I have been an irresponsible blogger for a long time. This address is
owned by me for a long time, yet I haven't shared anything. Well this is
my first entry, so let's try to sum up the first 11 months.
The year was 2014, and the month was March. I began Puppeteer:
Shadowplay with a friend for a course in Middle East Technical
University of Game Technologies master program. He is my friend from
undergraduate, computer engineering. We met when we were freshman. I
told him that we should take this project serious, not consider it as an
assignment and at those first days we decided to make it for Steam. We
made the early design with him, I was overly motivated at those first
days that some days I was working all day and night.
At the beginning, I thought simple 3D models with orthogonal camera
would be a good idea which was terribly stupid. I tried to make what 2D
vector design does with 3D models. The only reason was I knew how to
simply model and add skeleton in 3D but not in 2D. But at those days I
finished all the graphics enough for a prototype like in 3 weeks, keep
that time in mind that I will be referring it afterwards. I think it was
May, my friend decided not to participate in this project after the
term project. I was alone to continue the project, which was something
scary at that time. I have never been alone in something this important
for me.
Old graphics, all made by me
New graphics
So I continued the project. I met with a musician and sound designer,
Ian, a good friend that he accompanied me from that time to now. When
that semester ended, I had a prototype which was working online as well.
On July, one day I was full of courage and decided to put the game in
Steam Greenlight without any PR or anything. The result was not very
bright. Even though I wrote graphics will be completely changed, people
didn't care about it much. I cannot blame them, they were right. So I
removed the game after 5-6 days. And I started changing the whole
graphics. I met with lots of artists with a tight budget. With the
graphics I made, It took4-4.5 months to make the game ready for a
prototype. I was thinking an artist would complete whole in-game
graphics (not cinematics!) in 1 month, ok maybe 2, but absolutely in 3
months. 6 months has passed, and more than half of the graphics were
made in one month at the end. It was such a time waste. In the mean
time, I tried to advance the game as much as I could. But while I had no
proper graphics, I couldn't show anything in public. This is why I had
to wait for writing here or openning a Twitter account, or a website, or
a Facebook account. I cannot expect people to have any interest without
any proper visual material.
One of my favourite scenes from cinematics
Now that I have barely enough materials to show publicly, here are my
addresses where you can reach screenshots and all that kind of material:
Website: www.baltastudios.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/puppeteershadowplay
Twitter: https://twitter.com/InfoPuppeteer
My current goals is to establish some network and then launch a crowd
funding campaign at the same time with Steam Greenlight campaign.
Hopefully things will go well and I will be able to have enough money to
work with an artist of fantasies.
Feel free to reach me from this email address:
info at baltastudios dot com
