Can you walk us through your production pipeline as a Solo Developer, from writing and worldbuilding to level design, combat implementation, enemy creation, pixel/3D art, sound, testing, and final polish?
I first began by planning out the scope of my game. Having finished one game prior to this, I had an idea of what I could accomplish within 3-4 years, which was the timeline I had decided on for Memoirium. Before I even started on the story, I thought about how many areas I wanted to create and what would be within them. I knew each one would have unique mobs, a mini-boss, and a final boss. After that, I started to flesh out the story even further so I could actually connect these areas together and have relationships between these certain factions.
When I started working on the gameplay itself, I knew that the combat mechanics were the most important thing I wanted to focus on. So before I built anything else, I worked on creating a solid foundation for the fighting system. I went through many different iterations and versions, but my original design philosophy of having the resource bars serve more than one purpose remained intact.
For creating things like enemies and all the 3D art, I would start by finding inspirations or references. I would use the usual places like Pinterest, Google, etc. Then I would hop on Blender and do my very best with my limited skillset to create something that fits within the world and the area the enemy/item/object would be found in. There were rarely any cases wherein I would adjust the appearance of something I crafted. I knew that if I wanted to finish this game within my lifetime, I had to work quickly and efficiently. Since I am not an animator, I purchased the majority of the game’s animations from the Unreal Marketplace.
In terms of sound, I got the majority of the assets from the Sonniss GDC audio bundles. It’s a massive library of free audio sounds that has really saved me the time and effort of making it myself. As a Game Developer who prioritizes gameplay over everything, I knew that playtesting and playtesters would be an invaluable and vital part of development. Besides having close friends and family play the game, I recruited a decent number of playtesters through the platform playtester.net.
The system was efficient because players filled out a questionnaire after playing the game for at least 2 hours. The feedback they gave was essential to improving the game. Besides that, I myself consistently play and test out different parts of the game.
