This diary tells the story of how we are trying to make our first videogame. We are not expert in doing that, we have never done it before and we don’t know what will happen in the next future. It is an experiment we want to share and we think could be interesting for you, either it turns out a success or a failure.

You can find more about Belka @ www.belka.us/en

True Love

A sunny day of January a fire began to burn inside Belka’s heart. Somebody brought Tricky Traps at the office, and that was enough for us to fell in love with it.

Don’t know what Tricky Traps is? Seriously? Ok, I’ll keep it simple as the claim does: it’s a fascinating electric-mechanical game. Tricky Traps is a 80s game where the player goal was to help little steel balls to reach the end of a trapped course. Here you can find the original tv spot.

How did happen that Belka,a space dog, felt in love with an old vintage game we don’t know, but as they say, love is blindness.

An enthusiastic recklessness

When talking about internal projects, things in Belka go like this: somebody (or a situation) brings the attention to a product or an idea, someone have some random idea about it, someone else take up the challenge and than we begin the validation phase.
This phase is about verifying if the eventual product will have a future in the market by asking people questions about it.

About 95% of our projects end here. But not Tricky Traps. Why? We simply jumped the validation thing and rocket-flew through the operating phase.

*ALERT* Skipping the validation phase is highly discouraged as it leads to an almost certain failure. But in this case we didn’t care, we were too much in love, which is the first cause of product failure, we know.

Let’s make a videogame!

We decided to face this new challenge for real. Where to begin?

As every software company in the world, we don’t have a lot of time (in fact we don’t have any), plus we don’t have any expertise in videogame making. Actually, Giovanni does, he was one of the lead developers of Xenonauts. But Gio is also the busiest man in Belka. We could not ask him to stop coding well paid software and take on an high-risk internal project instead. After all, we are still humans and we need to eat something.

So our choice was our best available developer (the only one): the iOSninjadev intern, MaxFrax. We gave him a Unity course and we threw him in the universe of video gaming.

In the meantime, we found an obstacle between us and the realization of the best virtual representation of Tricky Traps the humanity ever saw: we didn’t have the 3D model. Of course, we could have done it with a 2D technology, but we thought it was too simple for our first attempt to make a game.

If you want to find out the incredible story of how we found a great 3D model (and his marvelous modeler) be sure to subscribe to this publication!

Up next: How to find the perfect 3D models for your videogame.