I'm Mike Armbrust, the sole developer of VizionEck. Every week or so, I'll be posting about the game. Updates, technical details, peeks behind the scenes, design breakdowns, etc. For this week I'm talking about my experience developing VizionEck.
I was a mechanical engineering student at the University of Colorado Boulder. I developed games in my free time and took programming classes for fun, but I had zero intentions of making it my career. The PS4 reveal changed that. Specifically, seeing Jonathan Blow front and center on stage made me realize just how big indie games can be: they can be a career instead of just a hobby.
The most important thing was to design VizionEck around my limitations. I was a mechanical engineering student at first and had years of experience 3D modeling, but creating a face or tree was completely outside my skillset. So I designed the game to lack faces, trees, clothes, skies, water, etc. All I had left were squares. Game mechanics, lore, genre, etc. all came after this decision.
One awesome thing about development is I love inventing new features and mechanics. Even if some change will go unused by the vast majority of players, I just can't help myself from improving things. For example right now I'm working on VizionEck's menu, and I recently added a key binding ability to most options. IE set Triangle to toggle y-camera inversion, set D-Pad Up to quick jump to the tips & tricks guide, and set L3 to change your emblem to a laughing man. It's kind of a silly feature that has so few practical uses, but the thought of even a single player thinking "wow that's helpful" makes me ecstatic.
As always, feel free to ask any questions. I look forward to sharing another blog post with you next week.
I was a mechanical engineering student at the University of Colorado Boulder. I developed games in my free time and took programming classes for fun, but I had zero intentions of making it my career. The PS4 reveal changed that. Specifically, seeing Jonathan Blow front and center on stage made me realize just how big indie games can be: they can be a career instead of just a hobby.
The most important thing was to design VizionEck around my limitations. I was a mechanical engineering student at first and had years of experience 3D modeling, but creating a face or tree was completely outside my skillset. So I designed the game to lack faces, trees, clothes, skies, water, etc. All I had left were squares. Game mechanics, lore, genre, etc. all came after this decision.
One awesome thing about development is I love inventing new features and mechanics. Even if some change will go unused by the vast majority of players, I just can't help myself from improving things. For example right now I'm working on VizionEck's menu, and I recently added a key binding ability to most options. IE set Triangle to toggle y-camera inversion, set D-Pad Up to quick jump to the tips & tricks guide, and set L3 to change your emblem to a laughing man. It's kind of a silly feature that has so few practical uses, but the thought of even a single player thinking "wow that's helpful" makes me ecstatic.
As always, feel free to ask any questions. I look forward to sharing another blog post with you next week.
