Hello! My name is Carlos and my brother (art) and me (code) have been developing what is now called The Spatials for six months.
Both of us have been at some point or are professionally involved in game dev, and we wanted to do try to do our own thing, with our rules, our ideas, no managers, no deadlines, aaaaaand oh god a year went by and we have nothing... Well you get the picture
We first developed two big protos, first a full 3D game with a custom engine, which we soon realized was way beyond the effort and skill we could munster between the two of us to finish in a reasonable amount of time. Still it was a very interesting experiment (and faking instancing with vertex shader constants and mesh duplication was boss, here's 5 million tris from thousands of objects in ~200 draw calls at 30FPS, on the slowest retina iPad at full res. Procedurally animated too)
UPDATE: quite a few people asked me about how this, so I wrote a blog post with all the details and some pseudocode:
Faking mesh instancing in OpenGL ES 2.0After this we pivoted in both our concept and technical planning, hard. We went for a much simpler idea, which would become the embryo of The Spatials, and on a technical level I repressed my 3D compulsions and decided to fully embrace what our framework of choice (cocos2d-x) offered, and nothing else. A bit of a case of The Pragmaticals, capital P (I am totally calling dibs on this name for a future game, mkay?)
From this was born Game Number Two. GNT was about a cast away spaceship or roaming space station or roaming asteroid inhabited by a bunch of colonist or astronauts or aliens or all of them, who occasionally went out on missions in randomly generated galaxy that took part as a sequence of automatic encounters and battles and diplomatic intermissions, all displayed in a VERY (in concept) oldschool text listing with a few icons and lots of numbers. It was completely non-interactive and induced sleep in most test subjects.
This lacked Fun, which is indeed a most important problem in a game, so GNT, as a concept, was scrapped too. BUT! This time we knew we were on to something. If we could find the Fun, and put it into this concept, something else would emerge. And that something was The Spatials.
The jury was still out about the Fun, but The Spatials was here. We refined the concept so the castaway segment was about building a space colony on an asteroid, a place to call home, in glorious 2D isometric fullres (mixed draw-order and Z buffer, and yeah it's a beast to get it right, specially since I constrained myself to not touch cocos2d-x internals unless 100% necessary). The passive missions were changed into a 2D isometric exploration/combat segment, with random generated planets. Half of your time would be spent managing and building up the asteroid colony for your officers to live in, and the other half would be about visiting exotic locales and doing very interesting science. The kind of science done with large caliber guns and high explosives. Hey, the nature of humanity never changes.
Fortunately for our sanity and bank accounts we finally arrived at a prototype+concept early this year. The gameplay and art bullet lists were, after a year, finally looking half closed, and we set to work. GNT provided a good framework for the UI and we advanced very fast. In march I remembered I used to be a Development Manager in a previous life and put a deadline on ourselves, fearing we would fall again in the infinite cycle of New Ideas and never finish it. It was so close now, it had to be done. So, the first of May, The Spatials 1.0.0 for iPad was done. It was rushed in some areas, it lacked content in some others, the monetization strategy was worse than bad, but here it was, in review. It went live a few days later and...
If you have followed other indie dev tales you may have noticed something amiss in my narration. PR, marketing, promotion, visibility, announcements, reviews, articles, forums, social media, crowdfunding, you get the idea. We were so engrossed in developing the game we either didn't think about it, or as the release came closer, we just brushed it off as "it's okay, we will do that after release". Nope, it doesn't work like that. And, apart from the very nice people of the Touch Arcade forums and a few other places, the game was mostly ignored.
But this was just one more step on the road for us. We have gathered all the feedback and dusted off the good ol' bullet point list and set to design a 2.0. This time it's going to be available first on PC and Mac, as a full paid game with no microtransaction nonsense, and we are releasing as Early Access, to engage fans and critics alike while we develop the game. The final version will also come back to the iPad and we hope other platforms too! And this time, we are doing things the right way, and we will give promotion and communication the critical attention it requires. We love talking to people about our game!
The Spatials homepage - Now available for download on PC/Mac!Vote for us in Steam Greenlight!Touch Arcade thread, lots of in-dev iPad 1.0.x discussion