Blog post #21 : 2018 ends and 2019 starts. Like that happened.

It was an amazing 2018 and yeah, we haven’t had done too much with Peace Quarter, but we did get a chance to do a customer project which ate all the time.

But I also mean that we are financially stable at the moment (at least for now) so not too shabby. But for this year, Peace Quarter is going to be on our mind.

We have been taking part in local game jams and one of them particularly was a good one, because we won it and that lead us to make a pilot for local project. Which is also the customer project I was writing about there. And that pretty much took a huge amount of time in our fall, but it’s now over happily and it went well.

And not only that, but our graphic artist has been active and done amazing work though out the year, and side note that she has also started her thesis that is going to have a part of concept for new possible project we would love to work on some day. So she’s been busy. 

 

http://www.rx3studio.com/roosarasanen/

And there’s a lucky chance that we could or would port GemFall Workforce inc. into iOS because we have a possibility to do that now. 

YouTube // Rx3 Studio

GemFall Workforce Inc. - Harkness' Shift (Now available. See description)

And maybe do a better trailer because that’s with the old music and now a days we have music by Pauli Ondruska on the game that’s also available to listen on YouTube and SoundCloud.

YouTube // Rx3 Studio

GemFall's Work Anthem

Other stuff was those game jams, part of our team was on Peliviikko and we pretty much failed to make the Peace Quarter. But it’s happening. Because we want to. 

YouTube // Rx3 Studio

Peace Quarter Teaser Trailer August 2017

And Global Game Jam is also dawning on us so that's something that our team is looking forward. And hey, maybe we get those short stories once I (olenbluu here) start to look through the story files and other shenanigans and see if I have something to share. 

_Rx3

Blog post #20 Global Game Jam 2018

So, like the year before we took part in Global Game Jam. We're on our way to make the game, but sometimes is just nice to sit back and do something different and get the year to kickstart in right gear.

This year we had plans to participate as a whole team, take our coder with us, but then we find out he needed to be rocking on somewhere else and it was just our graphic artist and writer, like the last year. (No really, he was rocking somewhere else, playing music and stuff.)
So what did we do then?

Rather than sticking too close orbit, we decided to go half rogue and see what we can make. Our graphic artist, Dicenete, was helping on another team also and did character art for Olenbluu. And we got help from Pauli Ondruska and he made an awesome theme for the simple RPG Maker game our writer made with her restricted skills. You should definitely go see his work on SoundCloud or YouTube.

So the game was pretty simple, made on RPG Maker VX Ace. But what was the most fun was to get to make documents, like the narrative script. This is something you don't get to make when jamming, for a very good reason. The team usually has no time to wait for the narrative to catch up, but being that the narrative lead was making the game with help of graphics and audio working pretty much as freelancers, the narrative script was part of the documenting the game making.

So, if interested go check the jam site we're on and play some free games. Like, there's a lot of nice and fun free games to try out on Global Game Jam website so use that opportunity.
https://globalgamejam.org/2018/jam-sites/fgj-kuopio/games

And the game file, first notes and the narrative script for the Omega Transmission 10018 part of our Peace Quarter team made in the jam.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1h8RtMVv2K7MLhzlN0Z-y0Vv-nhxy4AC9

And our narrative writer was also featured in writing blog as this weeks interview so be sure to check that also.
http://www.cscottfrank.com/writing-for-games-with-niina-rasanen/

Blog post #16: Debug.Log(“Hello World”);

Ok, this is my first entry here and I hopefully have some time to write more about coding and the development side of Peace Quarter.

As you may have noticed if you are a longtime follower (hopefully there are longtime followers) we develop our games with Unity. I handle the developing and coding side so our creative members can focus on that – being creative - and get their awesome work come to life in our game world.

We have come long way understanding how to work as a team and that really has its marks in my work as well. I used to mainly code stuff that needed to be switched from code if someone wanted to alter the way things work. This approach can be seen in earlier mobile game “Gemfall Workforce Inc – Harkness’ shift” and especially updating it. Everything we want to change comes back at me! That is bad for the team because they necessarily can’t get forward and time being quite the rare asset it slows down the development. It even might lead to some nighttime coding sessions to get the project at speed again.

So, to tackle this “lesson learned” I now develop assets for the team to use the Unity’s editor to modify key components. Development of these “tools” may be little slower but it keeps all team members at pace. You could think almost as the most valuable thing for me to do is try to reduce my work (Am I making myself unemployed?). Of course, there still are some things you can only change at code level but usually, they are bigger issues that we have noticed. I’d say developing games is constant learning. I would say my skills with Unity, C#, and programming, in general, have increased multiple times in a quite short time. One reason of course also be that as a small team the area of everyone is huge. That leads to a very versatile skill set that is useful. 

Another very good experience for team work was participating in game jams. There’s nothing like getting the whole team sitting at the same table and discussing. The feedback is instant and usually, the project is on fire (not literally!) at those times. This is the main reason we set up our office. We have a large table – ok table made from 4 tables and a book self – where we all sit and usually do our own parts. But the time we get pieces together we can all witness them first hand. 
It’s also very good that we as a starting indie team have finished some smaller projects and thus have seen the complete life-cycle of smaller game projects. If we had gone along and started Peace Quarter full steam without completing any other projects I think we wouldn’t even get this far. We also do some side projects with web sites and of course, small game prototypes for later use and I would encourage all starting programmers to first learn to finish stuff – small stuff at first – and then just start writing bigger games, programs, websites etc. You gotta start small you know.

Also for the guys and gals just starting to learn to program, it really isn’t hard it just takes time and willing to learn! There isn’t a better time to start than now. There are numerous tutorials online and game engines have become available for anyone to make their own games!

- Rx3 Team (Ville Räsänen, coding and programming.)

Blog post # 12: Health Game Jam May (fgj) edition

First and furthermost we kind a started Instagram to showcase between the scene work, we’re toning down selfies, but like graphic designs, concept work, graphic artist’s pictures when she has no ideas (at the moment) and more once we start working on Peace Quarter in full speed. Soon. Like really soon. In a week or two. Once we get our new “office” setup done. 

We had a great chance to make and held a workshop about game storytelling and narrative in general and visuals. Workshop was real fun to have and we learned much from our own work while making the workshop. And then there we had awesome conversations about game storytelling and then about visual design and how it shows to player. We also briefed Unity, but had no real chance to really dwell into the game making process on that end.  And because taking pictures of writing is a bit boring here's a some clothes designs for the workshop project we made. We chose to make a walking simulator to demo in the workshop and these are some of the concepts we had with us. 

Clothes design concepts.

Color chart for clothes. Which one would you choose?

Friday started Health Game Jam in Kuopio and our group made small dentistry game as it was health game jam. But then again, all games promote mental health when they are played for fun.Now that our whole team was on the jam we really get to see a fast game development process. It was really fun and from we might have learned a bit from our experience in last Global Game Jam and we were able to focus faster and realize our goals. Which was a good thing and if anyone is interested taking part in any kind of game jam, this is one thing you should try to apply to your work. 48-hours may seem long time in Friday, but it's a blink of an eye on Sunday.

 

Thanks to Lukki and Pauli for working with us on the jam game. See YouTube description for full credits. 

_Rx3 Team