Fried Squid Productions started off one late summer evening of 2010, with the idea to start a game developing project between a group of friends. After many cozy nights and cups of tea, our game idea was finally defined – we would make a game that would contain all our favorite parts from all of our favorite games: The combat system from Final Fantasy, the quirkiness of Monkey Island’s point and click, and the character progression of classical RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons.
Now you might start off by wondering “Are you guys crazy?” to which we’d say yes, yes we are. Lilliepad, lackaost, and I (Buttergoose) started the first few weeks by specifying the core gameplay of our game, how we’d develop it, and how the awesome end product would be. We slowly started writing the design document and producing concept art, because we wanted to make sure we had an excellent starting ground and solid pre-production before we rushed into developing the game.
When the first snowfall came (it comes pretty early in Sweden), Jesper, our awesome solo programmer, was introduced into our project. This was extremely well recieved, since Lilliepad is an Animator/Graphics Artist, and lackaost and I are Designers, so now we finally had someone who could put all their time into programming.
Jesper threw himself over the programming and actually managed to program the game about two or three times as fast as I as a Project Leader had anticipated. With the game now actually starting to become playable after only a short time, it was apparent that we needed another graphical artist, or Lilliepad would be suffocated under her to-do-list.
And so, with the beginning of 2011, our project had added our fifth member Filip, who is probably the best 2D artist I’ve ever known, so we were very lucky to have him on our team. With the team now complete, our game idea refined and production already starting, we were in for an exciting year.
The best part of our project was probably that we were all studying our second year of Computer Game Development in Skövde, which gave us the ability to work on our project on our spare time without having to worry about rushing the game due to funding. Agreeing to work slowly with our game was probably the best decision we made – it allowed us to develop the game thoroughly without affecting our university studies, which is usually the main reason other teams have had to quit the development of their games.
Come summer of 2011, we had a game where you could talk to NPCs, kill monsters, level up, collect gold, and buy items so you could kill more enemies. We had an awesome class system where you could, theoretically, have an unlimited amount of classes (yes, we’re crazy), and a bunch of other cool stuff that I’ll get more into later.
After the summer, we had most of our features done, and we started the phase that we are currently in now, which is adding tons and tons of content, as much content as you’d expect from an online game. We want our game to include everything from ye olde high fantasy towns and dungeons to quirky and strange places you never thought could exist, to underwater steampunk metropolisae. Yes, we are crazy.
Today, we have almost finished adding enough content to start our alpha testing phase; we have a server up and running (not telling IP. Yet.), and we’re in the final phases before our game will be playable by people that aren’t ourselves. We at Fried Squid Productions are looking at an extremely interesting couple of months that will define both our project, and us as game developers, and I hope the rest of you will be just as interested in knowing what happens as well.
Buttergoose,
Project Leader of Fried Squid Productions.
