Introduction

Hi, this is Lighblast studios, a newly formed game studio powered by me. I'm Sander and building games is my passion as are large and complex projects :) I have some education helping me out to execute that passion like Computer science at university and Game development at DAE, HOWEST Belgium.
I am in my twenties and have a burning sensation to create memorable experiences that leave a lasting impression on people. At least that is what games did for me and still do to this day and I'm hoping to create those experiences for others now, too. 

As a heads up, this post will focus more on getting to know me and the technologies that I picked to move forward with in my game dev career.
As a matter of fact these first 3 posts will be more informative about the project and my goals and views for the future rather than this game specifically, to really get to know me and the studio's vision.
If you are here solely for information about the game, I will start off with a little bit about that. But you'll likely be more interested in the next post where I go in depth about the lore of the game. I also understand this is a very long post and have thus divided things up under logical subtitles so you may pick and choose what you are interested in reading up about, should you so desire. Thank you in advance for taking some time to read through these, that makes all of this so much more fun. Now let's get going shall we.

This project

Shadows of Cal'duur, Lightblast studios' first project. An action roguelite with looter elements, with a focus on multiplayer coop (2 people lobbies) and world intractability.  With these two pillars I'm creating a game that will keep players engaged in interesting and complex fights, creating powerful builds and synergise with their partner in crime to earn new weapons and skins. These weapons and skins are where the looter genre is infused into this roguelike style game.  Through high replayability and the way you can alter the events inside the game you'll be able to hunt the conditions you need to get the best chance at dropping that new weapon you want or that epic skin you've been eying. Once you get what you want, that being a new personal record, or a skin you found for example, getting out is the only way you earn all that. Stats and loot you got during a run are discarded after the end screen if you don't make it out alive. Ending the run while you still think you can is therefore important, making for some intense fights with high stakes at the final battle. 

This is a short description of the vision that is in place, this "new" project has only just started development however and is still a long way off for a couple of reasons I'll get into in this post further down. I say "new" like that because it's been in the works for over 10 months now at this point. That's a long time for having only just started development you say, and I agree. Though I have good reason and things will speed up from here on out, getting this game out is still going to take me a very long time, seeing the scope of this project is on the larger side. I am a single developer and although I excel at programming and game design, I struggle with some other tasks, like sound design and 3D modeling hair on a character apparently...

The journey

Confrontation

Some of you may know me, in fact for now I think most of you may know me. However some of you may not really be in the loop with what's been going on with me. Like where has this guy even been, he said he'd make something 1-2 years ago... Well I have some explaining to do in that case. After getting out of school I had an idea about starting a small studio working with someone else or even multiple people to build a first game. After realizing that "oh boy this might really be happening" I began to look for a legal way of doing all this. Which was a bigger task then I had initially thought it would be. Starting your own business without having to spend a decent amount of money would be a problem due to how my country does things around here.  I needed an income of some sort. Alongside that, working from my parents home, even though I was taken care of every day, it also was not very productive for a multitude of reasons. I suddenly needed my own place,  a main job for money and enough time to make something from my game dev dreams all of that combined with a lot of other personal things that were greatly bothering me at the time. It was all pretty overwhelming. Some of my dreams seemed shattered and I didn't quite see how they could be saved at that time.

Comeback

The project I had started and poured all my energy into eventually came to a complete stop. It was a 2 man job but I noticed that we were both struggling with things outside of the project, resulting in communication about the project dying out as one person felt like they were letting down and the other felt like a burden to the other asking too much of them. In the end I think neither of us were really in the emotional space to work on such a project. But it also taught me an important lesson. A team not meeting expectations can really be demoralizing for everyone in the team. I decided that this is something I wanted to try and avoid in the future at least for my first project. As starting your first project you need all the morale you can get and that external factor is easier to not have to deal with at first. So I decided to focus on hammering away at my own motivation and skills to hone myself to the business man I want to become

In the meantime I was looking for jobs, or rather, I was discovering myself. slowly realizing I didn't want no job. I wanted to develop games but felt like my surroundings would not let me. At some point though I told myself too much time is flying by wasted. I told myself that I will figure this out and make this work however I can, work with what I can get, not sit there and wonder what I could have gotten. And I did just that.

Stonks

After figuring out what type of job I could do while making games as a side hustle, I started looking and found myself a job that physically activates me during the day but leaves my head nice and cool. This is great since I can get all my energy out during the day and have my brain left to do game development before or after my main job. This boosted my morale by a lot. Being able to live comfortably from a main job really cleared my head, making me able to do so much more, energizing me to get started on the next steps of my plan. 

Very serious business

Lightblast studios

First of all I had to at least know where and how to start a business in order to legally kick off my game developing career. As I am generally a very careful person and like to be well informed, I started looking up what my possibilities were. Here I had some opportunities as well as some pitfalls. With my main job the costs were less of an issue but only for a couple of options. which means I needed to find workarounds or more concrete information on  the "what if"  scenarios. As of now I am very close to making all the necessary official steps required, I am solving some of the tiny questions to prepare myself but the decision is made and soon I will kick things off officially somewhere in the next 3 weeks (Since I am taking a well deserved holiday to go skiing soon). From there on I can get started on some of the requirements that are needed for development like the steam appID and store page so you guys can start wishlisting the game if you like, and much more. 

Technologies

Before  I started this project I needed to figure out what I would be using, why and how to use it. I have a good amount of knowledge from my studies when it comes to building a game but the tools we used there are to be paid for, make you pay them at some point or even stab you in the back apparently (thanks Unity). After Unity's scandal, let's just call it what it is, I decided I did not want to be 10 years down my game dev path and be met by something like that that may shift my workflow in such a drastic way by having to shift engines or similar. For this reason I tried to go with open source as much as I can to really grab the indie part of indie game dev with both hands.

Godot

I chose Godot as the game engine to not only build this game in, but to grow with it as it solidifies its place alongside Unreal engine and Unity when it comes to independent game development. That is what I believe will happen and if it doesn't I'm still happy with my choice due to it being open source and having a large community backing. Alongside that I have come to learn that although writing pretty and often overly efficient code is nice and clean it is really not needed for most parts of small indie projects and needlessly soaks up more time. In Godot there are three languages at your disposal... yes THREE. C++ which I'm very familiar with from my background, C# which I am also pretty familiar with and GD script, a language created by Godot. This GD script language peaked my interest as it has a syntax similar to Python, another language I used to know very well, but it would have C++ under the hood. This meant that you would have the fast  and easy coding of Python combined with some of the efficiency of C++.  Needless to say this is an interesting language I could see go sky high some day within the indie dev community. 

Being able to switch between these three languages even within the same project seems like a good investment into the future. C++ for altering the engine to my needs if needed. C# for code that needs to be extra performant, and GD script for code that needs to be clean but also produced fast. And it is working, in my 3+ years of development I have never produced code related results faster within a game engine than with GD script.

The simplicity of the design of Godot, a now far larger community since the betrayal of Unity and the open source nature of the engine all combined forms a package I almost cannot refuse. That being said It always takes time to learn and get used to a new engine and that was no different here. I spent a lot of time doing this to prepare for my first commercial game.

Blender

This was a no brainer. I think it's well known by now that blender is pretty much the best tool for anyone trying to make easy all the way to complex 3D models, animations and much more these days. However, during my studies in game development we exclusively worked with Maya for industry standard reasons, with the idea that when learning about the tools used in 3D modeling you can basically 3D model in any software. While true, it does take some getting used to and a lot of googling things you know must exist somewhere which in the beginning was rather frustrating due to the frequency of googling things you feel like you should know already. Nonetheless 3D modeling is almost back to snub now. 

Animation and texturing are still something I am working on. Texturing I am familiar with and the style used in this project is purposefully kept relatively simple to avoid making this project overly complex. Animation on the other hand I have no experience with at all. Though I am very interested in it, I can't say how well I will perform on it yet. This is one of the steps I may need to outsource when it comes down to it.

Gimp

While used to photoshop for industry standard reasons in my game development studies, GIMP offers all I need for game development within the style I use. it is also open source and will be used for the game's UI and menu graphics.

Audacity

This is a special one. I have not put much thought into this one. I hear it is a popular option for many to make sound effects in. I might try this at some point. However I am fairly certain sound or at the very least music is something I will outsource. It is a skill I know nothing about and learning it to the quality I want to pump out with this game will increase the scope of this project way too much. Therefore I chose to work on this more during a future project.

Current situation

I have learned enough about my technologies to feel very comfortable going into this development phase of the project. However I am but a single man trying to do a giant task as many of you know. Although I love working on it, I also don't want it to become unhealthy, while steadily making progress. Right now as things stand I made up a daily schedule that works, after some trial and error.

During the weekdays I get up at 5am to get into some comfy clothing and get to work almost immediately until 7am then life kicks off and I go to work at my main job. Later during the night I will be home with my partner and repeat that throughout the week. So currently I would work a little under 2h every day of the week. Coming up to a little more than 9h a week. Sometimes I work more in the evening or weekend when the opportunity arises, but that is considered extra.

As you can see though at that rate development will take a while. Regardless I am very motivated and driven to bring this project to its full potential and deliver a product that you guys can enjoy and feel like you took part in, in some way.

Closing remarks

It's been quite the journey so far for just the technologies and personal development to get to where I am today and I'm very proud of the progress I've made so far. I feel 100% ready to tackle whatever game dev challenge comes my way and that's a great feeling.  Today was a lot of getting to know me, my background, all of the new technologies and the reasoning behind those choices. Lastly I've given you guys a very short introduction to what my vision and personal goals are for Shadows of Cal'duur. 

Next time however we are jumping in, I will talk more in depth about the lore and how that merges with the game so you can get an idea of what you can expect to experience.  I'll also briefly talk about the future I have planned in regards to the lore. I will close off with some information like applying for playtesters, what that means and what you can expect in regards to playing the game in its beta or maybe an alpha, for which you don't need to be a playtester.

Well that's the end of it, I want to thank you for reading through this wall of text if you made it this far. During this process I didn't think much of gathering many visuals for this form of content but in the future there will be some things to feast your eyes on. You've gotten to know a bit about me but I'd love to meet you guys, so if you have stories or questions or are just excited about what's coming write us something in the comments. I will do my best to respond timely.

See you guys next time.

Don't forget that we have a Discord community that you are welcome to join.