Welcome back Knights-To-Be,
With just five more days until version 1.0, the challenge going forward is keeping both our nerves and our excitement in check. We’re horrified at the thought of our game not living up to our expectations, to our players’ expectations. This is a feeling we’ve had since very early in the development of Sands of Aura and one we would like to reflect upon a bit.
The first demo…
GDC or the Game Developers Conference is an annual conference for game developers. It’s an opportunity to network, to meet with others passionate about games, and a chance to showcase your work to fellow developers with the hope of receiving some initial feedback. Our goal was GDC of March 2018.Our demo was to focus on showcasing level and enemy designs, our combat mechanics and the random loot drop rewards. Each of these were to be the main pieces of our game and we were excited to bring them together to show them off.
About a month before GDC, we hit a roadblock. Despite our excitement, the pieces of our demo just didn’t fit together right properly. The gameplay loop just wasn’t fun and we needed to figure out why. Our explorations eventually revealed a main culprit: the random loot mechanics. Every weapon and armor drop had randomized attributes such as stats, effects, and extra gem slots. Combat style was randomized as well, so that when a weapon dropped it could result in being a one-handed slashing style, a dual wielding style, etc. Our intent was to use RNG to make loot feel special, to harness the excitement that randomness provides. However, intent and reality often come into conflict.
This system made creating a good build an absolute slog. While we had wanted the RNG elements to complement our combat system, they had done the opposite and forced our encounters to become stale and repetitive rather than thrilling and unique. With this issue being so complex and one so central to the core design, we realized what had to be done.
We decided not bring our demo to GDC a month before it arrived. Our demo just wasn’t something we were proud of. Such realizations are hard to face.
The value of failure…
Not only did the collapse of our GDC ambitions reveal weaknesses in our demo, they revealed weaknesses within our studio. Organizational structure, task management, timeline projections, development skills, testing structure, asset pipeline management… All those necessary aspects of game making that often go unconsidered…each of these were subpar for our studio at best.
In hindsight, this all seems blatantly obvious, but we were young and our studio was composed of recent graduates. With only one title under our belt—a game that began as a student project—like many who attempt game development, our creative ambitions stretched well beyond our experience. Not to mention, our programmers were actively transitioning from working exclusively in Unity to development in Unreal.
To be blunt, we were naïve. We needed to level up and fast. Luckily, it’s only once you see a problem that you can actually fix it.
Pressing onward…
Back again at the drawing board we fought hard to find a solution to our RNG problem. We tried idea after idea, implementation after implementation. Each time we thought we had something that worked, we would only find it to be more cumbersome later on. However, with each attempt, with each failure, there was a bit of progress that carried over, little by little.
Eventually the randomized loot evolved into a simplified version of the weapon crafting system you’ll recognize in Sands of Aura today. Our armor sets also became fixed but we added an upgrade rune system to capitalize on a bit of variability in the old RNG system.
Turning again to our inspirations, we incorporated a cleansing mechanic similar to the Sharpen mechanic from the Monster Hunter series (spoiler alert, we eventually had to reevaluate this too based on player feedback) and added spell activations into the combat flow. While previously the combat was simplistic and repetitive, it gained a degree of difficulty requiring the player to make numerous considerations.
Eventually, enemies began to evolve to address the changes to the combat system. The level design became more complex with rewards being placed deliberately to encourage exploration. New dungeons sprung up, like the one that exists today as Melgom’s Cavern, which would eventually become the tutorial dungeon of Sands of Aura. Islands become grander, more visually considered as they would be the focal points on the horizon. The sandsea went from static to something kinetic with waves taking on the movement of the ocean.
Things were coming together… Project Terrarium was coming together.
Shifting sands…
The development of Project Terrarium was matched by changes in our studio. We made considerable efforts to address our projections, our structures, and pipeline management. We fought to fail faster, test sooner, and iterate without remorse. We got a little quicker. A little smarter. We grew up.
Soon many of us began experiencing life changing milestones. There was marriage, the beginning of families, the pursuit of much needed changes of scenery. Chashu Entertainment had begun in a small studio space in Culver City, California. It was there that a few recent graduates completed Deputy Dangle, and where we began developing Project Terrarium. It was our starting point. Our home.
But it was time to iterate. Time for one final photo and time to say goodbye.
Chashu Entertainment moved our headquarters from California to Dallas, Texas. Some of us remained in California, some of us moved states, and some (one) of us moved to another country entirely! While this iteration of our studio had its challenges, and the chaos of conducting development in different time zones was no easy feat, given the choice, I doubt we would choose to go back and do things differently.
Chashu Entertainment was moving into a new era! The era of remote work.
Next time we’ll dive into the further evolution of Project Terrarium, covering everything from our first trailer, the Epic MegaGrant, to our painstaking process of selecting a new name. We’ll discuss our experiences with marketing, team growth, and much more!
Thank you for reading!
- Chashu Entertainment
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
