Dungeon Master’s Toolkit: Dev Diary #1 – Personal Introductions

For the last 12 months, I've been dabbling in game development with Unity. While I had produced a few small, playable test projects, I hadn't really progressed anything beyond the prototype stage. Partly, this was due to a reluctance to spend my time producing art assets; a symptom of professional burn out. But it was also the scope of such things. An awful lot of work goes into creating even the most rudimentary of games (as I've discovered over the last year) and my predisposition towards working alone would put the entirety of that monumental task in my path.

Unless of course, I stopped working on my own.

Here's where I insert an awkward segue into introducing friends and ex-colleagues, James Podesta (aka. MadPuppet) and Chris Bennett (aka. Pale-Face). We each have some shared history of varying degrees of collaboration and infuriating circumstances. I'm going to share some of this on my blog for no reason other than to tell stories (as I'm wont to do).

I studied with Chris Bennett at Queensland University of Technology in a different decade, majoring in 3D Animation back when no one seemed really sure what it was. We both landed the same gig out of college: The children's animated television series Animalia at the unfortunately ill-fated visual effects studio, Photon VFX.

Considerably wanky Animalia promotional photograph with a super excited green gorilla.

Animalia was a pretty exciting project for me, as it represented vindication for years of broke-ass study and forcing my steadfastly resilient partner to co-survive on my disastrous attempts at edible cooked produce. Photon VFX wasn't exactly the smoothest introduction to the industry, but it was certainly an education, and to this day I remain incredibly proud of the sheer volume of work that us absolute noobs managed to produce.

From there, the work got less chaotic, and luckily for my partner, so did my cooking.

Chris and I parted ways, and then after a couple of smaller visual effects projects (or small parts on large projects, such as Baz Luhrmann's Australia on which my claim to fame is - with all seriousness - a tortured house fly) I started to feel that I wanted to try the games industry for a while. I had three good friends working in games at the time: Travis Draper, Iain Danvers, and Kieran O'Sullivan (who is currently working on Farcry 3 with a villain who looks like our love child, though to be fair it's much more him than me - the genes are strong in that one). They convinced me without much effort that a leap would be worth it.

I've always loved games. I'm a gamer. That's not a term to describe my leisure activities, but rather a distinct personal definition: I live and breathe video games, and I have since my parents purchased an Atari 2600 one Christmas in a different century, and I immediately stopped going outside. Ever. I believe this caused my parents some concern.

Now, I'm an almost-34 year old with video game tattoos and haircuts and a need to spend the rest of my life inspiring other people to be just as hopelessly enamoured with our craft. And I don't think my parents are any less worried.

So having experienced a small part of the visual effect industry, I left screen and started working in games at the unfortunately ill-fated Krome Studios (this pattern, I hope, had nothing to do with me). I came in at the end of a project, and Chris had just finished up another film gig at the time, so I pushed him to apply. Needless to say, his awesome skill set was in immediate demand, and a couple of weeks after I started at Krome, Chris did too. Said near-completed project was shipped, and then after some interim floundering (Krome's CEO preferred to avoid firing everyone between projects - an impressively altruistic philosophy that probably didn't help in the long run) I ended up on another project at Krome with our lead programmer being none other than James Podesta.

Some partially completed concept art from the aforementioned project.

It's interesting to note here that apparently everyone was tensed for James and I to immediately clash and start throwing chairs at one another. It's interesting because the opposite kind of happened: James is a guy who knows what he wants to do and how it should be done, and I'm a guy who knows what I want to do and how it should be done, and it is possibly just sheer luck, but we both wanted to do the same things in exactly the same ways. And so did everyone else on the team, so ultimately that project we were both part of was, for a time, almost perfect. It seemed to be this rare collision of good ideas and great execution by a team of eclectic individuals who all instinctively shared the same creative vision.

Then Krome made a farting-like sound, and we were all jobless.

Fast forward to a month or so ago, and either I contacted James or James contacted me, suggesting some kind of collaboration. We threw around ideas for a while, trying to settle on something which suited our particular skill sets, interests, and available time frames, and eventually settled on a contemporary dungeon-crawler game of the Eye of the Beholder vein. Getting Chris Bennett on board was (luckily for us) just an email or two later. After all, it's a genre we all love, and has recently been proven to retain some modern playability by the makers of the awesome Legend of Grimrock.

We'd like to expand on that with our own take on the classic genre. But we're also bound by the usual responsibilities plaguing independent game developers: Awful stuff like feeding your loved ones and paying for those horrible real-estate folk to stop threatening to kick you out of your house.

So, inspired by Epona Schweer and her brilliant business advice over at IndieBits.com, we came up with an experimental take on funding and monetization that with any luck will help us see our game through to fruition (hold on to your hats):

We will sell the assets we create for our dungeon-crawler game as asset packs on the Unity store. This includes environment art, monsters (rigged and animated), spell effects, items, GUI art, and all the code to drive it all. There will be enough content in these packs for anyone to kick start production on their own dungeon-crawler game, adapt to suit another RPG-like genre, or simply dissect for the purposes of education or re-textualisation.

In fact, it's entirely probable that upon completion of our game, we will have released enough content for anyone to make their own dungeon crawler game from the ground up.

It is our hope that these assets, packaged under the moniker of The Dungeon Master's Toolkit, will serve to at least partially fund the development of our game: As a new level is completed, the content for that level will be zipped up and sent off to the Unity store. We're still discussing price points, and figuring out how to package assets to be most appealing to those who don't necessarily want all of the content, but I feel we might inevitably have to wing it and adjust our strategies as we go.

I'm pretty excited about the whole thing. Not just the game project or The Dungeon Master's Toolkit - both of which press a lot of my nostalgia buttons - but also the collaboration. I tend to be a bit of a loner, but so far I've been more productive on this project than I have felt on anything in a while. There's something nice about sharing the weight of a project's scope among friends. And the work James and Chris are producing is challenging me to be better at what I do. Fingers crossed that this experiment, and the game behind it, work out like we hope they will.

More meaty stuff* to come.

* Not a euphemism. I seem to have to write this a lot.