This isolation is generally not a feature of large team development. Working largely as the only programmer on a team can limit one’s exposure to other techniques and ideas. Small indie development, as opposed to large team development, can suffer from the effects of isolation. It creates an opportunity to tidy things up and put on some finishing touches that had been previously omitted.
For the provider – myself – it forces reflection and self-evaluation. Sharing technology is a growth exercise for both parties. What are the advantages of indies sharing technology? The difficulty of game development, regardless of engine, will be adversely affected by the developers’ attempt to fight against the constraints of the engine. I believe that the engine fits well with Bedlam, primarily because Skyshine deliberately created a game design that would fit within the constraints of the engine. How well does your engine fit with their game? Why? The navigation network of nodes on the world map was something they added as well. For one thing, the turn mechanics and health mechanic is different in battles. Answering the questions that arise certainly helps guide the production of better documentation, which was a major outcome of the exercise.ĭid they alter/add to the engine in any way? The act of leading multi-person jam sessions in the tools prompted a good bit of preliminary clean-up and preparation on my part. However, the similarities between the two games made technology sharing imminently feasible.ĭid Skyshine’s work highlight any improvements that needed to be made to the Stoic engine?Ĭertainly.
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At one point we got together for another full day of in-person jam session to do a massive integration to their codebase, which provided them with our support for the game on mobile platforms.Īny deviation from our engine’s supported feature set would require programming effort. Jeff did all of the actual programming for the Bedlam-specific modifications. Throughout the development, Jeff and I communicated regularly, and my role was almost entirely answering questions, giving advice, or pointing them in the right direction. These jam sessions resulted in a good bit of documentation, as well. A short time later, their programmer Jeff Johnson met with me for a day to go over the structure and architecture of the code, the systems, and the build pipeline. We walked them through every feature and created examples of scenes, animations, user interfaces, and so on. We spent a day with Sam Gage and John Mueller, taking a tour of every feature of the game and the toolset. We kicked off the collaboration with several full-day jam sessions. When Skyshine began, we were already neck deep in porting efforts, as well as ramping up production on Banner Saga 2. What support did you offer to Skyshine? How did you balance this with working on your own games? However, the similarities between the two games made technology sharing imminently feasible. Our engine was always made with the single purpose of making Banner Saga and its peculiar systems, so my default position on sharing the engine would be one of reticence, as any deviation from the supported feature set would require programming effort. Sometime after the launch of The Banner Saga, John Mueller approached us with a game idea for Bedlam, with game mechanics that were in many ways isomorphic with the game mechanics of the Banner Saga, and hence with the feature set of the engine. John Mueller of Skyshine has been a longtime friend of Arnie Jorgensen, both of them great artists with a comics background. Why decide to give other indies access to Stoic’s technology/engine?
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