Behind the Scenes Update #2:  May 2022 Reflections, Revelations, and Roadmaps

Hello everyone!

Welcome back, it’s been a while! Today I would like to share some of the progress made since the last update, review where things stand at present, and take a look ahead at what we have planned for the future.

There has been quite a lot of activity going on behind the scenes around here. That means we have a lot of ground to cover in this update (quite literally in at least one instance!). Get comfy, this might take a minute or two.

Let’s get straight into it!

To start, I would like to thank everyone for all the messages of support I have received so far. Being a solo developer can tend to mean a lot of working in isolation, which I discovered can actually a good thing for me most of the time. That sense of isolation doesn’t even include spending a few months converting an old school bus into a RV and going from the pacific northwest to the great southwest to live completely offgrid for 6 months! Yes, that is a thing that actually happened! It has definitely been a wild ride and your support has helped immensely. Once again, thank you all.

Since the last behind the scenes post, life has been filled with all kinds of new experiences, adventures, and an incredible amount of learning across a wide array of subjects. There’s even been some prototyping going on around here! We’ll get into that a little bit later.

At the time of the last update, the systems that make up the Gods and Legends Unite experience were being translated from thoughts and ideas into actual design documentation. That process solidified those concepts and helped identify some early iteration requirements. The core of the game is now documented to a point where implementation and iteration cycles can begin.

The way we work here is extremely iterative. The inherent ability to change is one of the most powerful elements of software development in my view, especially when applied to game development. It is also just the way I have always worked by default when writing any kind of software, before ‘iterative processes’ and ‘agile development’ were even ideas that people talked about.

It’s a fact of life that sometimes even the best sounding plans and designs don’t work out the way you intended. Being able to adapt on the fly when plans and reality collide is the true strength of iteration in action.

Having repeatedly experienced the power of releasing playable versions early and incorporating user feedback into the development process, the goal for all our projects is to release features as early as possible and then iterate on those ideas until we are satisfied with the results. That means the specifics of any feature are a candidate to be updated after a basic version is playable in the game and people can actually try it.

This early release cycle will provide more flexibility for integrating user feedback as a guide for our efforts as we continue improving the game. Roughly translated into practical terms, that means some features we release will very likely change completely (potentially many times!) or they could even be removed completely, based on the situation.

Initial documentation ‘complete’, the focus shifted to how our games should function behind the scenes to support these grand ideas. One of the main goals for Jump Back Studios is to create constantly evolving online titles that can be enjoyed for decades to come, so addressing these issues in a way that enables long term flexibility from the outset is very important. Most of the details tend to quickly start diving really deep into the weeds on the various subjects surrounding online game development, like modern software architecture best practices, what cloud software host to use, or which middleware services to utilize, if any at all.

Luckily, I have been fortunate enough to be involved with titles like Dark Age of Camelot and the Guild Wars series. My experiences over the years while working on those titles helped me create a set of best practices for developing, deploying, and updating online titles. Jump Back Studios and the titles we produce are the application of those practices, which will further evolve as we move forward. Yay for positive reinforcement cycles!

A lot of the reading during my research has been a refresher that aligns with my previous experiences rather than brand new information or a correction of bad practices from the past, even though it has been a few years since being in a live environment and some technology like Docker and kubernetes is now more standard. That is comforting, even while realizing more reading will be needed to catch up on that tech as well.

I am extremely grateful that there are production-ready options available for many of the non-gameplay related bits that are basically required now. These options make it much easier to create and manage things like user ids, chat, leaderboards, events, microtransactions, database support and other underlying elements that we will need.

Even just a few years ago, any one of those items listed above would have mandated a much larger investment of resources to develop and maintain (and with lots of added risk in many cases). While most of these technology elements are unrelated to gameplay, this is the sort of functionality that is absolutely critical for creating the types of communities we want in and around our products.  

Now, let’s move out of the weeds a bit and start talking about some actual game related stuff!

As mentioned previously, the core systems for Gods and Legends Unite have been designed to a point where initial implementation can begin. Over the past few months I’ve been taking some of those ideas and started the process of turning them into functional code entities! This is a big step forward for the studio and extremely exciting for me personally.

Even after years of professional experience with multiple shipped titles, it is still totally thrilling when something first comes to life on screen and works the way it was intended. There are also still moments that leave me astounded that any of it ever works at all. The combination of technical aptitude, creativity, and black magic required to actually ship a game has always enthralled and enticed me.

If you couldn’t tell, I absolutely love the marriage of creative artistry and technical aspects found in game development. That love has kept me creating video games in one way or another since starting as a grade schooler way back in the 80s, punching BASIC commands into a Commodore 64. Since then I have been responsible for all kinds of new content areas, game modes, and live updates for various titles through the years using multiple custom toolsets and scripting languages (some of which I also had a role in creating).

However, getting comfortable enough with Unity and C# to do anything seriously productive has taken quite a few months filled with many practice tutorials and LOTS of reading. Working in Unity and Visual Studio almost feels like second nature now, though I am definitely a far cry from being an experienced (or even good) C# programmer.

Having had the great pleasure of working with some truly talented programmers in the past (and hopefully again in the near future), I am very well aware that I still have a long way to go and a lot to learn. All that being said, now being able to implement custom functionality on my own marks a pretty huge step forward.

Much of my progress in understanding these tools was accomplished while living off grid in a converted skoolie for 6 months out in the middle of the desert. It was about as close to the middle of nowhere as you could get. We were forty miles away from the nearest blip of a town and fifteen of that was on very unimproved dirt ‘roads’.

There was no cell service at the property, no internet access. Ironically, it may have been the best place in the world to focus for an online game developer like myself who has basically been online since those commodore 64 days.

The first time I watched text slowly creep across the screen after coming through a 300 baud modem, my life was forever changed. When I realized that there were places to call and….PLAY GAMES ONLINE(!?!!) my fate as an online game developer was sealed.

Going offgrid was the first time I have been unable to go online pretty much whenever I wanted since those early days, years before anyone had ever heard of a thing called ‘the internet’. Yes kids, there was a time before the internet. Hard to believe, I know.

The near total isolation allowed me to eliminate all distractions and actually focus enough to wrap my brain around a slew of new tools and languages. For example, this post is being written in Visual Studio Code using markdown, neither of which I had used a year ago. Now both of them are essential tools in use frequently.

My wife and I would drive the forty miles in to town in order to use the ‘local’ library hotspot and download whatever documentation or tools would keep me occupied until we came back in 3-4 weeks. Our solar powered battery (usually) kept my laptop running while out in the middle of nowhere, and that let me continue reading and coding.

That experience wasn’t really part of the initial plan, even though I have always envisioned Jump Back Studios as a non-stationary entity that would allow anyone to work from anywhere. Going completely offgrid is the most extreme version of that idea, but that’s how things worked out and also partly why there hasn’t been an update in quite a while.

All these new skills mean building our games on a more solid technical foundation from the very beginning. Unfortunately, it also means taking longer than originally hoped to initially get something playable out there for everyone to try. Of course my original plan was pretty much completely insane from the beginning, but that’s the nature of plans sometimes. You don’t know what you don’t know, until you find out…

The off grid experience helped clarify what kind of project Jump Back Studios (read: me, myself, and I currently) can build right now and the kind of project Gods and Legends Unite really wants to be when it’s ready for an official worldwide release. These two things are currently not very similar to one another, but I do believe there is a pretty clear roadmap towards making them align.

Gods and Legends Unite will be a tactical team building online RPG that includes playable historical and mythological figures from all around the world. When considering a feature list that includes multiple PvP types, guild content, crafting, hundreds of units with unique skills, and all the content required for PvE missions, the scope of the project quickly grows to a point where it is clear that I can only do so much on my own before needing to bring in some additional staff.

It has always been clear that Gods and Legends Unite will be a huge undertaking that will require a team of people to really do it justice. The team won’t need a large number of people, but it will definitely need more than just me. A couple programmers, a small team of artists, another designer or two, an audio composer and a couple business people to handle pr/hr would be my ideal team for a project like this.

Art requirements alone for this sort of game typically take a team of people delivering thousands of assets. Since I have no skill in digital art, that means any art assets we use will have to be outsourced somehow or authored by in-house artists that currently don’t exist.

The Unity Asset store can help alleviate some of those art needs, but I would greatly prefer for the majority of our assets to be custom authored so we can create a unique visual identity for our games. There are a lot of amazing artists out there that could really bring some interesting looks to what we are doing here and I would really like to see that happen.

So, what to do? I’ve been funding everything out of pocket and doing what I can with my amazing wife supporting me as best she can. Now that we have returned to what people call civilization, we have been doing some online deliveries to almost cover our expenses. Hiring people is simply out of the question right now.

Ideally, crowdfunding efforts will facilitate hiring additional staff and secure my ability to focus full time on further development. In the meantime, work continues on a different way to potentially bring in some additional funding.

Out in the desert, work began on a prototype that’s a little different from what you might expect. This prototype is a progression rpg with idle elements. It is a much simpler game, one that provides practical experience with the tools and techniques acquired over the past year and puts the results toward something more substantial than more throwaway samples.

The core progression simulation is working and currency rewards are also functional. It needs a few more things in place before it can really be called much of a game, but it’s already fairly close to being something that people can play. That is what I am working on at the moment, something that I can more easily get done on my own, if necessary. In theory, this can also create code (and hopefully even funding) that can be put towards Gods and Legends Unite.

After working on a 3d prototype for a few weeks that was intended to be more of a visual experience, that has been scrapped to put the focus fully on the core gameplay for now. So, away with the flashy bells and whistles and fancy looking doodads! The new version still makes use of the code from the previous version, but in a simpler visual format.

This game will be very simplistic at first and most of the planned features wont be available. It is currently an offline, text-based, menu driven game with little to no graphics or sound. It will not stay that way, but that’s where it is starting from.

The first publicly playable versions will initially be available for windows only, with other platforms being added as development progresses. When a build is ready, a link will be posted on this website so people can give it a whirl.

The process admittedly is slower than it could be, as my laptop is sadly out of date and was on the low end when it was a new machine almost a decade ago. The poor thing cant even upgrade to Win 11 and doesn’t have an SSD. Thats my dev machine right now. It works, but it really is painfully slow sometimes since I’m pushing it way past its limits. However it does give me a good sign for whats to come once I’m working on a modern machine that is actually built to handle development tasks.

All of these experiences combined have left me so incredibly grateful as well as feeling more refreshed and renewed than I have been in a long time. From my perspective, the fact that this much progress has been made under these sorts of challenging conditions is actually an extremely promising sign.

For those of you out there that love supporting indie developers, I started a GoFundMe drive that will hopefully pay for a new laptop at least and if I’m lucky, a lot more than that. Click here for your chance to support Jump Back Studios!

I do believe that (finally!) covers just about everything I wanted to share with everyone today. Thanks so much for staying with me through this incredibly long journal entry.

Subscribe below for emails about updates as we continue to bring dreams to life. Also, please visit our GoFundMe page if you would like to contribute to Jump Back Studios growth by donating, sharing, or both! Thank you for your support!

Until next time,

-HippieJesus