PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:

Damian Schloter, solo developer from Germany. Studied illustration in Hamburg and taught myself coding on the side, working on my first game Slasher's Keep, which I released in Early Access shortly after getting my degree, full release came two years later. Before the release of Slasher's Keep I also made a small browser-based game called Double Hitler as a university project. I put that on Newgrounds and it garnered a bit of attention from big YouTubers.

Now I've been working on different solo Projects, trying to lay a foundation I can build on in the future.

TELL US ABOUT SLASHER'S KEEP.

My current project is an FPS with guns but a focus on melee - not officially named yet. I'm aiming for a game pace similar to Hotline Miami, with a more elaborate melee system that makes for a longer time to kill. Still, it will be about quick kills and quick deaths. The exact gameplay feel is still to be determined, though. So far I have the basic combat mechanics down: Guys can be knocked into a "stagger" state, if you hit them again they will get knocked to the ground where you can finish them off; Lethal weapons can finish them off standing. The goal is to make the act of dispatching an enemy more of an achievement. As the game progresses, kills will get quicker but so will deaths as enemies get better weapons too. The rising stakes will also make for a tighter and tighter tolerances when balancing the game, so that will be fun for me, I reckon...

Many years ago I had some vague idea for a third-person 3D brawler in tight spaces with heavy use of active ragdoll, where you'd kick down doors to small apartments and knock guys around the place. After shelving a medieval fantasy melee FPS project and having to start over I figured I could try doing an FPS version of that old idea. I'd always wanted to make a game with guns too, which the modern setting allows for. The fiction genre is roughly "spy thriller", think an assassin with unorthodox methods knocking heads and taking names.

HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN

After Slasher's Keep I wanted to lay the foundation for multiple projects with increasing scope, keeping project sizes manageable. To that end I was working on an FPS framework, among other things. I was going to make a small melee FPS in a medieval fantasy setting, that was supposed to be a snapshot of the world I was going to set follow-up projects in. The first game would be focused exclusively on the combat mechanics in a little horde mode level. At the same time I was world-building and writing stories for follow-up games and everything.

WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?

Then the Unity kerfuffle happened and I looked into switching to Godot. I ultimately failed to recreate the project in Godot due to several shortcomings: Firstly, animation retargeting simply didn't work right and all the animations I had got off the unity store were more or less useless; Secondly, I was unable to recreate the cartoon lighting I was used to and had built all the assets for due to Godot not having deferred lighting.

The whole animation thing ended up being too much of a pain so I hatched the idiotic plan to go back to 2D sprites and go for a simpler graphical style where only the characters are cel-shaded, with the shading drawn-on. I've had some problems there too but was able to solve them reasonably well. Now I'm already in to deep to quit. My whole project management plan, going from small projects to bigger projects, is greatly diminished, but I figure bigger games make more of a splash anyway. I just try not to think about the mountain of work ahead of me. It's still comparatively small in scope and not as much of a pain to QA test as my previous game which leaned heavily into procedural generation.

I have another project I haven't shown anything of which is a 2D game that could be described as a singleplayer card game of a sort. That one I successfully ported to Godot so far. Godot actually turned out to be better for that than Unity, with many features included out of the box, whereas I had to get several plugins off the store for the Unity version.

Overall I like working in Godot better, if only for the script editor integration. Not having an editor view of the game as it's running has been annoying but I hear they added that in a recent update.

WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?

Godot is missing many features you'd never think about until you need them and can't find them. The biggest hurdles for me were not having a deferred rendering pipeline and the animation retargeting thing (something related to rest poses having to be identical T poses and the rest pose fixer not working). I sidestepped those by, uh, giving up. I think the animation thing has since been fixed or there's a workaround, too late for me.

There are other things like lighting or nav meshes not baking at random. It's bizarre sometimes, I don't know.

Right now the most persistently annoying thing is AtlasTextures not allowing for a custom origin point, so the origin is always the middle and I find myself having to leave a lot of empty space around the drawings. Very weird.

Switching to 2D sprites for the characters instead of an active ragdoll system also made the game concept very difficult to implement and I've had to cut it down some. I had to make some concessions with the sprites: When standing, NPC sprites have 8 perspectives to switch between, sides mirrored, so 5 animations. Some animations only have a frontal view, some are missing views from the back, such as melee attack animations. When knocked down or dead, NPC sprites have one view only. This is a little grating for the inconsistency and was a little tricky perspective-wise but it works okay. After all the jankiness of the style is part of its charm.

I'm also making animations reusable with interchangeable sprites. NPC heads, torsos, legs, right hand and weapon are interchangable. This is a massive hassle initially but I figure it will be a boon in the long run. All NPCs will be able to use all weapons the player can use. They will be able to pick them up and use them against the player if he drops them. I'm also planning on adding multiple weapons for most types, such as multiple pistols with different stats using the same animations with the sprites swapped out.

With 3D models all of that would be moot. I like to think the extra effort will always shine through though. I believe players can taste fresh content (i.e. bespoke assets of any kind) even if they can't put their finger on it.

Another hurdle is that drawing animations is unbelievably boring. I remember vividly drawing the last sprite sheet for Slasher's Keep and thinking "I'm never doing this again.", now here I am drawing another million versions of the same guy and planning to do it 5 times over for other guys. I don't really have a remedy for that. Audiobooks help.

ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?

Everybody tells you to give up on your dream game and make small games. Many tell you to copy existing games like pong or whatever. This can be disheartening and may even make you quit. I say never clone any game, always be creative.

The thing you need to practice is not simply to make games that have already been made. Instead you'll want to learn how to translate the creative concepts in your mind into something playable. In the process you will go and find out about the tools at your disposal. Once you learn about what's possible your creative concepts will become more refined, i.e. they take implementation into account. Your dream game concepts will become less vague and more actionable. Soon your ideas will be structured around the actual implementation. You will learn how complicated something is and the effort that it requires. You will even be able to tell whether something you don't know how to do is doable and you will go and learn that too and keep learning.

You can in fact do all that while working on your dream game but if you're starting from zero your dream game idea is probably not concrete enough and too large in scope. You may come to regret committing to something so massive when it turns out to have been a daft idea all along.

ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?

I think one should always take advice on creative work with a grain of salt. Everyone's approaches differ to some degree, but ultimately game development offers a path for anyone with the aptitude. Every project has its own challenges and only the ones working on it really know about them. Many regurgitate received wisdom as gospel and it can be hard to tell the scholars from the hacks.

Game development and the market are constantly changing but it may not even be all that important to keep up. I think the better approach is to draw from other aspects of life and the human condition and whatnot, and then craft game mechanics based on the fiction they're depicting, rather than chase genre trends. Rather, think of genre trends as game design tools in your toolbox, the same way you learned about tools of implementation in the engine editor and whatnot.

My view is that game design is a way of abstracting the fiction into an interactive experience. This can be more or less straightforward, such as a racing game applying real world physics, or far removed, such as a first person shooter conveying the experience of running around and shooting folks via WASD and a mouse. I think people have lost sight of that and instead approach game design as the act of retooling established mechanics in the abstract and then throwing an arbitrary coat of fiction on them. Then again that's also a legitimate approach. Whatever floats your boat, man.

Damian

Slasher's Keep on Steam