For the past couple of weeks we've been searching a proper art style for our upcoming VR (Virtual Reality) game: My Shadow.We've been making some nice progress so far and maybe even figured out some good solutions to form the art pipeline for the upcoming production.I decided to gather up some images along the way, so to...
It's been a month when we started to work with our virtual reality game project, My Shadow. If you did not know yet, we got the demo part of the game funded by AVEK (basically Finnish government fund for artists). We have the deadline set for the upcoming Nordic Game 2020, where we plan on attending to show the game for ...
New year with new challenges! Year 2019 was pretty much our first "active year", which was mostly identifying the "core of Jestercraft". The whole point for the company has been to find ways to make "business" out of things which I personally like, but also find valuable for other people. The start was pretty rough for t...
What are "hyper-casual games" and how should you make one? The whole "hyper-casual genre" is rather new, but trending topic among the game industry, so it's good that you either understand what is it about or maybe even try it yourself. Let's dig in!What is a hyper-casual game?Hyper-casual games are very simple mobile ga...
Game development is at the intersection of technology and arts. That makes designing games hard since you need to design not only fun gameplay mechanics but also the environment and world which keeps the player interested. So what keeps us interested?How to make a good gameIt would be awesome to drop the silver bullet he...
For many Game Jams feel like a massive leap to unknown. An epic fight in which you need to prepare yourself for months, or even years."The people who have years of experience have joined a game jam back in the days to learn. You can't learn all this without actually making games, so why not start it tonight?"The fact is ...
How to get a publisher for your game and make an interesting game at the same time? I'm going to share my thoughts, tips, and tricks on how you can make sure that you're on the right track with your project, right from the start!"...you're more able to focus on things that not only the publisher finds interesting, but al...
To get stuff done, you need to get your hands dirty and actually do it. But to know what you're about to do is better to think before that.It's rather easy to get excited about something new. Be it a new project, hobby or such it's (in most of the cases) fun to start something new. Carrying that "passioned" hype along th...
As I'm writing this, it's Monday. It used to be one of the most stressful days of the week, it even affected the day before (Sundays) when the piles of work, deadlines, and pressure started to kick in. For the past year, I've been teaching my self to stop doing this and find ways to have more fun while working. And it se...
Since I'm attending the Pocket Gamer Connects, Helsinki as a speaker this year I wanted to try and write my thoughts of mobile games and monetization here as well.I'm attending the panel "Is this the era of hybrid monetization?" on the first day of the event. I actually got the "questions" upfront, so I decided to write ...
Recently I've had a lot of great discussions with people who either are trying to build a sustainable game studio or planning to do so. I wanted to gather some of the best practices within this blog post, which can help you go forward! Please understand though, that the topic is so wide scale that there is no "single rec...
One of the most important things in game development, is to understand the importance of scheduling.Games are one form of art. Which also means that it's almost impossible to call anything "ready" or "complete" when talking about game features. It can be never ending process, to work with something because it just doesn'...
Know your player! This time we discuss of the topic within a podcast! (If for some reason you can not see the embed link below, you can listen the podcast on Soundcloud.)Let's discuss how and why you should aim to understand your player from the beginning. Listen up the podcast below:
1. You're not making your game fo...
After writing the post "Books for independent game developers" I ended up taking the Theory of Fun -book from the shelf and read it again after a very long break. It sure was not a bad decision, since it brought a lot of thoughts of the core, of making games.[WARNING: Rant ahead!]This made me think again, what really mak...
Testing your game is one of the most valuable things, you can do while making your game. Or to be exact, without it you basically let the luck decide, is your game interesting and/or does it even work!Test early, often and with the right peopleYou're not supposed to make your game a polished diamond to start testing it. ...
This time I'm going to share couple of books, which have affected my design and/or business thinking within the game industry. There is some books which you may have heard of, or maybe even you've read them already. Some of them has nothing to do with "game design" or making games in any way. Let's take a look:1. Start W...
I just took a look into a nice article on Gamasutra which discussed about the"A "Hot or Not" genres on Steam. I wanted to share my thoughts around this, since I find this type of thinking very important, when making your game.THE GENREThe very first thing everyone should understand, when making a game is that you should ...
For some of our readers game jams may be familiar, for someone they may be familiar but don't understand why people are so "hyped" about them. I'm going to drop my "two cents" of why game jams are important and why YOU should attend one as well.Game jams are normally organized as "physical events" where people come toget...
DATA-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT IN PC GAMESWhen aiming for data-driven development in PC games, things start to get a little tricky. Especially if you're making a premium game, which players purchase to get playing.For premium games, you need to start doing the data-driven development before releasing the game. YOU HAVE JUST AN ...
What is "data-driven development"? To put it in a nutshell, it's when you try to get away from thinking what works inside your team and let the data/metrics tell you the answer. How could this be used while making your indie mobile game?When making a game, it's almost impossible to predict what players are interested in....
