It’s been awhile since our last update.  March was a busy month for us.  We had a great time at the GDC in San Francisco, and met a lot of great people and learned a lot of useful information.  We started a relationship with Epic Games, and have been heads-down learning how to make the most of Unreal Engine 3.

We had some minor updates to the story for our first game that really opened up the possibilities, and have been drawing and redrawing art to fit the changes.  The extra time has been helpful for us too, learning how to take our Maya and ZBrush knowledge to the next level.  Pieces of what we’re calling our “demo level” are starting to get underway and should come together shortly.

I’m also nearly finished with a Flash update to the site, that I mentioned before.  It’s a lower priority item for us, but we’ll be replacing the core of the site with a new Flash-based one shortly.

Stay healthy and happy,

Andy

Welcome back, after what we hope were restful and eventful holidays with family and friends.

After the New Year started, our pace picked right back up again.  Here are the updates from the past month:

Corporate:

The corporate front has been relatively calm this month.  We added another artist and an audio engineer to bring our total to nine.

We’re taking a trip to San Francisco for the http://www.gdconf.com/ in March and looking forward to that very much.  We should be able to collect some good information that will either help speed up or validate our current design pipeline.

Game Design:

Research seems to show that game dev companies struggle with the graphics pipeline, and after some minor challenges, we have really started to refine the pipeline that works for us and are starting to see some good high-quality models come through the process from start to finish.

We’ve been heads-down working on the first area of the game that we may use as a demo level.  The best part about actually building and putting assets into the game engine is that it puts everything under the microscope.  We’ve made many changes to the story, game play, level design, and graphics pipeline as we’ve found things that don’t work or perform less-than optimally once we see what they look like.  It has been a very rewarding experience for the team so far!

Website:

We should have more concept art that we can post soon.  I’m trying to pick and choose images to post that show our talent, yet don’t give away the full concept of the game yet

We’re well into February so I’ll post another update at the end of the month, before our trip to GDC in March.

Warm regards,

Andy

I’m going to start posting a monthly update on our progress.  I think it will help us see the work we’ve been doing collectively, and may help others understand the steps we’ve taken both to get the company off the ground as well as the process that we’re using to develop our first game.

Here’s what we’ve done so far:

Corporate:

It’s a one-member LLC right now being funded by day jobs and volunteer work in the evenings.  We do have access to angel investors and venture capitalists but have decided to wait until it is absolutely necessary to ask for their help, if at all.  Ideally, we keep working the day job to fund the night job for a few-to-several more years, and our first release makes enough money to turn core volunteers into employees and fund salaries for that team for five-to-seven years.  Worst case – the game makes little-to-no money, but we’ve had a creative outlet for our passion, have a tangible asset (the game) to show for our effort, and gained the skills needed to forge new career paths if desired.

We started with four of us and have grown to seven.  Basically, we have two people doing art, two people working on 3D modeling and animation, and three people working in the game engine doing level design, etc. – with a lot of cross over between roles. We will probably add another person to focus on the 3D modeling and another dedicated artist soon.

Website:

We’ve been working on a Flash version of the site, but with everyone being heads-down on getting assets built for the game, the website has been pushed to the background.  Some day when we have more time, we’ll put something fancier out there, but this works for now.

Game Design:

When we started in May, we all had a LOT of experience playing games, but none of us understood what it took to actually BUILD a game.  That has changed.

First, we had a few discussions about the types of games that we loved to play, and where – was it on a PC, console, or handheld device?  We found that most of our time was spent on the PC, with very little time on the consoles.  We all play games on our phones and tablets, but more as a distraction than something that we’d commit a lot of time to.  Ultimately we decided to shoot for building an Action/RPG PC game first, and then proceeded to spend a few months working out the story and gameplay on paper.

During that time, we also went through a brief, high-level education period where we figured out the types of tools we’d need:  game engine, 2D graphics/painting software, 3D graphics/modeling, animation.

For the game engine, we piloted two engines – Epic’s Unreal Devleopment Kit (UDK), and Unity Technologies Unity3 engine.  Both were great products, but UDK seemed to fit what we needed from an engine for our first game – especially the fact that it is free for us to use for development.  We may use Unity at some point in the future if we decide to build a mobile game.  Crytek released the CryEngine3 SDK after we had finished our pilot and had already started getting a real education in UDK, so we did not consider it.

We were really hoping to keep costs low on the other tools.  Gimp is an excellent piece of software, and we gave it a good “college try”, but we found that in all of our training that the pros use Photoshop almost exclusively for 2D work.  In order to shoot the learning curve faster, we bit the bullet and went for Adobe CS5.5.  It turned out to be the right move, because we may be using Flash for menus and other animation in the game, and the Adobe Suite came bundled with Flash and a ton of other tools that we may be able to leverage in the future.

For 3D work, we had two decisions to make: choosing Pixelogic ZBrush or Autodesk Mudbox, and choosing Autodesk 3DSMax or Autodesk Maya.  After getting Sculptris from Pixelogic and having a BLAST with it, we decided to grab ZBrush.  This was a good move as it seems to be our favorite tool for creating organic, high polygon count objects.  We also decided on Maya, as it seemed to be able to do everything that 3DSMax could do, but also had better capabilities that we could use for cutscenes and other animation.  We did look at Blender, an open-source tool like 3DSMax and Maya, but had some challenges getting assets out of the tool and into a usable form in UDK, so we decided (reluctantly at first) to scrap it and go with the professional tool.

We may end up using other tools like Scaleform, Bink Video, UV Layout tools, and others, but for the most part are focused on mastering Photoshop, ZBrush, and Maya and working out the pipeline on taking an idea from a concept to a usable asset in the game.

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That should be enough for this month – thank you for reading and Happy Holidays!

Warm regards,

Andy

Dear Readers and Loyal Gamers,

Welcome to the Fortuna Major Studios website!

We look forward to sharing our experiences and games with you in the near future.

Warm regards,

Andy