To celebrate Halloween, we set up a YouTube channel with Team Zenaya of Senshi.Labs doing their first developer video log (vlog). Since some of us prefer talking to writing, we figured it would be easier for the team to discuss our development process by taking a video. Do check it out!
Language: Taglish (English + Tagalog) with subtitles.
Some of you might have noticed that we have released a couple of small games in the last couple of months, while some of our bigger dream projects remain in the back burner.
There is a reason for this: experimentation. We did not want to burn resources working on a dream game for years and years, especially with the huge possibility of having only one game to our name and an outdated looking one at that. We’ve all heard of horror stories about game projects taking too long to finish, only to be outclassed by newer games. John Romero’s Daikatana had been one example, and had become a huge learning experience for the game dev legend himself. If you look at YouTube and do a search for “games in development hell”, you’ll find a number of them. Read More
To be honest, I never really thought Senshi would ever happen. And I did blog about the domain staying dormant for 7 years before I finally found a use for it. But here we are, May 8, 2014 was when Senshi.Labs was officially registered. A year later, we now have 4 games under our name.
In December 2012, I left my producer post at Anino Games but I had also just received my PhD, which meant that I could go back to part-time teaching. Thing is, I also did not want to leave the game development industry completely, so I sought to enter an organization that could allow me to cultivate my love for education at the same time. There was only one game dev company (whose name will remain undisclosed) back then that I was interested in, despite a lot of offers elsewhere. That organization rejected me because I didn’t seem like a good fit. Read More
There were a lot of things different with how I built Song of Pisces compared to how I built Prologue. For starters, though there were customizations I’ve done with Prologue’s system, they were nothing compared to the customizations I have done for Song of Pisces. This project was such a massive lesson in itself for me; it felt like making a game for the first time.
Pisces’ core story has been around for 10 years, written by me and my Ragnarok Online guildmates for the characters we built in that world. Creating a game with it was another matter entirely. For one thing, there was the issue of maturity. For another, there was the issue of differences in medium. Most important issue: this must become an original game in itself, with a story that is completely different from the world of Ragnarok Online. As an adult, a lot of the stuff I had written for my own characters a decade ago make me cringe now, and there were scenes you can easily write on paper that could not be translated just as easily in-game. Needless to say, before I embarked on the project, I knew that there was going to be a lot of re-writing involved. So I decided to start by re-creating my own characters first and sending them out to my favorite illustrator, Clarice “Sao” Menguito. Read More