Hey everyone, Andy Moore here from Radial Games and welcome to episode one of
what is likely to become a long hopefully prosperous video series. This
video series is going to cover essentially radio games in its entirety.
Contracts, custom work, projects, contract work, all that stuff. I kind of want to
give you the viewer an insight, kind of a self-made documentary on what's going on
here at the studio. I have a few kind of restraints that I'm gonna put on this
video series. I'm going to try to do one once a week, but I'm hoping more often
that I'm hoping once a day if I can pull it off, but at least once a week you're
gonna get a new video. Secondly, each video has to be done in a single take and
oh my god this is so painful. You do not know how many times I've restarted this
video. Okay, so has to be done in one take. And thirdly, I'm gonna try to keep the
time under 10 minutes, hopefully under five minutes per video. So nice quick
slices of what's going on at the studio, current news, things like that. I'm
hoping to reveal all. I'm hoping to show you tutorials on basically what I'm
learning myself in Unity and how my current latest project is going. Status
of current projects, how I come up with game ideas, how I prototype, how I vet
ideas and see if those prototypes should be put into production. What I'm doing
with, I have an intern working here, what I'm doing with him. What I, you know,
plans for the studio, larger plans, bigger plans, the business side, development
side, contracts, how to make a game fun, you know, all those little things. I'm
hoping to cover all of these topics and you know, much more in this video series.
But I wanted to kick it off with this video because I think I'm at a very
exciting time in my game development career. Here at Radio Games, we have just
started a new project 24 hours ago. So we are within the one day window of a new
project's inception. So as an anchor point, this video series can follow this
project through from the initial seed of an idea, hopefully right through to
release. Now, it's kind of hard to talk about the idea at this point because it
might completely evolve and change and be a whole new beast by the, you know, a
year from now. I have no idea what it's going to end up as. But I can tell you
what I'm currently dreaming of, what my current goals and inspirations are and
what I'm currently prototyping. And in the next few videos, you'll see my
prototypes and you'll see how I'm doing it and maybe I'll even throw in a few
tutorials on how to get it done in Unity. But for now, I'm just going to talk
about the idea. So I remember back in my childhood days, I played a lot of a game
on the Commodore 64 called Boulder Dash. It's a 2D side scrolling kind of digging
game where you dig around in the ground and boulders fall on you and it's a
basic puzzle platformer, essentially. There's been a lot of digging games since
then and probably before then as well, including Dig Dug and even I played one
recently, brand new release on the PS4 called Super Motherload. Fun little
game. I've always loved those games and it's not because I love the grind, because
I hate the grind, but I really, really like the idea, the concept of creation
via subtraction. You know, the act of taking away something and having that
building something else. I think some games have done that really well recently.
Minecraft, Door Fortress, they both do this very, very well. You just remove
things from the world and then suddenly you have something in that empty space
and you explore that empty space. Now I want to do this. I want to make something
like this. I want to use something that uses subtraction for creation in a 2D
kind of side-scrolling environment. Now these digging games is a good reference
point for that, because these digging games have a whole lot of subtraction,
but no real creation out of that. I mean, you're digging, sure, and you're
collecting minerals and maybe you're returning them to base and upgrading
your ship or whatever, but there's never really a point to the subtraction
other than just as a vessel to transport you somewhere else. So I'm hoping to make
a game where your subtraction is actually creating something more along the
lines of SimCity. Every space you excavate will become a larger part of a
greater system, someplace that you'll keep revisiting, a place that you'll see
very frequently. I also have another kind of angle I want to take on this. Another
constraint for this design is I want it to be couch playable with two players,
cooperatively, and I want it to not be two people playing the same game. I want
two people to have very complementary gameplay experiences, playing their own
unique games, and one person might be digging along and the other person might
be doing the base building, one person might be out front killing all the bad
guys, and the other person could be in the back doing, you know, transporting,
you know, diamonds back to the surface or something. I don't know what that's
gonna look like yet, but that's one of my goals, is I want two people to be
sitting on the same couch, playing on a TV across the room, so I'm thinking console
release, I'm thinking 16x9, thinking playable on a controller, thinking I
could make this in Unity, and I'm thinking if this game could probably be
prototyped out in a month or two, polished up in six to eight months for console
release one year from now. I'm hoping we'll see what happens. I'm pretty good
with my time estimates usually, so I think I'm pretty stoked about this.
Alongside this video series, I'm also keeping a Tumblr blog at captain-andy.com.
You can check it out, and I'll be publishing builds as long as the build
is working, daily builds, so you can play every iteration of the game in its
current state. It's 24 hours in, there's already four playable builds up on the
website, so you can go check them out, and keep tuning in. I'll have a video for
you, hopefully very soon. Anyway, thanks for checking out my video. See you
tomorrow!
