Thanks for sharing this! This is very cool. I played through this game last year and loved it. Being an old school Mac gamer, it brought back that feeling I used to get playing games on the family...
Thanks for sharing this! This is very cool. I played through this game last year and loved it. Being an old school Mac gamer, it brought back that feeling I used to get playing games on the family Mac. I have to say, the music in the game was pretty great, too. I've only read through a couple pages of the log, but I'll be interested to see if he gets into discussing the music, as well.
Overall, I was SUPER impressed with the sound design in the game. Every single little memory soundclip was detailed and immersive, with fantastic environmental sounds and voice acting.
Overall, I was SUPER impressed with the sound design in the game. Every single little memory soundclip was detailed and immersive, with fantastic environmental sounds and voice acting.
This thread includes a very detailed development journal of Obra Dinn. Starting here: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg1024978#msg1024978
This thread includes a very detailed development journal of Obra Dinn. Starting here:
It's IMO a prime example what sets apart "I maed a videogame" style games randomly popping up on Steam and the kind of indie games that set the standard. This is what all other indie games compete...
It's IMO a prime example what sets apart "I maed a videogame" style games randomly popping up on Steam and the kind of indie games that set the standard. This is what all other indie games compete with. That's 4+ years of top talent work.
This is just the tip of the ice berg of this 44 page thread which itself is probably just a small taste of the work underneath. He also researched naval history in great detail to get the setting right, did his own music, learned how to sketch like a sailor and, of course, created the detailed UI you'd expect from the creator of Papers, Please.
I sometimes read these postmortems on Gamasutra where an indie dev complains he did everything right (though maybe not enough marketing!) but didn't make the projected $200.000 and... well, this is "doing everything right". This is some polymath genius shit. Every detail has so much care put into it, stuff no one will even consciously notice. It's not often that you get such an in-depth dev diary so this is a rare chance to see what goes into an A-tier indie game. This, right there, is why it's so hard for an indie game to compete.
Holy crap! He even recorded everything he did and made time lapse video of building the ship. If I were doing something like this, it wouldn't even occur to me to record it (let alone when would I...
Holy crap! He even recorded everything he did and made time lapse video of building the ship. If I were doing something like this, it wouldn't even occur to me to record it (let alone when would I find time to edit the video and upload it!).
Thanks for sharing this! This is very cool. I played through this game last year and loved it. Being an old school Mac gamer, it brought back that feeling I used to get playing games on the family Mac. I have to say, the music in the game was pretty great, too. I've only read through a couple pages of the log, but I'll be interested to see if he gets into discussing the music, as well.
Overall, I was SUPER impressed with the sound design in the game. Every single little memory soundclip was detailed and immersive, with fantastic environmental sounds and voice acting.
This thread includes a very detailed development journal of Obra Dinn. Starting here:
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg1024978#msg1024978
It's IMO a prime example what sets apart "I maed a videogame" style games randomly popping up on Steam and the kind of indie games that set the standard. This is what all other indie games compete with. That's 4+ years of top talent work.
Lucas Pope learned how to character model and built his own tools to create the whole crew of 60. The in-game models look perfect!
He just casually developed his own single-pixel particle system.
The ropes on the ship are rigged, some created with custom scripts.
The dithering isn't just the "1bit button" in Unity, it's projected onto a sphere to look less wobbly on head turns. Just the amount of work that went into this detail is mind-blowing.
This is just the tip of the ice berg of this 44 page thread which itself is probably just a small taste of the work underneath. He also researched naval history in great detail to get the setting right, did his own music, learned how to sketch like a sailor and, of course, created the detailed UI you'd expect from the creator of Papers, Please.
I sometimes read these postmortems on Gamasutra where an indie dev complains he did everything right (though maybe not enough marketing!) but didn't make the projected $200.000 and... well, this is "doing everything right". This is some polymath genius shit. Every detail has so much care put into it, stuff no one will even consciously notice. It's not often that you get such an in-depth dev diary so this is a rare chance to see what goes into an A-tier indie game. This, right there, is why it's so hard for an indie game to compete.
Holy crap! He even recorded everything he did and made time lapse video of building the ship. If I were doing something like this, it wouldn't even occur to me to record it (let alone when would I find time to edit the video and upload it!).