BLOGS

A new devlog! We’re at number 3 already. Everyone is hard at work on Histera, but all of us are working on vastly different areas of the game. We want to give everyone a chance to share their part of the development process. We want to take you on a journey with us through the wonderous world of game development all the way up to the release of our upcoming first-person shooter Histera!

Mounim El Meziani || GAME DESIGNER

“Hi, I am Mounim, and I am a game designer at StickyLock Games, currently working on Histera. I started working on this project half a year ago ago when I joined StickyLock. While It hasn’t been long since I’ve started working here it sure has been interesting!”

“The first decisions were made long before I joined the StickyLock team. – If you’re interested in those first decisions, check out our other devlogs!- As I was not present for the first steps of the design process, the first thing I needed to do was scour through the Game Design Document created by members of the art and programming team. This way I could fully grasp the initial idea behind the game with all its features and flavors.”

“After gathering the information needed to completely understand the inner workings of the project, I concluded there was still a lot of work to be done to create a backbone for the game to be built upon. Luckily, I joined the freshly formed design team containing the talented level designers Jan Zhang and Daniël Seton who already did tremendous work within the project.”

“The original vision for Histera was formed by a smaller team, which consisted of mainly artists and developers who doubled as designers during these early stages. Artists approached the game through their art-focused lens, developers through theirs. Because of this, numerous ideas where ambiguously described. Sometimes the ideas were only discussed and agreed upon in person without any written corroboration or consensus. Even when speaking with my peers from different areas, several different and at times even conflicting views were put forward, but remained fragmentary. This was a great task where a design team could create clarity by making some much needed decisions.”

KILL YOUR DARLINGS

“For all of us, creating a game comes from a personal passion for gaming. Sadly, that means we tend to get too attached to our so-called precious darlings[1]. Before the design team was formed, the game design was oversaturated with ideas. Everyone’s own view of what an entertaining feature would be was added. You could say that “too many cooks spoiled the Histera broth.” The problem with borderless freedom however is scope creep and vagueness. Even Vincent van Gogh needed a canvas to paint on, so we too needed restrictions and boundaries to create our game within. We boiled the game down into a few bitesize features that made Histera, well… Histera. Then we tried scaling down on the number of other features that we would incorporate. At that time, we may not have been the most popular department within StickyLock, as a few team members were sad to see their feature were about to be removed or altered. Yet, we tried to be as considerate as possible and reworked existing ideas as much as possible to avoid deviating from the initial vision.”

“Step-by-step the design behind Histera started to take form, and a cohesive foundation was established. Much like the beautiful graphics and robust codes are created by our talented and hardworking artists and programmers, the design team is working with might and main to deliver the finest and most exciting gameplay our fans can wish for.”

[1] Precious darlings are elements of the game that you have grown attached to through your hard work but need to be removed for the sake of the final product.

SEE YOU NEXT WEEK!

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