We are back again, with more discussion from inside the development of Somnipathy! This week we want to pull back the hood on two very different systems involved with our work: one in-game, and one out-of-game.
PickyBurrito49 is one of the programmers on our team, and he’s taken the lead role on several subsystems within our game. Frequently this means that he works on a system isolated from the rest of the game’s development, and then only gets to see how it interacts with our world after plugging in a reasonably functioning alpha version for us to play with. Sometimes, this breaks the game entirely! This kind of work also means that sometimes he has to go back to the drawing board with an idea, so we asked him about his process building out a system that can’t be tested until an alpha implementation:
Our technical director makes my job easier because he has a knack for seeing into the future and providing parameters for subsystems that are capable of handling whatever we need them to do upon adding them. Some rebuilding is still inevitable as the game continues to evolve but overall it has been pretty fun to be able to build out ideas I have and share them with the team. I am looking forward to seeing the public reaction to Somnipathy too!
On the opposite end of the spectrum is the work of our Creative Director, Mink. She leads our small yet mighty team of creatives as they excavate the art mines, iterating upon ideas to come together into a cohesive and coherent whole. Along with her talent as an artist, she also has a background in film and animation that we all rely upon heavily as we work. The art mines are very time consuming, with many versions of concepts being extracted and discarded before a particular character, element, or object being locked in. She took a few moments to pass along her philosophy on iteration and feedback to share with you:
The term art mines is funny but very fitting for what can be considered as the “trenches”. A gaming project is guaranteed to have a surplus of art needs and in truth, “art never really is complete,” you merely stop making changes – ideally, when it has become “enough”.
Much like everything else we do, teamwork is key to achieving our vision. Sadly in the world of Somnipathy, Aggy does not really have a team to rely upon – other than you, the player! Remember to wishlist us on Steam, and help Aggy find her way.
