12/3/2023 0 Comments Simairport devlog![]() It was actually my love of Dungeon Keeper that led me to discovering Dwarf Fortress in its fairly early days, which scratched the same itch of digging out a fortress into rock and building your own place inside it, but with all the extra simulation and magic of Dwarf Fortress on top. I loved the theme of being the bad guy in Dungeon Keeper, but more than that I really loved the relatively simple mechanic of digging out areas from rock to put your own rooms and traps and designs into. Theme Park, Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper all stand out to me from Bullfrog. ![]() I’ve always loved strategy and business-management type games the most. When one piques my imagination, I write it down into a little notebook of them, partly so that I can put it to one side and not keep being distracted by it, but also to see if it stands the test of time when I look at it again a lot later. I remember reading an interview with the Introversion devs (the makers of Prison Architect) that they found “content” was the big stumbling block for them as a small indie dev team (in a time when small indie dev teams were still pretty rare), that specifically the map for Defcon took the most time to create in the development of that game, so they learned they had to really keep the time/costs of this kind of content in a game small if they’re to have any chance of completing development.Įveryone with an interest in games has a bunch of ideas they’d like to make into games. Most importantly though, it’s relatively cheap to do – there’s little to no animation so simple sprites can stretch a long way in terms of in-game content to the cost of creating that content. It was simple and expressive – an excellent fit for the genre of strategy/management games as it clearly and concisely can show you what is where and what’s going on. This is what led to borrowing the visual style of Prison Architect. Finally I could plug this gap, but only in a small way, it’s not like I could afford to commission an artist or designer to work on something full time, but I could get small tasks done here and there. I’ve always wanted to make a game, but not having much in the way of artwork really limits you. I’ve always been a coder, so of course anything visual I produce has “programmer art” i.e. Importantly I also had some money to pay other people to do bits of work here and there. It wouldn’t have been possible for me 20 years ago with my lack of skills and experience, but now I do have those skills and experience. Not only did this make my work more flexible, but it meant I had a business, and a small amount of extra funds in it to do something… A few years later though I had an excellent job where I learnt a hell of a lot about making good software, and after 5 or so years of that, I became an independent contractor/consultant. At least eventually – the company I worked for first ended up making the entire office redundant following the crash of 2008. As much as I love games, I decided that wasn’t for me and went into the field of business software instead, essentially getting much better pay for much “easier” work, and no overtime to speak of. I wasn’t really convinced that I actually wanted to be a tiny cog in a huge game dev team – this was in the early to mid 2000s and stories were rife of the gruelling conditions of the games industry with crunch and unpaid overtime of up to 100 hour weeks being the norm, leading straight to burnout and a disastrous work/life balance. ![]() The response from each of them was that they wanted someone with more experience, which was frustrating for entry-level/graduate roles but that’s the way of things. ![]() Fresh out of university I applied for a few graduate game dev roles, and even had a few interviews at well known studios here in the UK. Perhaps the *full* history this time! Skip to “ The actual April update” if you don’t want a rambling history and background of the game. Welcome to the first official dev update for Mountaincore! If this is your first time reading one of our dev updates, I should give a little history lesson.
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