So funny thing…

Remember that last blog post I made on Content Creation? How I basically listed all the reasons why stopping production on the main game to create a separate system that allows the quick and error free creation of story assets in the format we need, wasn’t a good idea for us at the time?

Well…
A lot has changed since then hahaha.
I think if there’s anything I’ve learnt from that – it’s this:
When it comes to indie development, nothing, absolutely nothing is set in stone.

If you recall, we were short on our most creative resource – People. Since that last post, we’ve added on two new team members – growing our initial team of 5 to 7. Now I know that doesn’t sound like a massive huge change or anything, but – to an indie project, where everyone is literally wearing a gazillion hats, 2 new people can make a world of difference for the original team and workload.

What expanding the team did:

• Improved overall focus in project tasks
• Enabled several departments to work at the same time and independently (God, YES)
• Immediately changed our needs and content creation suddenly became one of our top priorities!

It’s been a while, giving Brad, our game designer; a good chunk of time to smoothen out some big kinks in our ideas and make it easier for us to see AWITT coming to life from different perspectives. Our worries about – “Holy crap, is this game even fun…?” have subsided a little, enabling the team to focus on what matters right now -> Getting the game done. 

So that Content Creator?  Well it got created 🙂

There was quite a lot of back and forth discussion on – “Wait, I thought we weren’t doing that now…didn’t we say blah blah?” – so I was tearing my hair out wondering if it was a good idea or not to do a full 180 on a production decision. I was quite the annoying game developer for a few weeks… hahaha

I honestly totally overestimated how much time it would take to complete and kind of powered through it.

Our first build is being pushed out to our Story Writers – Indigo, Brad, Chris and Mike this weekend. I’m expecting a lot of bug complaints and suggestions – which is a great place to be and once that’s all taken care of – we’ll have an official story creation system that can create our story database – in a way that’s error free, fast and friendly!

It doesn’t look all that impressive or pretty just yet, but it’s going to do AWITT a world of wonders 🙂

Goodbye to those painful minutes of copy pasting nightmares and XML tag juggling.
Can’t wait to report an update on how what our story writers think about it all -_-

 . Amina Khalique | Technical Director .