BLOGS
TURNING CONCEPT INTO REALITY
At StickyLock Games we’re all working on Histera, but in vastly different areas and we want to give everyone a chance to share their work! Every game arrives at that moment where months of concepts and ideas need to take shape in digital form. Game producer Jamel Ziaty is here to tell you how we transformed the concept of Histera into a playable state.
TURNING CONCEPT INTO REALITY
There is a lot that happens from the inception of a concept to creating a full game and although we still have a ways to go, I want to share with you; How we turned concept into reality with Histera.
Jamel Ziaty || GAME PRODUCER
“Before we dive deeper into the ins and outs of turning a concept into reality, I need to talk a bit about StickyLocks’ growth. Over the course of producing Histera, StickyLock has grown an incredible amount in terms of employees. At the start we did not have much more than a single programmer and a few artist that would take some time out of their days now and then to create something for Histera. Currently we have dedicated programming-, art- and design teams working on Histera. However, While we were in the process of growing the team to this new size we were simultaneously working on Histera. During these periods certain decisions had to be made at various points that would later be invalidated by these new team members and the expertise they all brought with them.”
“At the very start, Histera was an idea that our CEO had come up with. A very basic proof of concept and a plethora of design documents were made somewhere around 2017. However, the project did not truly get picked up again until the end of 2019 when Mitchel, our lead programmer now, started to work on it again. The proof of concept was made with peer-to-peer networking, which we did not deem to be a viable method for a multiplayer shooter, thus we abandoned this proof of concept quite quickly. We were mainly testing the waters and seeing how we wanted to build up the game.”
WORKING WITH A GROWING TEAM
During the process of transitioning our concept into reality, certain game design features were discussed and solidified, so the programmers were able to build those systems and continue the progress of the game. This way the game kept on growing. During this process we tried to keep Histera in a playable state, so we were able to test the gameplay, level design block outs, and reiterate on them.
When you are a rapidly growing studio, it is difficult to make decisions about the direction of the game. You, as a studio, might be too small to have a dedicated designer at one point in the production cycle, and a few months later, those designers might be added to the team. The designers could then find themselves wanting to change the direction of the game a bit to ensure it is the most enjoyable experience for the players in the end. This meant that the decisions on the direction of the game we made early on (design, art, system architecture), could be changed by new people coming in who made one of those specific aspects of the game’s development their main focus.
This is an extremely difficult challenge to tackle as a studio, but once specific roles get defined better and filled in, the process stabilizes more and the direction becomes clearer through a lot of communication.
Once we had dedicated designers, they had the task to tweak the game’s design to a point where they could be happy with it and thoroughly believed that the game would be fun to play. There were some limits due to the systems that were already in place from the older design which were very hard to change at this stage. This meant that there was a specific scope the design team could change things within. They would often have to experiment with certain mechanics and document how they wanted the various mechanics to work. They would also run tests with level design variations in block out form to test the layout and flow of a level. Once this was done, the art team was able to fill in the blocks with actual contextually correct models. The programming team would take the documented mechanics and either work them out for experimentation or implement them fully within the core code base once they were approved.
TURNING CONCEPT INTO REALITY
At StickyLock Games we’re all working on Histera, but in vastly different areas and we want to give everyone a chance to share their work! Every game arrives at that moment where months of concepts and ideas need to take shape in digital form. Game producer Jamel Ziaty is here to tell you how we transformed the concept of Histera into a playable state.
TURNING CONCEPT INTO REALITY
There is a lot that happens from the inception of a concept to creating a full game and although we still have a ways to go, I want to share with you; How we turned concept into reality with Histera.
Jamel Ziaty || GAME PRODUCER
“Before we dive deeper into the ins and outs of turning a concept into reality, I need to talk a bit about StickyLocks’ growth. Over the course of producing Histera, StickyLock has grown an incredible amount in terms of employees. At the start we did not have much more than a single programmer and a few artist that would take some time out of their days now and then to create something for Histera. Currently we have dedicated programming-, art- and design teams working on Histera. However, While we were in the process of growing the team to this new size we were simultaneously working on Histera. During these periods certain decisions had to be made at various points that would later be invalidated by these new team members and the expertise they all brought with them.”
“At the very start, Histera was an idea that our CEO had come up with. A very basic proof of concept and a plethora of design documents were made somewhere around 2017. However, the project did not truly get picked up again until the end of 2019 when Mitchel, our lead programmer now, started to work on it again. The proof of concept was made with peer-to-peer networking, which we did not deem to be a viable method for a multiplayer shooter, thus we abandoned this proof of concept quite quickly. We were mainly testing the waters and seeing how we wanted to build up the game.”
WORKING WITH A GROWING TEAM
During the process of transitioning our concept into reality, certain game design features were discussed and solidified, so the programmers were able to build those systems and continue the progress of the game. This way the game kept on growing. During this process we tried to keep Histera in a playable state, so we were able to test the gameplay, level design block outs, and reiterate on them.
When you are a rapidly growing studio, it is difficult to make decisions about the direction of the game. You, as a studio, might be too small to have a dedicated designer at one point in the production cycle, and a few months later, those designers might be added to the team. The designers could then find themselves wanting to change the direction of the game a bit to ensure it is the most enjoyable experience for the players in the end. This meant that the decisions on the direction of the game we made early on (design, art, system architecture), could be changed by new people coming in who made one of those specific aspects of the game’s development their main focus.
This is an extremely difficult challenge to tackle as a studio, but once specific roles get defined better and filled in, the process stabilizes more and the direction becomes clearer through a lot of communication.
Once we had dedicated designers, they had the task to tweak the game’s design to a point where they could be happy with it and thoroughly believed that the game would be fun to play. There were some limits due to the systems that were already in place from the older design which were very hard to change at this stage. This meant that there was a specific scope the design team could change things within. They would often have to experiment with certain mechanics and document how they wanted the various mechanics to work. They would also run tests with level design variations in block out form to test the layout and flow of a level. Once this was done, the art team was able to fill in the blocks with actual contextually correct models. The programming team would take the documented mechanics and either work them out for experimentation or implement them fully within the core code base once they were approved.
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