🌟 What kind of small company can make an indie [open world] game anyway! 🌟

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and good night, everyone! 🌞🌞🌞As an indie game team that's still figuring things out, we're often asked a slightly questionable question: open world? Can a small team really handle that? 🤔

Yes, we're attempting this seemingly impossible task - is exactly the kind of step we're taking into the open world realm with a small group of less than 10 people. We are aware of the disparity in resources between small teams and big companies, but we always believe: driven by creativity and love, we may be able to find a way to break the ice for independent teams.💪

🧩 1. The meaning of modular development

Let's compare making this game to making Lego blocks, by turning the various parts of the game into modular components that can be assembled and disassembled very easily. Simply put, it means to make a set of LEGO model parts with good uniformity, and then use these parts to assemble various interesting things. Of course, it's not easy to do even that.

After quite a few difficulties, we are now a big step closer to realising this idea. We're getting a lot faster at designing content for the game. It's a great feeling to have the hard work come to an end. We're even thinking of making these modular development tools even simpler in the future if possible, so it would be nice to be able to open them up directly to players in the future! 🤩

📣 2、Take every opportunity to gather all kinds of opinions.

At the beginning of the project, we participated in BW and other exhibitions with early DEMO, and never thought that we could harvest hundreds of proposals that players wrote to us seriously. These thick reports carry players' expectations and suggestions, and also let us discover a lot of problems early, as well as confirm the reliability of many ideas. For small teams, the biggest hidden risk is the lack of a large number of gameplay tests and QA processes, and the insufficient sample size of information may lead to the development team's closed-door approach, so throughout the entire game development cycle, we will treat players as the biggest gameplay testing ally. We're grateful to the players who tested an early version of the game last year for their input on the combat system, which has allowed us to improve the entire combat system significantly. 🗡️✨

👥 3. Hexagonal warrior teams

It has been said that small teams must all be hexagonal warriors who can multi-task, and this is true, and that’s we do. But I'd like to talk more about what makes a hexagonal warrior a hexagonal warrior. For developers, the real logic behind hexagonal warrior is a support that puts the player experience first, and if we really take the perspective of a regular player, we get a feel for the experience of the game we're making. It will be found that a full-featured software is like making a meal, want the meal to taste especially good, there are very many details in the middle of the work to do. These details rely only on each person to do their job is difficult to fill, only when you really want to make the table meal particularly delicious, rather than just let people eat when, each person must take up more cross-border work. 🌟

💡 4. Who was the genius who came up with the idea of ‘Parallel Thinking on Blighted Technologies’? I should thank him for inspiring a small team like ours.

We don't have million dollar motion capture equipment, we can only craft animations via hand-keyed keyframes, and we don't have super-detailed art modelling. There's no Unreal Engine with its dreamlike and gorgeous graphics. Undoubtedly, the best choice for a small team to make an open world game is to base on the mature technology that has been widely proved, and think more about how to make the game interesting. Despite this, developing a game like this can be difficult and daunting, but perhaps that's the fun of developing games, forcing us to think about the right way to do things in the midst of an uncertain future. We hope to have the support of our players to see if this small team can leave its mark on the sea of stars. 🌌✨