I'm James Simpson, the founder of GoldFire Studios. I've been in game development for 20 years now, starting with web games when I was in school. We've got a core team of 4 people, two in Oklahoma City and two in Europe (but many others contributed to Arctic Awakening over the years).
Arctic Awakening is a first-person narrative adventure set in the unforgiving Arctic. Your plane crashed in a storm, leaving only your court-mandated therapy bot for company as you journey to find your co-pilot and uncover the mysteries buried beneath the ice.
We had been making multiplayer games that could be played across web, mobile and PC, but we really wanted to do something different with our next project. In addition to games, I'd always been interested in movie making growing up, so combining the two in some form had been a dream of mine. Games like Firewatch, Life is Strange and the Telltale games helped pave the way, and we had an idea to stand on those shoulders and see what we could add to the genre.
The journey ended up being a lot longer than we had anticipated as we ended up needing to re-learn pretty much everything and also built all sorts of custom tools along the way. Even though it was a long and at times difficult process, we learned a lot along the way, which has made the whole process worth it.
We were used to JavaScript with custom or fairly stripped down engines for our prior projects, so C# in Unity was a natural fit and most of the team already had some Unity experience previously.
Figuring out all of the things we didn't know that we didn't know. We were quite experienced with 2D or isometric multiplayer games, but making a single player narrative adventure in a 3D world is a completely different matter. Most of the skills we had accrued over time pretty much went out the window and we had to re-learn most everything from scratch.
For something more specific, it would be our AI companion drone. We spent a lot of time on the initial system for him, but it just wasn't achieving what we wanted out of the character in terms of movement, character and navigation. So, halfway through the development of the game we ripped that system out and completely re-built it from the ground up. It's needed constant refinement over multiple years to achieve natural looking physics-based movement and navigation that doesn't feel forced while still being helpful and grounded in the world.
Make sure you absolutely love and believe in the game you are making. It's always going to take longer than you expect. There are going to be points where you question why you're making this game at all. Points where you think nobody is going to like or enjoy what you're making. It's all part of the process (and trust me, there's plenty of people out there who will absolutely love what you're making if you love it too), but if you don't fully believe in it then you'll never make it through those tough times and see the project through to completion.
Have fun! Games are meant to be fun and provide entertainment, so don't worry about the antagonizers, trolls of negative people out there. Focus on the people who are actually interested in what you're making and have fun making it for and with them.
-James
❤️
