User Stories: How AI Helped Me Develop a Mobile Game in Just a Few Days

Developing an indie game can be a daunting task, especially when working solo or with limited resources. As an independent "hobbyst-developer", I wanted to explore how artificial intelligence could assist me in different aspects of game development. This led to the creation of The Spear of Leonidas, a small game developed with Construct 2. The entire project was an experiment to see how AI could streamline and enhance the development process.

What is The Spear of Leonidas?

The Spear of Leonidas is a mobile-friendly game that is completely free to play. It features two main modes:

• Play Mode: The objective is to throw the spear as far as possible.
• Arcade Mode: Players must aim at objects placed at varying distances to score points.

The gameplay itself is simple, but the real challenge—and the core of my experiment—was integrating AI into different parts of the development process.

Using AI for Artistic Direction

I am not an artist, and one of the biggest challenges I face as a solo developer is maintaining a consistent and visually appealing art style. This is where AI became an invaluable tool. Instead of generating images directly, I used ChatGPT to define an artistic direction and suggest specific elements to include in the environment. For example, I asked questions like:

• What animals could appear in the background?
• What type of vegetation would fit the setting?
• What should the destructible vases and other objects look like?

By leveraging AI's ability to provide creative guidance, I was able to focus on a cohesive visual style without needing to generate art from scratch. Once I had a clear vision, I refined the assets using Photopea to fit my needs.

AI-Generated Music: A New Frontier

Another area where I experimented with AI was music creation. As someone without musical expertise, composing a soundtrack from scratch would have been a major hurdle. I tested various AI-powered music generation tools and eventually settled on ilovesong.ai to create background tracks for the game. While the results were simple, they complemented the game's atmosphere well.

Of course, AI-generated music isn't a perfect substitute for a human composer, but it provided a solid starting point. I still had to adjust and integrate the tracks manually to ensure they matched the gameplay experience.

What AI Didn’t Do

It’s important to clarify that AI didn’t handle everything. The core gameplay mechanics, scripting and overall design were implemented manually using Construct 2—a tool I was already familiar with from previous projects. AI acted as an assistant rather than a replacement, providing creative inspiration and assets that I could refine and integrate as needed.

Final Thoughts: AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement

The Spear of Leonidas remains an ongoing experiment rather than a definitive statement on game development with AI. My goal was not to demonstrate how to “replace artists or musicians” but to explore how AI could assist indie developers in overcoming creative and technical hurdles.

For solo developers and small teams, AI offers exciting possibilities for speeding up workflows and enhancing creativity. However, it’s still just a tool—one that works best when combined with human intuition, refinement, and vision.

If you’re an indie developer, I encourage you to experiment with AI in your own projects. Whether it’s for brainstorming ideas, generating assets, or assisting with music, it might surprise you how much it can streamline your workflow.

What do you think about AI in game development? Have you used it in your own projects? Share your experiences in the comments below!

Freank

User Stories: 16 Bit Nights - Is it still possible to promote a game using Facebook Groups?

I thought about also sharing with you guys a recent marketing experience with 0 funding, mostly because I assume most of us do marketing ourselves so it automatically becomes part of the game development.

So during this post, I want to: 

• point out the importance of knowing your target audience;
• the importance of having good promotional material;
• my personal experience with Facebook groups promotions;
• some Facebook algorithms.

Ok, let`s start! 

First-round

I recently remade my Steam thumbnail and what better way to get some promotional material than this?! Also please note that this information is strictly resuming to Facebook groups.

I first posted in pixel art theme groups on Facebook. Why? Because I try to aim for the target audience and what better way than to start on a place where people love pixel art (since the game is also pixel art) and here are the results from day 1:

1. Pixel art + 35k members = post got 330 likes 30 comments 17 shares​
2. Pixel Art 29k members = post got 111 likes 25 comments​
3. Pixel Art Heaven = post got 136 likes and 22 comments​

Results: 1 follower and 20 new wishlist additions.

Conclusion

I am not some high tec guru dark star fapfap button Wizzard master developer, no, I am just like most developers so when I start to see so many like per post I was very excited, normally my posts on those groups get per average 20-30 likes, I was having high expectations for a wishlist so I was a bit disappointed when I saw only 20 new additions. It can also be the fact that some of them already had my game on wishlist since I posted there before from time to time about the game. Anyhow it was a good result and I strongly recommend you make smart posts, for example, I only stated in the post I made these pixel art banners but I did not put any links in the description so people actually asked for a link and only after that I edited and added the link, so try hard not to be a hit&run poster. Also if you want to keep your post up, respond to comments a few days after so that your topic gets bumped up. Please also consider I did not include the private messages received based on this.

Second round

So why haven't I posted in all FB groups the same day?

Because of Facebook algorithms, for example, even though I made the new custom text for all posts, I did have the same 2 pictures uploaded and if facebook sees you post the same comment too many times it will automatically warn you and mark your posts as spam. The second day I decided to target Xcom players because my game is heavily inspired by Xcom, I am not talking just about some art and 1-2 mechanics, no I am talking about the overall game design and the majority of features, heck, my game is basically Xcom in real-time.

Xcom

And note that I posted same 2 picture but I adapted the text, Here are the results:

1. XCOM players 4k members = post got 80 likes 50 comments​
2. XCOM: Enemy Withinposting 400 members = post got 14 likes 3 comments​
3. Xcom 2 2k members = post got 40 likes 8 comments​

Results: 10 followers and 80 new wishlist additions

Conclusion

Based on pixel art communities results, I was expecting around 8-12 wishlist additions so when I saw the results it was clear for me, I first yelled some mumbo-jumbo spartan DarkStar Sailormoon Voltron lines in a weird language then I realized that even though the pixel groups were A LOT bigger then Xcom ones and that I got more engagement on them then on Xcom ones, the more I get closer to the target audience the bigger the conversion rate is. So I strongly recommend hard research on the target audience before starting marketing. I believe it is the same s**t with wishlist conversion rate into sales, as in if you get wishlists from giveaways and from people who meh or are casuals the conversion rate will be lower, and the more genuine wishlist audience you got the more the conversion rate will grow.

Third round & forth round

At this point, I included both 3 and 4 rounds of Facebook group marketing because the results are non-existent. Round 3 was aiming toward casual gamer groups and round 4 was aiming toward Indie Game developer groups and other small pixel art groups, same promotional picture + adjusted text. Please notice how huge are some groups, how small, and how that factor is truly not important when it comes to smart marketing and knowing your target audience.

Results:

1. Indie Game Promo IGD 56k members = post got 9 likes 3 comments
2. ​Retro Indie Pixel Game 9k members = post got 12 likes 1 comment​
3. RTS game lovers = post got 2 likes

​and other groups not worth mentioning because of results

Conclusion

And for the casual gamer audience, I targeted PC gamer(more than 30k members) group, steam gamers, and so on BUT and it is a strong BUT here, I got 1 or 2 likes per post in these groups, now you are going to say "awww then this is a waste of time I will ignore those groups" and after you say this I will strangle you because you know nothing, Jhon Snow! Why? Some time ago I made TAURONOS game and that game had casual players as the target audience, the thing is that I got good love on this casual player audience group for that game specifically because that was its target audience.

So in conclusion: Know your target audience & do not be a spammer that does hit&run, be smart about it and you will avoid wasting time on promotions that will bring no results. Time is very important. Now I am not saying not to post in Indie game development groups but I am saying do not post in Indie game development groups unless you have too much time.

I will make some more posts during the week in other groups but I estimate the main goal was already achieved.​

Overall:

• always make posts in target audience groups otherwise you would just be spamming;
• adjust the text to each specific group, don`t be lazy or hit&runner, put a bit of soul into your post;
• respond to all comments, it helps when people see you care and it also gets your post bumped back up;
• put quality/polished promotional material;
• have a call to action, either by asking for feedback or support for your wishlist, it is all up to you on what you need;
• do not post in all groups in a short period of time or Facebook will mark you as a spam post;
• do not post the exact content on many groups or again, Facebook will mark you as a spam post.

Aditional:

• I also used ads a few times this year and I must say the conversion rate for Facebook ads is totally not worth it. It brings some traffic but most its from fake accounts.

If you got any suggestions/feedback on what I did wrong please do let me know.

Tauronos developed by Popa Cristian/16bitnights

Also please do not think marketing resumes only on Facebook (I am talking now to the newbies, not to the veterans who obviously know this). If you enjoy this post I will try to share my marketing up-to-date experience for all social platforms and marketing-wise related stuff such as email marketing, PR, marketing plan 1 month before release, and others.

I am not perfect and this is just my opinion & personal experience. I originaly posted this topic on TigSource.

- Popa Cristian/16bitnights

User Stories: Bookend Team - Why do a VR Game?

The whole Bookend team has never worked on a VR project nor have ever been avid VR connoisseurs up until the creation of Bookend. 

"a pop-up book" in VR

What we did know, however, was that we wanted to create a unique, well-designed project meant to wow everybody within the University of California: Santa Cruz’s capstone series.

Our first thought was to develop a VR title. 
This idea was two-fold: first, it was supported by the fact that many of us believe that virtual reality as a concept is only budding. We have yet to see the huge mainstream appeal of virtual reality and the technology is only going to improve. We, as the Bookend team, want to be there for the ride (and get a portfolio boost). Second of which, virtual reality was a means for us to truly create an immersive experience allowing the designers within the group to truly flex their design muscles, and the developers to experience developing with virtual reality in mind.

In an attempt to explore this idea, we began iterating on Beloved, an atmospheric horror game set within a virtual reality space. We iterated ideas over the course of a couple months such as the player having ghost hands and using telekinesis to guide another individual around puzzle situations akin to a second person exploration game. Although the game was only supposed to take place within a household, the project quickly got out of scope within its narrative, art direction, and programming months into our development cycle.

Winning the the Peer Choice Award

We persevered through months of dead-end conceptualization, eventually leading us to create a narrative-centric puzzle game meant to subvert the expected conventions (grab objects and throw stuff) within a virtual reality space. Although started by a core team of ten students for Beloved, we quickly ballooned our team into twenty (ten core members and ten auxiliary members that helped with art, sound/music, and programming) for Bookend’s rise.

We definitely wanted the gameplay to be reminiscent of reading through a pop-up book so heavy design iteration went into honing in on that particular feeling. As such, many of our mechanics are analogous to the features of a physical pop-up book. The music and narrative direction, in particular, serve to enhance the whimsical and enchanting nature of Bookend’s aesthetic.

Creating Bookend was not without its problems, however, as developing through the affordances of VR. We ran through multiple problems that the affordances of a mouse and keyboard avoided. Namely, controls were our number one issue. We changed our controls scheme multiple times due to player confusion with the Oculus controls. At first, we had it so that the player navigated the game space with their headset, looking at objects they wanted to interact with. We quickly realized that this idea was more trouble than what it was worth. Players quickly grew frustrated at the fact that they had to pinpoint their headset at a small object in order to select it. 

We then changed the controls to focus on the Oculus Touch. 

Bookend Team

Our first iteration of this was too focused on the Oculus face buttons (A, B, X, Y). We had players press the grip button on the controller and confirm their selection with either A or X. This caused the issue of the player not knowing which button was A or X causing them to become increasingly confused and frustrated. Through a lengthy design discussion, we finally decided to change the controls to what we have now: Point in VR by closing the grip button and confirm the selection with the trigger button. This was due to the fact that the grip and trigger buttons are the largest buttons on an Oculus Touch controller. This changed proved beneficial as when players would get confused about the controls, they would first attempt to press the trigger and grip buttons. 

Wanting to create a project that mattered to us, the team decided to make a VR project that doubled down on immersion and unique gameplay features. Developing through VR is difficult, especially in the controls department. (Try getting someone to press the A button while they can’t see!) Nonetheless, through multiple months of hard, dedicated work, Bookend slowly yet steadily transitioned from a concept born from the fall of Beloved into a concept that carried its own weight. The last-minute scrapping of our original idea left our team scrambling, but we’re extremely proud with our work thus far. 

We hope that you enjoy playing through Bookend as much as we enjoyed making it.

- Book End Team

User Stories: How Founding An Indie Games Blog Changed Our Perception Of This Industry

As the term gained popularity, producers and consumers alike began to wonder: what exactly is an indie game anyway? Should we consider anyone who hasn’t been signed by a publisher independent? And if that’s the case, are solo developers and multi-million dollar self-publishing studios on the same plane?

Eventually, to answer these and other questions, my partner Elisa and I launched The Indie Toaster in May 2017. We began to review other people’s work, we attended events, we published summaries and - most importantly – we made an effort to meet as many creatives as we could fit into our schedule. Our final goal, you ask? To provide the community with all the guidance and assistance we could muster.

Almost immediately, we began to realize just how deep this specific rabbit hole goes. The indie gaming industry is not as simple as it might seem at a first glance. Whether you’re working on your first project or already have a few titles safely under your belt, here are three tips we feel could help you!

All Projects Have a Price

Once you open your door and let people know that you’re there to help, questions usually start pouring in. One of the most common we’ve seen in the last 400 or so days is about how much it costs to build a game from scratch.

Let’s be crystal clear about this one: there’s no such thing as a completely free effort to bring something to life. Regardless of your intentions to make money out of it, developing an indie game will cost you. Before you even attempt to move forward, you should get familiar with whatever requirement your project has.

If you’re only developing out of passion or are doing it to earn experience, time ends up being your most valuable commodity. In this case, the golden rule is to be as constant as you possibly can. Dedicating 8 to 10 hours a day into the earlier phases of your plan will serve you no purpose, if you can’t be persistent enough to see the end of it. 

Things get a bit more complicated when a commercial release is involved. You’ll have to acquire all needed licenses, invest in assets and marketing, maybe even pay your colleagues a few bucks to keep them happy. As such, building a realistic business plan remains one of your utmost priorities. 

Do that and you’ll be one step closer to becoming a successful indie games developer.  

Don’t Be The Jack Of All Trades

“Fine then! If hiring outsiders costs so much, I’ll just take care of everything by myself!” This too is an extremely common answer we get while talking to devs. Especially among first-timers, tackling every aspect of their project in a single sitting is seen as a final proof of honor and ability. 

Unfortunately, as players come to expect more polished and richer experiences, doing everything on your own often becomes impossible. Mind it: it’s not a matter of skills or willingness to sacrifice your free time. On the contrary, it’s the sheer amount of work that has the ability to trample your dreams. 

The average indie game takes several months to see the light of day. We’re only talking about the time needed to turn an idea into a working build. On top of that, you’ll have to account for marketing, community management, quality assurance, and shipping. Oh, and you should sleep too. You might feel invincible in your early 20s, but that won’t last forever. 

Once again, your final goal influences the way you work. For a non-commercial release, you can take as much time as you want. When you’re planning to sell your game, though, setting the right kind of deadline - and sticking by it - can make a difference. Delay your release too much and you might doom your title from the start! 

Maybe it’s time to drag a few more people into your project? 

Be Ready To Fight For Your Place

We talked about managing your resources, we discussed how you shouldn’t do everything by yourself, yet we left the most important question for last. “What exactly makes an indie game a success?”, we were asked more than a few times. Truth be told, there’s no clear answer to this one!

In its infancy, the interactive entertainment industry saw a couple of hundreds of new releases hitting the shelves every year. In 2016, SteamSpy counted more than 6000 titles seeing the light of day. The number was even higher in 2017, for which the site reports more than 7050 new product pages. That’s a lot of competition you’ll have to ride through. 

There’s no magic formula for success, but there are a couple of guidelines you should stick to. Among the others, always make sure you probe the market before you start working. Join development groups, visit events, ask fellow gamers what kind of titles they would like to play. You won’t have time for it once the project is underway. 

Finally, be prepared to fight for the attention of your crowds. Start marketing ahead of time, get in contact with the press - we have a guide on how to do both - and give your indie game as much visibility as you can; even if it means cracking open your piggy bank!

- Alessandro Cossidente

User Stories: LostTrainDude at Codemotion Rome 2018

or: How I went to give a talk about puzzle design in adventure games and came back with an interest in hardware programming.

On April, 18 you could find me in Rome, among over 2000 people attending Codemotion tech conference.

The event was held at the engineering department of Roma Tre University, a place I know very well, because that’s where I first attended a Global Game Jam in 2012.

I was there to give a talk about puzzle design in point-and-click adventure games!

Here is a handy YouTube video. You can find the presentation slides here.

Thanks to both my brother Syd and TheTMO for recording the video!

That said, let’s talk about the conference!

It was exciting to see my name there, but turns out there were a lot of things to be excited about.

First of all, I was going to meet some old friends from the indie gamedev scene.

Andrea Ferlito (who made all of this possible in the first place), TheTMO, Ciro Continisio (now Technical Evangelist at Unity in Brighton), Giuseppe and Francesca from Yonder (now working on Circle of Sumo), Giorgio Pomettini (who gave a great talk about Rust programming language in videogames), Augusto “KyserByte” from Motorsport Gaming, Tommaso from Caracal Games, and more!

From left to right: Andrea Ferlito, my brother Syd, me, Jeff and Giles

It all started here, end of Day 1, when we met Jeff Minter and Ivan Zorzin (Giles) from Llamasoft!

Needless to say: meeting Jeff and Giles was a blast. We laughed over a couple of drinks and chatted about stuff we love, in and out of the gamedev subject.

Yet again, it’s always nice to feel like part of a huge family.

In the back you can spot Ivan Preziosi (wearing a baseball cap), whom I met on this occasion and found out he’s developing Hard Times, a game about homeless survival in the big metropolis of indifference. A really interesting and deep game that sends out an important message, without compromising entertainment.

Also it reminded me of one of my favourite games of all time which is Rags To Riches from C64, but this takes everything of a whole new other, and higher, level.

Ivan discussing the game with Giles (Llamasoft) and Andrea Ferlito

Another thing this event may be responsible of is my taking my first step into hardware programming. Something I would NEVER expect to happen.

Amie DD was one of the speakers and when I attended her keynote, I couldn’t help but be inspired and curious.

I really like this picture, because it seems like she’s just out of a cyberpunk movie, her lines being: “Hey, fancy some hardware?”.

I asked for advice and she provided me some, also advising me not to fear hardware and offering to help me start, something I accepted with extreme gratitude!

Being mostly among the gamedevs I didn’t manage to be around many other speakers, who all came from different backgrounds.

Still, it was nice to meet them and share a few laughs at the Speakers Dinner. I’m very curious about the “Anxiety Driven Development” talk by Nicole Bartolini, which I could not attend to because I was giving my own talk at the same time.

Thanks, Codemotion Rome 2018, I won’t forget you and your excellent team easily, if ever.

- LostTrainDude/Christopher Sacchi

User Stories: 6 Eyes Studio - I left EA 2 years ago to work on my own game

I left EA 2 years ago to work on my own game: a tactical RPG with great pixel art and lush hand-drawn battle maps.  After more than a decade working in the video game industry, the last 4 at EA, I decided it was time to do away with "non-compete agreement employment" and I quit my job to follow my dream and start working on my own game. 

Together with my wife, a kick-ass pixel artist, we set off to create Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, a story-driven tactical RPG aiming to bring back the glory days of Final Fantasy Tactics and the like. Today, we're both developing Fell Seal on a full-time capacity and making awesome progress. 

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark is a turn-based tactical RPG set in a fantasy universe, with a touch of steampunk. We're focusing on a mature story and dialogues, an intricate and vast class system and solid core gameplay. The game is a mix of lush fully hand-drawn environments with carefully crafted high-res pixel art. 

The gameplay aims to be as faithful as possible to timeless classics like Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre, but brings in its own set of improvements and additions, such as improved UI, a novel items system, potent visual character customization and lots of exciting abilities (to name but a few!).

The maps feature various types of terrain and elevations, which allows for more options and crafty play during combat. For example, tossing a unit that can't swim into water is going to yield pretty potent results...

Our artist decided she needed to draw a ridiculous amount of clothing for characters, so we created a system that lets you customize the visuals of your units from a very large array of portraits, outfits, skin colors, hats, hairs, accessories, eyes, etc. All with many color options. With this system, none of your units are going to feel generic (unless that's your thing).

This makes for as large and varied an army as you fancy it... You can set up all your units in the camp view, which allows you to change their gear, abilities, class, etc as well as craft new gear and items. You'll also be able to unlock secret classes, on top of the 20 core classes.

The game focuses a lot on the story, which is told via in-game cutscenes in a mix of the style of games like Final Fantasy 6 and Tactics Ogre.

We launched our Kickstarter for Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark 2 days ago and we're 15% funded at this point.

Fell Seal has an incredible amount of at put into it (we're up to about 80,000 individual sprite frames at this point, which is a staggering amount), so we've been relying on the help of a few awesome contracted artists to make sure we can both keep the quality high and the timeline as lean as possible. The Kickstarter will allow us to keep using their vital services and aim for a Q3 release in 2018.

We're off to a good start on Kickstarter and the community there has been awesome. We hope you're liking the style of our game and will consider supporting us on Kickstarter!

Feel free to post any questions you might have (preferably about the project, but anything else works too, lol)! We'll be happy to respond!

6 Eyes Studio

User Stories: Unidentified Entity - 7 Tips for a "good showcase"

Svilupparty, an Italian showcase about indie games, is been an enriching experience.
I received a lot of feedbacks from developers but also by simple gamers.

The idea of finally going face-to-face with other developers amazed me, especially as I was used to another kind of professional reality.
The first day I stopped to try some videogame of which I've heard about before, and I was amazed to meeet little teams of guys which started a project from scratch as I did.

Naemo by Hyperchild

By the way, an amazing thing was the big amount of people who offered to cooperate on my project, including Claudio Peli, which is actually the coder of Naemo.
The mood was really friendly and enjoyable, even though it was a bit small to hold so many people. However it's been a wonderful experience that I reccomend to all those who want to get closer to this reality. I'll be back next year with a more detailed version of Naemo.

For those who might be in the situation to expose a videogame, in my brief experience I would reccomend:

1. First of all, keep it real, phisically. 
2. Don't go away from your workstation no matter what. 
3.  Be ready to repeat over and over the same speech for all the time of the event. 
4. Needless to say, patience is everything. 
5.  If you are smokers, well.. good luck. 
6. Be prepared to the criticism, because they'll come. And it's good thing. 
7.  Last but not least, always smile. :)

- Hyperchild (Unidentified Entity)

User Stories: LifeLit Games - My first "showcase-experience"

Our experience at Svilupparty, huh? 

Well, the event was awesome, many people came to our stand to play Houdini: The Grand Magus, some of them, after have left came back with more friends to play the game with. 

The most positive thing about presenting a game at Svilupparty was the possibility to get feedbacks and first of all.. who doesn't like compliments? 

Houdini: The Grand Magus

There are many plus in presenting games at events like Svilupparty, first of all the possibility to talk with colleagues and enthusiasts. 

At the start, when the organizers told us where we should had to stage our booth we were already super hyped. 

When the people started to come at our stand we became yet more excited and of course started talking and making friend with everyone. 

In the end we got many useful feedbacks and some calling cards from other developers. In these days we'll apply many changes suggested by the players, like adjusting difficulty and make some aspect of the game more clear. Our "pro tip" for the ones who want to partecipate to this kind of fair is to always be kind with players even though they may say terrible things at your product and always have calling cards!

- LifeLit Games

User Stories: Ste - 4 Ways to Obtain Custom Resources for your Game

How can you make a unique and professional game?
First of all you should ask yourself: what makes a game professional?
Why is my game different with respect to the others in sale?
Why I cannot give value to what I do?
Are these question ever asked to yourself?

One thing is for sure: originality is what create value.

It does not have to be necessary something new: you can take something which already exists and propose it in a new different way (your way).

You can merge and mix existing things and add to your knowledge: in that way can make new things.  

The other way is to give free reign to your imagination.

We know the videogames are a wonderful alchemy of different arts, such as graphics, drawing, music, scripting, storytelling.

Having these winning elements can make your game professional: in order to have all of these elements you need to customize resources in the way you imagine.

Professional doesn’t mean have a wonderful story to tell and do it with common graphic assets available by anyone; professional doesn’t mean neither have a breathtakingly design style but use standard musics that don’t reflect my game’s themes. 

 The perfect way would be take care yourself of all the elements that make a videogame.

Be a good illustrator, a good composer, and master with scripting. Otherwise let others help you.

So what are the possibilities that a game developer has to make a game with exclusive resources for your own game? 

Let’s see together. 

1. Reassemble existing resources.
   Not a bad way, especially to begin. If you don’t want make use of standard packages resource provided by engine or you don’t want to use the usual materials available from anyone on the web, a good idea is to found the best resources that interest us and learn to edit or reassemble these as we like. For example, we can take a sprite of a stone and merge it with a tuft of grass and a flower, change it the colors a bit and we have made a semi-new resource. What’s important is don’t use copyrighted material in your own project (from other games). Steal resources from the others does not make your game professional. This method also can be used for music: there are a lot of royalty free musics on the web, available for free use in any project. It’s important to be patience in seeking and listening a lot until you find the song that fits for your game.


2. Learn to do self-made resources.
   It’s true that we live in a “specialized” world. In reality the most important thing is the knowledge and the learning with no endings the most dissimilar things. Why became a “programmer” or a “composer” if I can be good enough in everything? Sure, it will take a little more bravery and endurance to grow more passions at the same time, but in the long term we’ll be rewarded. That is the way we make us different and unique with respect to the others. If we want to make something unique, we need to have some other skills more than the competitors. Or…


3. Find people who will work with us.
   It’s not always easy find people who follow us, who take care as much as we do in a project. If you find someone willing to give you an aid, remeber: you have found a treasure. People always wonder: “Why should I join this game?”. Afterall it’s not their project but yours. We need clear ideas, a bit of experience and things to show (to show them we’re serious). Sometimes we might find enough people to form a development team, or else (if we fail or if a team is too much challenging for us) we still have one last option.







An Art made by Elf Games about Our Hero made by Ste with the 





4. Get original resources from assets store.
   The different engines (eg Unity) often have stores dedicated to the sale of assets by competent person in a certain field. These could not be resources for your game, but we can still be tranquil since the price is a limit in accessibility and diffusion. However we might need of unique and exclusive resources (at the same price) customized for us: Making Core has born for that, to create an interchange of skills and make collaboration between developers, to obtain only custom resources for our projects: a customized sprite, an exclusive soundtrack, a personal script.

And you? Which method you use to make unique your own game?

- Ste

User Stories: Mike Coeck - Getting through Greenlight

I am sure that many devs are asking themselves the question:

How do I get through the Steam Greenlight process before Valve changes it and starts charging me horrendous amounts of money? 

For those who don’t know yet, Valve announced that Greenlight in its current form will change. It’s about to be replaced by a new system that will charge up to 5000$ to put your game on the system. Now most will agree that this is a necessary change. 

Too much bad games made it through the process, mostly bad ports of mobile games who don’t have a place on any pc. 

So why would you want to go through Greenlight now before it changes, except of course for the obvious money reasons? 

Well, the good thing about going through the process is that you don’t have to publish your game right away, you can take all the time in the world once the game is lit. Valve has also informed the community that anyone who has gotten through the process, will not be charged any extra money or will not have to go through the new process. 

Let’s break down what we did with Antigraviator to get through Greenlight. First, we started by panicking, not what I recommend you to do, but you might if by reading this article you are just finding out about the changes and realize you probably have one month or less left. We already had plans to put our game through Greenlight, but not immediately, so we had to move some deadlines around.

Our next step was to read up a bit on the Greenlight process and what was needed. I will sum it up for you here: A video showing gameplay, some screenshots and an interesting summary of the games features. Interestingly to note is that you don’t need a demo. I can only recommend to read up on how to do an interesting gameplay video, how to take great screenshots and how to write interesting summary texts for you game, because I am not going to cover that in this article. 

After we created these things, we did make a demo, but in all honestly, looking back at it and seeing two Youtubers trying to cover the game, the demo should have been focused more on the single player element of the game and not the split screen multiplayer. There is really something awkward in seeing one person trying to control two players. 

The last thing was to put everything online and trying to start a buzz. One thing we learned is that people are not waiting to see your game on steam. They are not sitting behind their computers looking for the next greenlight entry that is put online. You must tell them and inform them that your game is on the platform and that they should go and vote. Use social media to do this! There are a couple of interesting groups you should be following on Facebook, the biggest being Indie Game Developers. Also on twitter you should know about using #screenshotsaturday. Getting picked up by a bigger game news site will also help, 

I didn’t happen for Antigraviator, but then again that was not our focus for this campaign. 

We did make a special skin for people who helped us, but that did not bring the success we had hoped for.

- Mike Coeck, CyberWalrus

User Stories: Signorino Alessio - How to Make an Horror Game

Hello guys! My name is Signorino Alessio!

I'm the developer of Silent Memories P.T., a fan RPG Maker game based from the famous original game Silent Hills P.T. developed by Hideo Kojima for Konami.

I just want to say first of all, thanks all of you supporters, when everyone test it and says how good it was, that makes me very happy! 

I'll continue to work on it, to give you something that Konami didn't.

About your games:

As a developer, I want to give some advices if your planning to create games!

First of all, you really need to think what you want to do, and be sure if you could really work for that game, because if you think to do something you can't realize, you could give up soon. I had this problem one time, trust me. My favourite RPG tool is VX Ace, because is professional but simple. It can support most of formats and it have a lot of resources. You can obviously choose some other engine, but this is what I love.

If you are planning to create something big, find help and create a team like us, you can't do it all alone! About the publish, it's better by starting on RPG Maker Forums, that's the nice place to publish your games, like I did on "Rpg²s", one of the best Italian Forums. You can add your games on IndieDB ecc... I would prefer Indiexpo because it has free access for every player and developer, and the staff is really helpful!

My story: How Silent Memories is born?

I always liked and played the Silent Hill saga. I meet this game my first time when I bought Metal Gear Solid, which included the Silent Hill 1 Demo. After the PS1 game, I played Silent Hill 2 & 3 on PS2 and I really started to love this series. Even if I couldn't play other Silent Hill games, I always watched the others series on Youtube.

The day I met Silent Hills was during PewDiePie's gameplay. 

I really liked the atmosphere of that game, but then it comes the bad news: Silent Hills Cancelled. After 2 years, I saw a lot of fan games based on P.T., but I never seen a RPG Fan Game, so I just said "Why don't we try too with an RPG Maker version?". So the project started, and finally is here. Of course, I couldn't make it without my friends, everyone in the Team helped for Testing, Graphics and especially my two best friends Silvio Fosso, my Co-Developer, helping every time, and Dakota James Emery Dennis, our best composer, who did a Soundtrack Cover of the original Silent Hill 1 Theme.

My pubblic:

People seems enjoy our creation, and that make us really happy!

For the success, we started to think about a sequel with the full story of this game.

For the sequel I searched a lot of theories of the Silent Hills fans, and we found everything useful for the full plot! We're just thinking to call the Sequel

"Silent Memories P.S.", which means "Playable Story" or to leave it Silent Memories, because the first letters S.M. could mean "Story Mode". People asked to make it for MV, but unfortunally, that engine can't use my strategies, but anything could change. I want to say again, thanks all you folks!

Our goal, is to let people know, that TwoD Studios can bring some beautiful games made in Italy! 

Thank all you folks and thanks to Indiexpo and his staff!

- Alessio Signorino, TwoD Studios

User Stories: Martin & dsoft20 - Tips for a Game Jam !

Hi, i’m Martin and together with dsoft20 we developed RE.CO.N.

I’ll share some info on how we developed the game in only two weeks as an entry for the Indie Vault Game Jam.

The theme for the Jam was “evolution”, certainly not a simple theme to develop as it can be interpretated in many ways and after a little briefing we opted to develop the theme as personal growth, borrowing from the Sutherland’s differential association theory.

In brief, for those who don’t know this theory, criminal behavior is learned from other persons trough interaction with them.

Based on this theory we split the game in two half with two different methods of making choice:

1-infancy – as you know infancy is an age where irrationality and impulsivity are more common and you’re more prone to follow others, that’s why there’s no “moral scale” for your choice as the player can be influenced by the blue clothed kid that acts as “guide” to criminal behavior (naturally you can ignore him);

2-adult age – being an adult mean (in most cases) think before act, so the player is forced to think/choose from two actions using the “moral scale”.

In the end it’s a matter of acting before thinking versus thinking before acting.

With that in mind we discussed how to develop the game setting and the gameplay; at first the game was to be set in a standard fantasy world but that option was quickly dropped in favor of an aseptic and geometric sci-fi environment easier to model and texture.

The gameplay also changed from an action/rougelite to a more “simple” adventure game.

Why you might ask? The reason is simple, neither i nor dsoft are pros so we accounted delays and problems beforehand in our time budget.

Those changes in the end were right as problems, delays and unexpected occurred for various reasons.

As for the tools of choice we used Unity 3d as the game engine, Blender 3d and Gimp for the graphics.

As far as actual development the most crucial and difficult task was to create the event system used to trigger everything in the game, from cutscenes to doors openings; this task took most of the time of the development.

Meanwhile dsoft was scripting the game I made the graphics in a ps1 style using dsoft’s psx_retroshader.

The most problematic thing graphic-wise was modeling the environment; in the end I used 3d “tiles” and builded the level by joining them togheter in blender. 

This method has one major drawbacks that is the visual repetition of the assets, that’s why I used vertex paint to add shadows and color to the environments and with the addition of various props I tried, hopefully, to reduce the aforementioned repetition.

Together with dsoft I’ve scripted the story, made the cut scenes and planned the events of the game and put everything in place.

“Slowly” the game was completed and If you have played i hope you enjoyed it, or if you didn’t played yet you can play it here on Indiexpo .

Here some random and obvious tips from this experience:

-  Don’t underestimate your time budget;

-  Don’t be afraid to cut or simplify things;

- As an artist don’t overdo and choose a simple style and, if the game allow it, try to model the environment in a modular way;

- Last but not least have fun :D

- Martin & dsoft20

User Stories: Lorenzo Bolognini - From indiexpo to my First Comics Convention

"Hi, i'm Lorenzo Bolognini, aka Lollo Rocket Diver, the author of Theia.

After a great and exhausting weekend at the Cosenza ComiCS convention, and after our 13-hours long return trip, we're finally back home and it's time to write a few lines about the experience!

This was our first convention, and despite a bit of initial shock, everything went really well. 

We know all too well our games are a niche genre: they don't attract huge crowds. And yet, the audience we've attracted was exactly the right one: people who couldn't even believe the makeshift sign we used during the convention. 

All of the fans of the old Final Fantasy series (by that, I refer to the first 10 entries) and '90s J-RPGs in general loved our works, especially Theia, which is what we were counting on. 

The favorite game among younger kids, surprisingly, was The Old Ones, a game we created in less than a month just... because. That's incredible! 

I'm almost thinking about a remake, to make it better and a bit more streamlined. That wouldn't be that bad of an idea. 

Games aside, we met a metric ton of great people, such as the developer of Call of Salvenee - a complete nutjob, but a good one. He kept us company with his satire about Salvini and the Prime Minister the whole time. Oh, and we finally met MrSte in person: he created Crime, Live or Die and Akuma no Gakko. We also got to meet the guys at Portal Games and the Cosenza ComiCS staff: incredibly professional and helpful, they exceeded my expectations. 

So, to cut this sort, 

I'd like to send a big Thank You towards those people who made this experience unforgettable. Thanks to all the guests who visited our stand, to those who stopped by and praised our work, to those who are downloading our games wirght now, to the Cosenza ComiCS staff and the guys at Scrigno Azzurro, and finally to our friend Luca (from now on, I'll call you p[R, you're great at public relations) who helped us with everything and took us to the best food places in town. Well, I hope we can do this again! We're already looking at future projects now, let's see what we can do. 

There's some bug fixing to do in Theia, so it's likely you'll see a new release in the Indiexpo website a few weeks from now... Moreover, since no one has done it yet, I should probably modify our old games to change the team name in OnDead Games. There's so much Seraphic Gate stuff still out there. Better change it. See you next mission!"

- Lorenzo Bolognini/Lollo Rocket Diver

User Stories: Lusianl - Several Downloads in little time with a very short Demo

Hello everybody, I'm Lusianl and I'm one of many guys that lives in the wonderful world of indie games.

Just one month and a half ago (more or less) I published a short Demo version of my game Wild Rage, made with RPG Maker, in indiexpo and I wanted to give you some tips, in order to get a fair ammount of downloads.

1 - Have lots of friends and family! XD Don't be afraid of involving your acquaintances and relatives. If, like me, you have lots of friends, uncles, aunts, cousins etc... and they know your passions, stress and force them to test the things you do!

(the same applies to co-workers!)

2 - Do not underestimate social networks (facebook, twitter, google+ etc...). Register and find people who share your hobbies; remember : 'who follows you, want to be followed! The "Like" or the "Subscribe" here and there doesn't hurt anybody, as a matter of fact it can lead to interesting cooperations, with people who can help you to improve!
Twitter is a huge help for this: posts are published at very high rate and guys who love videogames are happy to quickly retweet and share. If you're a designer, instead, you might want to try on facebook, the birthplace of many artists and designers!

3 - Subscribe to videogame forums! Be an active member of the comunity and get them to know you! Personally, as a "maker", most of my downloads come from Rpg2s, the biggest comunity in Italy, and from makerando, the official RPG Maker Italian Comunity. But I published the game on many other forums, foreign too. They follow, but alas, they never comment!

4 - Create a Blog, with everything that you do, your ideas, your hobbies, your passions. You have no idea how many people, in the whole world, can think the same way!

5 - Make it interesting! Always be respectful of others, don't be rude or arrogant!

These are several tips to get people to know you and if you thing this is nonsense well... remember that in indiexpo i got over 300 downloads in little time only with a very short demo of my game : Wild Rage Giant Bluster , only in Italy! Not bad, uh..?



- Lusianl