For many years, we have been creating games in a micro-team, usually just my husband and me. After years of working together, we understand each other almost without words, know each other's habits, and our workflow. This is a solid foundation on which to build something great.
We've always made small games suitable for our small team, but a few years ago, we wanted to create something more complex. So the idea was born to create a tower defense game in a tiny 3D world and add a secret quest to it.
We had experience using the LibGDX library, and we've been experimenting with the GODOT engine for a while, so we chose Godot Engine for our project. Why GODOT? Because it's open source, because it works well on linux, and because we can be part of an amazing community :)
When we started working on TailQuest, version 2.0 of GODOT had just been released. Yes... it was a long time ago!
In the beginning, our game was controlled by touch or mouse cursor. But when Nintendo Switch came out, we thought, "hey, maybe it would be fun to do tower defense for consoles!" So we changed the game to be controlled by the player's character instead of the mouse cursor. This changed a lot of things in our design, but the core principles remained the same - tower defense and secret-seeking.
We had to change a lot of things in our game at this point, such as the design of the towers and levels. In the first version of the game, the towers had eyes with which to track enemies. But when the cutest character in the game appeared, we realized that towers with eyes were too much.
Old Towers:
New Towers:
Creating a cute character wasn't easy for me because I'm not a great graphic designer, but I'm stubborn. So I stubbornly created new versions of the character.
The level design also had to be designed differently now - now every place and every secret had to be designed so that you could just walk into it. This may not sound like a serious problem - but it changed a lot and made the project suddenly our biggest project in life. Anyway, that was one of the reasons :)
My hand drawing skills didn't help much either - my drawings are terrible!
But it's not that important, really. I really like to draw my concepts by hand - it allows me to organize my thoughts and ideas.
So... if you're not very good at drawing, don't worry, you'll be fine!
More on creating levels can be found here: https://www.indiedb.com/games/riven-tails/tutorials/level-design-from-an-ugly-sketch-to-playable-level
And now, after many years of really hard work just the two of us - the release of our game is really close!
Unfortunately, we've never had good marketing, so almost no one knows about our project, and we have a really small number of wishlists.
Since the number of wishlists is one of the factors contributing to how Steam treats the game upon release, we have a great request. If you like what you see, please wishlist our game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/824090/TailQuest_Defense/
Thank you! It means a lot to us.
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