Hey guys,
You maybe have already read our short Article about the upcoming release of Siege Breaker.
Today i want to share some of our experiences we`ve made with developing a game with you.
It was not always easy.
When we started our education as game apprentices we didn`t know what would expect us.
Now we know that it i`snt`easy to develope a game, even with a limited scope and much help from our teachers and co-students.
But lets start at the beginning.
The idea for Siege Breaker was quickly developed. We wanted to create a fast paced Tetris with a new mechanical twist. Because, as you may know, Tetris is still a veeeery good game with solid mechanics so re-invent it without only changing the setting and make it another tetris-clone is not THAT easy.
After about tow days of intense brainstorming we came up with the idea of a quadruple Tetris.
First the setting was placed in the human body. The castle was a heart and the blocks where viruses and you had to protect the human body against a infection.
With this setting in mind we pitched the idea (We had eight "pitch teams" and five projects were selected and produced).
But we realised very soon that we had not thought about a clear visual language that would support our fast paced gameplay. Thus we changed the setting to a nightly medieval fantasy theme with a dark background, bright blocks and effects to better draw the attention to the gameplay.
Then we were forced to learn to work as a team. Because we didn`t know each other we needed a certain time to get to know each others style of work and the individual mindset in relation to the project (P.s our team consists of 2 Artists, 2 Designers, 1 Engeneer and 1 Produxer ). Some people were more motivatet than others to mak "just a Tetris game".
To combine all our visions and thoughts about what Siege Breaker could become we had to decline some good ideas, but as always when you have to work as a team, you can`t please everybody!
A much bigger challenge was to don`t take those refusals personal (especially when it happens several times).
But somehow we managed to become a pretty good team, we came to know each other better and established a sort of productive workflow.
The following ~five month were full of hard work, interrupted by the Milestone presentations (every month we had to present our progress to the examiners).
We also had split classes (sometimes the Artists had no project time for a whole week!) what made things more difficult.
But finally, three days before the release, we are alsmost done! While i´m writing this, the Artist are still finishing stuff, polishing assets, the Engeneer is cleaning up his code and my designer mate is finishing the Homepage.
I thinkt everyone of our Team will agree with me in the following conclusion:
We learned a lot about teamwork, labor division and conflict/time management and we are still eager to learn more!!
Thanks for reading, i hope i could give you a little insight how we createt Siege Breaker and how our experiences were.
Reminder: Siege Breaker will be published on the 3/3/17 on itch.io and our homepage :)
Have a nice day
-Team BlockIT
