Dev Log #1: Starting a Studio

Who are we

Me on a sticky note

Currently “we” is mostly just me, Nathan Gale. For the past 8 years I’ve been working in AAA gaming, starting as a tester and, after years of hard work, moving into a design role. From those roles I had the opportunity to work closely with a lot of great people and learn a lot about the process of making games, not just in design, but across all disciplines. However, in all that time, I’ve never worked on something I would considered to be a type of game I would play myself, and always dreamed of starting a project I would be in full control of.

Getting ready to start

For so long, I had a feeling layoffs were coming, I eventually began looking forward to it rather than fearing it. I always wanted to try my hand in indie games. While nothing was going on at work I tried to improve my skills in any way I could - programming, art and audio tutorials, creating mini projects. A group of “unassigned" co-workers and I started working together on a little project to fill the time and keep sharp. This reignited my passion that had been lost over the past few years. Eventually, when the layoffs did finally come, I felt like I could hit the ground running and move straight into some solo game dev work. 

Choosing a game to start with was (and still is) a hard decision. Throughout the years I’ve built up a vault of ideas, a slowly growing list that I added to whenever some inspiration struck. But how do you narrow down from hundreds of options to just one? I knew I didn’t want the first project to be something that would take years, I wanted something that I could finish relatively quickly and get out there. I wanted to know what it would take to build a game from start to finish.

Evolution of the first capsule art

I started by eliminating the big ideas, like anything in an open world or with any especially complex mechanics. I narrowed my focus and leaned into what was giving me the most inspiration - a puzzle game. But as I began work, I realized that even that was too big to finish as quickly as I wanted to and pivoted. With the little work I had already done, I changed my focus to an incremental game, a genre I realize is where most of my playtime has gone for a while now. I was originally inspired by seeing the Nietzsche quote about gazing into the abyss in countless different games and wanted to just make a game explicitly about staring into a hole and thus Abyssoir was born.

“if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you” - Nietzsche

On top of just the game itself, I wanted to make it feel like an actual studio I was building and not just a game, so I started with this website, created social media accounts, setup task management software etc. I have a dream of working with more people eventually, and it would be nice to have everything set up to easily add new people to. And in the meantime, it makes me feel like I’m starting something permanent, not just a one-off hobby game.

Learning the skills

I’ve dabbled in a lot of different tools of game creation, but until getting laid off, I’d never delved so deeply into anything. So I had (and still have) a long way to go to learn everything I need. Gamedev.tv was a great resource for helping me learn both Unreal and Blender skills as well as countless random tutorials on YouTube. While I’m sure there are better and more efficient ways to achieve what I want, I’ve at least gotten to the point I can create what I want and figure out what I need without too much difficulty.

I know there are many skills I’ll need to learn to finish the game - audio design being the most glaring if I decide to make my own music and SFX. Hopefully when the time comes I have some good resources to learn, or a good contact to help out.

What’s in a name

Concepting the studio logo

Choosing a name for anything is hard, for a function or variable, for a character or game; but for an entire game studio that you want to represent you and all the games you might make, it’s even worse. I had a few criteria I wanted to hit, I wanted something with a personal connection, something that suggested creativity and, least importantly (but what I cared about the most) something I could picture being animated in a unique style as an opening in each game I’d make. 

The personal connection is probably not obvious, but BANK was my family's “code word” growing up. You know, the word a stranger would have to tell you before you’d trust them. And it was because it was an acronym of all my families first names, with mine being the N in the 3rd place.

I hope the creativity angle is obvious, with the Dream component (plus a ‘dream bank’ being a place to store many different creations). I also had an obsession with anything dream related when I was younger, and wanted to make that a part of the name.

For my unique opening requirement, I always pictured something like Disney changing their castle or animation to fit their movies (e.g. adding a pirate flag to the castle for Pirates of the Caribbean or changing to a neon techno style for Tron: Legacy). What I wanted specifically was something that could show a scene and transition to a logo and, to me, the easiest option was some sort of doorway that you could see into and then slam closed into a logo, and a bank vault door fit that well.

Next Steps

Hopefully I can make a new dev log once a month and bring you long this journey with me. I plan to add some actual WIP art and blueprints as well. If anyone is reading this, see you next month.