Deconstruction! Dev Blog, Pt1- The Beginning.

Hello Everyone!

Welcome to part 1 of the Nation Breakers: Steam Arena development blog. We will be releasing these every couple of weeks depending on our workload - as we don't want to detract from the development itself we may not always hit a weekly target. The intention of the blog is to describe the evolution of different parts of the game as they evolved through the history of the game’s development. This lets us give you some dense and focused info without it being just a weekly log of iterations and tweaks. This first part will be about the origin of Coded Clay Interactive and the people behind the studio, essentially just getting to know us as well as getting into the early versions of the game. Okay! Enough of the intro fluff. Let the blog begin.

Team Clay - Who we are, where we’re from and what we do!

Damien Patterson - Programing, Co-founder.

“I was born and bred in Perth, Western Australia. From as young as 8 I can recall trying to program early versions of a graphic calculator and making ‘choose your own adventure’ style narratives by using programming to allow the player to put in their own friends and family members as characters. I made my first game with graphics around the age of 15, back in the early 2000s, using the same engine that now powers Nation Breakers: Steam Arena (well an iteration of it anyway). I excelled at math and physics at school, and this became my focus in tertiary education, earning a degree in engineering. I didn’t like the ‘day job’ of engineering though, and quickly retrained to become a high school teacher. I’ve been teaching Physics for 9 years. I slowly got back into game development and improved my knowledge of the GameMaker language as a hobby. Learning everything myself, it was 5 years before I felt I was ready to make something for others and so I started work on early prototypes of Nation Breakers: Steam Arena.”

Zachary Andrews - Artist, Co-founder.

“My story begins in Esperance, Western Australia. A small town in the south west, it has incredibly white beaches and a 1:1 scale, undamaged replica of the Stone Henge of England (because.. reasons). My exposure to art comes from my parents, they ran an art gallery for roughly 10 years which was essentially our house and home. There we hosted countless exhibitions, weddings and live music. Out of school I went into graphic design studies and picked up my first lot of skills which I've used as a backbone for my work ever since. I put those skills into my love for music, joining several bands as a vocalist and doing the CD art, music video production and freelancing that work out to the music community. Through one of these bands, an international project, I worked with a writer from the Polish game studio Techland. He landed me some voice over work for Dying Light, making zombie noises (perks of being a metal singer) and some temp character assets. As a massive fan of gaming, being able to have this taste of the industry was super cool and seeded a strong desire to work in it. Several years went on and I had developed writing fiction as strong hobby, something I took up to give my game design ideas extra depth beyond concept art. This work was really my private collection of moonlight thinking while I mainly made a living with art design, video production, tattooing and day jobs. Now to be actualizing those secret ideas and being deep in game development, it’s as if a decade long burn of skill accumulation has merged into a single expression. Happy to finally be here!“

How the Clay was eventually Coded.

Community forums focused on game engines, like GameMaker, often have collaboration threads with people looking to find a great dev relationship that produces a great game and a great studio. Reaching out and hoping someone will just latch onto your post and say “yes, I'll help, lets go!” usually goes unanswered, or cops some cynical feedback about skills, ideas or the industry. But not always, and that's exactly how Coded Clay Interactive was born! Mid 2018, Zach had just left university as raising a child, studying full time and maintaining enough income became too stressful. Feeling defeated and dwelling on his stock of game design and fiction material, he reached back out to his friend in the industry who in return delivered a little pep talk, telling him to learn the skills to do it himself. Zach took it upon himself to delve hard into coding tutorials, using the GameMaker Studio 2 engine and producing his own prototypes. Eventually, reaching a roadblock as programming was not his strength. Zach reached out on the GameMaker forums, asking for anyone in Perth, Australia to help.

To his surprise, someone actually replied! Damien was in the forums and by sheer luck happened to be looking through the collaboration section within a day of Zach posting. Perth is a pretty small place for a capital city and one of the most isolated cities in the world, seeing a developer in his home town piqued his interest! Luckily, it turned out Damien and Zach only lived 20 minutes from each other and could quickly meet up and discuss ideas and ambitions. Damien came prepared with an early version of a game that would soon become Nation Breakers: Steam Arena, using a lot of placeholder art. What originally started as a “I'll draw yours if you code mine” kind of deal soon developed into a single project focus when they realized the scope of what they wanted to do and the work involved (An obvious thing really!). Over the last year of sharing ideas, developing the team dynamic, exploring limits and ambitions they concrete a work ethic and unified drive. As a team of busy working parents, Coded Clay Interactive hopes to deliver rich and engaging gaming experiences to all those who spend their valuable and limited time on them.

The Prototype!

Damien, as a hobby, had started work on a dozen games before settling on Nation Breakers: Steam Arena. This included a game where players designed their own fleet of spaceships (from fighters up to goliath motherships) for RTS battles, a game where the player manipulated hordes of zombies to take over towns and a rogue-like 2D platformer whose levels were inside of mechwarrior-like machines that the player was also in charge of in a larger overarching battle. Each game died from a lack of interest to get beyond the basic prototype. The next game was another rogue-like 2D platformer (with an additional multiplayer component boot, because larger than life scope was his thing).

Half way through the prototype Damien finally decided to limit the scope to something that he would complete. Cutting all but the original platforming and player attacks - the focus was now going to be a 4 player competitive brawler, fast paced with single hit kills, in single screen arenas. Taking inspiration from ninja themed anime like Naruto, the game focused on 4 mechanics - parkour like platforming, melee attacks, range attacks and a dodge - each mechanic interacting with the others. Shuriken would collide, sword swings would deflect shuriken and dodge moves would avoid damage and place the player behind opponents.

He had done it. It was a complete game - so much so that Damien took to playing it with his students at the end of the year during the last week before summer break - they had a blast. To his surprise, his students asked “are you going to sell it on Steam?” Damien had never considered it. Seeing how much the students whooped and cheered when they played this early version sparked a desire in him to get the game to more people. So the first task was to improve the art. Everything in the game was free assets or crudely drawn by Damien. Without much of a budget he was left using community marketplaces. It was hard to find a ninja themed set of characters that had the right sort of attacks and movement. Too hard. In the end Damien chose to change the theme of the game to a world of warriors and magic based on a fairly complete set of assets from the GameMaker marketplace.

After a year of further refinement and redoing all the art, it was clear that marketplace assets just wasn’t going to cut it. The game was fun, but lacked a consistency in its presentation. Damien had just commissioned an artist to produce a few character sprites to test the waters of how much it would cost to bring an artist on board when he found Zach’s post on the forum looking for assistance in Perth. That was the start of the partnership that led to Nation Breakers: Steam Arena.

That's it for today!

Apologies for the long blog. We wanted to get the studio background out of the way yet still give you some game info. Thanks for reading!

Next Episode - Finding Planet Piston, Re-themeing the game!

Zach and Damien