So, I recently uploaded a game to Newgrounds and it was not recieved well. 

The game was intended to be a tongue in cheek shooter with a hash/stoner theme, but what it ended up being was a reminder to me just how important good game design is. 

I can't say that I ever thought it was designed poorly, in fact I think it was designed OK, but I think the issue was that I never got beyond OK. I am not much of a programmer and in attempting to do something that was a little bit more like a conventional game, I created a challenge for myself that I was not able to meet. 

Still, this will not deter me. I am coming back at the end of this month with a new game, and this time I am really hunkering down on the design... so, look forward to that. 

Hi out there. 

So I am going to be publishing a game in the near future. The game is a silly little stoner shooter (a sentence which will make sense when you play it) and I have been working in Unity 4.6 for this game. 

The question is, now that I have finised this little game and would love to start a new title, should I move into Unity 5?

There are allot of arguments on either side of this question, so that is why I pose it to you.

Sincerely
Sylvester

So, I am aware that I am not the only person to be hit by this, but it is as annoying now as it ever was. I am working on a game currently, which I would like to have out soon'ish, but I have hot a wall, I simply don't know what platform to release it on. 

I love Unity and it is a great engine with which I have just gotten friendly, so the thought of having to whitch is something that I am dreading, but it seems that I have no choice, untill the whole webGL problem has been solved. 

So for now, I will have to try my luck with other game making tools or maybe just stick with Unity and try my luck. 

Developing a protagonist is always difficult. You want to make sure that she is likable and relatable, while remaining cool or awesome.

for our game we went through a few iterations of our protagonist, moving from rebel, over nerdy, to girly, but we finally decided upon introverted. 

We wanted to create a character who was the embodiment of the experiences that she had been going through, experiences that the player would have to uncover through the course of the game.

We wanted her to seem like someone who would not call attention to herself, but someone who would be capable of amazing strength when it was called upon.

This is of cause allot to read into a couple of sketches, which is why our animator has his work cut out for him.

What you see here is is actually a bit of a special piece of concept art. 

This is the last piece that was drawn while we were still planning for our game to be an FPS single player experience along the lines of amnesia or outlast.

To be fair, this piece was not the deciding factor, which changed our minds. what changed our minds were long and rather tiresome conversations between the core team about the kind of game we wanted to make.

We were all in agreement that the game should be an unique horror experience, but bringing that from our vague concepts to an actual playable demo, proved harder than we thought it was going to be. 

In the end we decided to scrap the idea of doing anything in 3D, as it would be too taxing for us as a team to create something we would be proud of in that medium. 

Rather, we chose to focus on a 2D adventure, something which we knew we would be able to execute… well, to be fair, that last point remains to be seen.

one of the things that we worked allot on was the design for our main character, We wanted her to seem vulnerable, but capable.

We had already decided that she was going be a young woman, but what kind of character she would be, was still up for grabs.

We started to look at characters from popular culture from which we might draw inspiration. we looked at heather from the third silent hill game, we re-watched Juno to look at Ellen Page’s Performance and we sat down and played “the last of us” to get a sense of Ashley Johnsons performance as Ellie. 

As Nice and fleshed out, as all of those characters are, we decided to go in a slightly different direction with our character. 

We wanted a girl who was less about the wisecracks and funny observations and more about the helplessness of being alone in the dark. 

We wanted a girl who was not a fighter, not a capable part of the world, not a strong woman, we wanted a scared little girl who was in way over her head.

With that in mind, we sat down and started to sketch out some character ideas, which is what you see above.

With a project like this, you go through several stages of development. One of the mayor stages that we struggled with and in fact are still working on, is the game design.

for a horror title as the one we want to make, you need a setting which is both open enough to encourage exploration, but closed enough that you don’t get lost or loose the thread of the story.

We spend the longest time toying with the idea of an open world setup, where the player would be allowed to wander around at random, giving them free range over the story point.

we eventually went away from that setup, as it didn’t really give us allot of freedom to structure the story the way that we wanted to.

for the game experience to be exactly what we wanted it to be, we eventually decided that creating a slightly more structured experience would enhance the enjoyment for the player and ultimately, the developer as well. 

We decided pretty early on that we wanted a protagonist for our game which defied some of the stereotypes that are set forth in gaming currently.

while characters like Nathan drake or Commander Shepherd work brilliantly for what they do, we though that, for the portraying the vulnerability needed for a game like this to be successful, we needed someone who could be scared along with the player.

This is how we came up with wendy.

We wanted to create a teenage girl who was as unprepared to deal with the horrors that she was faced as the player would be. We wanted to create a character which could be scared, but rise to the challenge along with the player.

what you see above are some of the early sketches of wendy, that we created.

So, this is another one of those early looks at the game that we are developing.

at this stage of the game (pun intended) we were still trying to figure out what kind of gameplay we were going to be implementing. 

Because we are a rather small team, we had to take all aspects of the production into the equation when trying to figure out what we were going to develop.

At the time, we were trying to figure out exactly how one might go about creating a unique world based on the tried and tested model that is used in games like amnesia, slender and outlast.

what you see above is one of the test drawing we did to explore that world.

Over the last couple of months we at postmaster games have been developing a small video-game to test out our might at video-game development.

So far it is going well, as we are almost at the halfway point of our development cycle on the game which is currently called “unsafe”

What you see above is some of the early concept art for this title which is a horror based 2D puzzle adventure game.

we hope to be able to share more information with you as the development moves on.

please share this post master post, if you like what you see.