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Comment by erik | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the comments!

The game is indeed built with Unity. 3D models and animations were created in 3DS Max.

Game development was a hobby for me for a long time, with most of my experience coming from participating in 48 hour game jams, like the LD48. (http://www.ludumdare.com/) It's been an interesting journey transitioning a hobby project into a commercial release.

An interesting challenge that our team faced was that we all came from a programming background, so through the project we have had to find ways to fill all of the other requirements for the game.

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That's interesting! I'll have to check out those game jams as a way to motivate myself. As a developer, I've always wanted to break into making games.

And I think your team has handled the artistic aspects of the game very well, especially considering that you have programming backgrounds that might not have included visual design training.

Anyhow, thanks for sharing and best of luck with your title in the future.

I would definietly recommend game jams / weekend hackathons as a way to try out game development. I always found the goal of finishing something small very quickly to be great for motivation.

Our team was very fortunate to have someone with some 3D art experience, even though his primary background and education is in programming. I sometimes joke about the "programmer art" of our game. Here is an imgur album that looks at the art a bit, and gives a glimpse of how it has evolved.

http://imgur.com/a/sYhk5

It looks great. I find it intriguing that it's a 2D platformer done in a 3d environment. Were you ever tempted to move the camera?

3d art can take more overhead to produce, but it gives a very different aesthetic than 2d art. We were really lucky to have someone on our team with 3d art experience.

At one point we did play around a little with having the camera turn and fly around when the knight grabs the cup at the end of a level, but the levels are really only build to look good from one perspective, and it would have been hard to make it work well.

Trine is done that way as well. It's surprisingly immersive for a platformer.

Trines art direction is also beautiful and worth the price of the game alone.

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