I am honestly really excited to debut The Valley, a game art project of over a year and a half of development and hard work.

The story of this project starts after I finished my Steam game, Swordlord, a 2d gladiator physics beat em up for PC. I developed it using A6 3d Gamestudio, a german game development platform for windows only. It was the first game development tool I’ve ever used. Back in high school and college, it attracted me because it had a tutorial called Teach Yourself Programming in 7 Days. So going through the tutorial, it taught me scripting in a simple C language. Once I was able to get a box to rotate infinitely through an endless loop, I was hooked.

Years after college and once I started working at ChromeData, I was toying around with it and making prototypes, and they were honestly pretty cool. I put together a framework to build games, with pathfinding, shader stuff, projectiles, save/load, character animation and animation blending. However too much time spent making a framework is not enough time actually making a game. So I hunkered down and put away the lofty projects and just wanted to make a finished game. I had an idea of just having pixelated characters swinging weapons at each other in crunchy pixel graphics. Once I saw the ending from the beginning, it actually helped me finish Swordlord. For anyone struggling in finishing creative stuff like stories or music, maybe try seeing the end, and you will know how to get there from the beginning, so don’t leave the end open or say that you’ll cross that bridge when you get there.

Swordlord has 4 badass characters you can control with slight physics differences, and you swung the danger end of your medieval weapon into your enemies… repeat until they became a lifeless chunk of red pixels. It was a resounding success for me, to finish a game from beginning to end, to handle everything from bug smashing, front end programming and even community interaction. It actually passed Steam greenlight! People wanted to see the game happen!

After basking in the victory of a finished game with good reviews and recommendations on Steam, I needed to step on the gas and get to work on its sequel. I made a rough story of the 4 heroes and their plights in this story, and that was my chance to begin my own Lore, my own world. So I began work on the next framework for a 3rd person melee action game, the spiritual sequel for Swordlord! This program was now being made in A8 3d Gamestudio, the latest version of the software.

Unfortunately, life can sometimes throw you for a curve ball, and all your plans may not fall in place. In fact, they can be outright derailed and sent into a burning ditch of lava and poison spikes.

But I’m still here, so that means this story hasn’t ended. Lets see what happens, and how we come out of it…

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Game Art, the Valley and the Future