years ago, and also our first 3D game we released, I decided to talk more about this game (and the series) in the second part. Stay tuned for screenshots and prototypes we had before the final game :).

To end the post, I would like to mention our social media, where you can follow us if you enjoyed this blog post and want to see more. Besides Twitter and Facebook, you can now also sign up for newsletter via e-mail below the article.

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