unashamedly “video gamey” look without relying on known references or icons and so I played around with fewer onscreen colours and lower resolutions.”
WHAT NEW SKILLS DID YOU HAVE TO PICK UP ALONG THE WAY? I learned level design as I was making the game, which was exciting but also intimidating. I would play a lot of FPS games – Quake and Doom being the main ones – but I would also try modern boomer shooters to see what I liked and didn’t like about level design and went from there. I’d also never coded a large game before, so that was a constant learning experience too. I used visual scripting which made it more accessible to me but it was still a huge journey to make and a few times I went back and redid entire parts of the game (like movement or the map system) to make sure it I also tried to learn as much about marketing and business as I could, but it’s much harder to say how much as I haven’t compared notes with anyone yet. I certainly have banked a lot of information which hopefully gives Hellscreen the best possible chance it can have to succeed in the future.
WHAT TOOLS DID YOU USE TO DEVELOP HELLSCREEN AND HOW DID YOU GET ON WITH THEM?
I started building Hellscreen with Unity (with Playmaker, the aforementioned visual scripting tool) Photoshop and Maya LT.
During the pandemic, I dropped Maya and Photoshop in favour of Blender and PhotoPea; not just because of cost, but because they weren’t giving me the creative freedom with the tools they provided.
Blender in particular made the production quality rise and has empowered me more than any other software outside of Unity. I ended up coming up with lots of processes and pipelines for quick, iterative-level design within Blender too which is interesting because a lot of FPS developers only use it for character and prop design. (Programs like Trenchbroom tend to get used for FPS map making.)
WHAT WERE THE MAJOR HURDLES YOU HAD TO OVERCOME? The main one was learning to code the game, but I always felt like I’d get there if I gave it enough time. The other thing was having to balance contract work with making the game (which is the reason why it took so long to
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