(The following text was adapted from Golden Moose Studios' blog.)

It’s a few months into the formation of Golden Moose Studios, and with the start of the new year approaching, now seems as good a time as ever to begin the IndieDev Diary section of our blog!

What Have We Been Doing at Golden Moose Studios?

Manne and I started the studio at the end of summer 2016. This involved many different components:

Paperwork related to company formation.

This was no simple task. A lot of my indie developer friends spoke previously about 50% or more of their time consumed with non-game development type work.

I assumed a large portion of time would be spent on business-related tasks, but I didn’t realize to what extent my time would be consumed with straight up paperwork, lawyer discussions, etc.!

This included:

Social media channels and our website.

Fairly straightforward. There’s more on the website we’d like to fix and other elements we’d like to add, but it works.

Deciding what to include in our game’s prototype and creating a roadmap and budget to get there.

While we know what we want to incorporate in the final game, it took a while to nail down exactly what we wanted to show in the prototype.

I redid the outline for our prototype more than once. Initially, I created a standard design document, with a walkthrough of key events, places, and game design, and looking back, the final outline hasn’t deviated much from our initial ideas for the prototype.

There came a point however, where I realized I was only hinting at the emotional elements we wanted to incorporate. I hadn’t delved deep enough yet to demonstrate the heart of the game.

I started over, this time focusing on the emotional core and pushing different elements to support this (effects, camera angles, etc.).

Assembling our core team.

This involved writing jobs posts and submitting them across social media (Reddit, art-specific pages, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, other sites/groups specific to game development).

It is time consuming to go through the entire interview process – reviewing applications and portfolios, scheduling and holding interviews, and sorting through additional details.

Other misc. activities

Manne also set up a file sharing repository for our game and worked on a backup script, just in case the game exploded into a million pieces (all right, games don’t actually explode in that sense…but if files became corrupt or something else happened, we would still have a working version of the game).

We also oversaw logo creation and ordered business cards and company shirts with our new logo. We already received requests from some of you who want to order your own shirts with our logo!

(Once we find a good merchandise company for this, we’ll be sure to add some merchandise to our site. If you have any recommendations, let us know!)
 

Working out the story.

Since our game is story-driven, we needed to develop a solid narrative foundation for the direction our game is heading.

We reached out to a former Pixar story writer (Toy Story, Finding Nemo). With his help, we are developing our vision for the story and characters. It has been both enlightening and interesting to work with someone who has such a strong narrative background in movies!

Meeting with experienced game designers.

So far, we met with a few veteran game designers from both the AAA and indie space to talk through our vision for our game and discuss business/marketing strategy. The advice we received was invaluable, and it confirmed we are indeed onto something with our concept! 

When you’re in the indie space, it’s easy to work entirely in a bubble without receiving any external feedback until you’re ready to announce your game to the world. While we didn’t need to take this extra step in meeting with other developers, it was a good step to take early on and helped identify the direction we wanted to take with our prototype.

(On a side note, if you know of any veteran game designers who might be interested in serving as a mentor/consultant on a story-driven game, please let us know at [email protected]! We are looking for someone to work with in the long term.)

Starting on game development!

This included systems programming, level design, and creating prefabs for game assets we will use throughout the game.

Why does it take so long to develop a prototype?

Well, we aren’t treating this as a standard, "just-prove-it-works" prototype. We are using this pre-production time to sort out issues we would otherwise need to work out down the road (physics, etc.), as well as to demonstrate our vision for the game.

An example of this is creating a more robust movement system (instead of generic movement that could be finished in less than a day).

This means that the prototype will more closely show potential investors how the final game will look, rather than...

What Has Been Done to Date?

What is Next?

Our goal is to have a playable prototype later in 2017 to show potential investors. We are using our own funds to create the prototype (and pay freelancers!). We still have plenty of work to do before we’re at a point where the prototype reflects our vision for the final game.

After the start of the new year, we will work with an environment artist to dig deeper into the artstyle for the game and reflect that within the prototype. (This means taking a grey-boxed level and adding 3D objects, lighting, shaders, etc. to make the game "come to life" artistically.)

 



Stay in Touch!

We will continue to share our progress with you over the course of development. Stay in touch with Golden Moose Studios through:

You can also follow or reach out to us through our personal Twitter pages: