Three Years a Dev

Year One...

Boy, were those fun times.  Learning how to make balls roll in Unity, using RPG Maker and it's stock sprites, and of course uploading everything to GameJolt. It was a blast, but it also left a lot to be desired. I wanted to make big games with big themes and more complicated mechanics. So I left the GameJolt life behind and moved on. That's when I started to get more involved with the gamedev community on Twitter and started getting serious with learning how to use Unity.

Unfortunately, as I assume many noobs do, I had a tendency to make an ass of myself on Twitter. I can recall multiple occasions where I said very rude things about other people's opinions on the indie scene, and independent development in general. If any of you people are reading this (and even remember) I would like to apologize for that. 

GameJolt profile: http://gamejolt.com/@JoelNewman/games

Year Two...

So now we reach year two. I have a few games under my belt and I'm looking to do something a little more epic. I began doing some planning and brainstorming for about 4 months... and in the end scrapped a bunch of the stuff I was coming up with. I still think some of the ideas I had were good, but just not feasible at this point in time. Feel free to check out just how drastic the changes were http://www.indiedb.com/games/the-ovate-order/articles. 

I think I went through 3 different iterations of my current project before I ended up on the version I am currently working on. Everytime I had learned something new, or got better in an aspect of development I felt the need to try and go back and add or change things I had already done. This slowed developement down a lot, so eventually I had to just settle on a way of doing things. Once I did this, development became much more steady. That is a big old lesson learned: Once development begins, don't try to change things.

Year Three and Beyond...

So now I'm at three years into my game dev journey. My game, The Ovate Order, is really starting to take shape and I'm proud to say I've done it all on my own. However, with that being said, I am really happy to announce that the Piko Island Studios team has welcomed Dan Knorr to the team as our Composer! Dan has a Master's in music composition and theory and has had his pieces performed throughout the US and internationally. This will be his first time working on a videogame soundtrack and I am super excited! I have heard a snippet of what he has in store for The Ovate Order and it sounds great!

We are currently running a Kickstarter, which is coming to an end soon. If any of you would be so awesome as to check it out we would really love it!

Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pikoisland/the-ovate-order-a-druid-action-adventure-ccg

Other than that, I'd love to connect on Twitter https://twitter.com/Piko_Island

Thanks for reading and take care ya'll! Keep on making games!

-Joel Newman-