Hey there! We mainly focused on bug fixing and optimizing our savefile format. Additionally, we continued the work on our world rendering and map generation, but these aren’t ready to be shown yet. Our adventure for rendering had a few interesting complications. We’ll most likely talk about them next week.
Due to this, we’ll take the opportunity to start introducing our team, starting with myself, Zeknir. Over the next few weeks, we’ll continue the rest of the team and talk a bit about the history of the game.
Team Introduction – Zeknir
Hi, I’m Zeknir!
I’m the lead developer, creative director and artist for the game.
Background
I’m a guy (and presumably a dragon) from Austria, currently 21 years old, with a passion for gaming, coding, and designing things.
I left secondary technical college (or HTL as we call it here) about 1.5 years ago. I’ve personally never been a big fan of school, as it’s too much theoretical information. I like to work on projects and create something instead.
Introduction to Gaming
My siblings introduced me to games at a fairly young age with Super Mario World, which is still one of my favorite games to this day. From there on, a fascination has been growing inside of me for games and other worlds in general.
I’ve played a wide variety of games, ranging from platformers and RPGs to strategy and shooters. The only genre that I’ve never really been enjoying are online arena games, like MOBAs.
There are multiple games which influenced me quite a bit. Spyro introduced me to the greatness of fictional worlds. Age of Empires II made me love strategy games. Roller Coaster Tycoon and Minecraft showed me the amazing possibilities of sandbox games. Undertale and Paper Mario made me think differently about characters and stories. And there are
Why Game Development
With Little Big Planet I quickly realized that creating games is as interesting as playing them for me and that I’d like to do that in the future. So, with the age of 7, I started to learn coding with books (of course in a very basic matter). Later, I switched to C# and am really happy with it.
Of course, games need graphics as well, so I began to create pixel and vector art just by looking at other games and fooling around. I’m not the greatest artist out there, but it’s good enough for me.
I started many, many failed projects over the past few years and the first game I actually somewhat finished was a little shoot-em-up about 3 years ago.
After that, I participated twice in Ludum Dare with @Traincraft (you can find our entries here) and now I’m working on Bio Colonies.
I’m also very fascinated by world building and game design. I love thinking up foreign worlds and their interactions with players. I’m currently creating an original setting and system for my pen and paper hobby.
For everyone trying to get into these topics, I can just recommend
What am I doing
So, what am I doing for Bio Colonies? As stated above I’m the
As the lead developer, I’m trying to make sure that the code we write will eventually turn out to run Bio Colonies. While we mainly make decisions as a team, I’m giving the thing a bit of direction and trying to figure out problems before we start implementing them. Of course, this doesn’t always work out, but we’re learning.
As the creative director I’m managing the creative aspect of game design. Where does the game take place? What can the player do in the game? Is it fun or annoying to do something? These are the types of questions I try to answer.
Additionally, I’m also creating the graphics for the game, with my limited knowledge about graphics design.
Next Steps
We are currently in the process of finishing up the first version of the map renderer and terrain generator. Due to a big bug in the conversion of coordinates, we didn’t finish this week.
Stay tuned for the next post!