After preparing the very basics, we’ve started to finally wonder about the truly interesting thing: the prototype.
We wanted to finally get on it. So we’ve started the real search – engine.
We didn’t want to end up being stuck in some big engine, also because of the preferences of the developers. One of us really doesn’t like Unity. We have been looking around for free for commercial use engines. After a little search, we found an interesting engine called Duality. It seemed really nice and simple. We’ve decided to use it for Market Dominion. After that decision, we’ve started working on a prototype.
It’s good to remind that back then, the game was known simply as ‘Entrepreneur’. We knew that the name will have to change, as it was hard to pronounce and not that great. To put it in words of one of the developers: ‘Entrepreneur sucks’. So we got into a heated debate about the new name. It wasn’t heated at all, but it was definitely long. Some of the first ideas were Business Pioneer, Business Tycoon, Enterprise, Market Blast, Market Corner and Market Dominion. Among the finalists were Business Pioneer, Market Dominion and Market Corner. All evening of discussion came down to one name the game is known under today: Market Dominion.
We went ahead with that, and got to work. The game engine was chosen, the name was chosen, we’ve started setting up a page for the game – everything was going fine. It was time to finally work on the prototype.
While Michael got to work on the prototype functionality and tested with first buttons, menus and maps iterations, I got to work on improving the graphics. The concept of the map has started to change a little and that’s where the idea of filters came along. The filters that exist in the game today were an idea for quite some time. I’ve started working on first iteration of the states map and an improved standard map. It was quite a task because of the lack of previous art experience, however I managed and I’ll talk about it in the next Tale Tuesday.
The first prototype took a few weeks to work out. It was called ‘EntreDemo’ because of the old project name still being used (we went through to Market Dominion gradually). It also featured the old map and was used to test a lot of planned features: for example states, which needed their functionality tested before introducing them. It was also a good test of the game concept. We enjoyed testing it and decided to continue development of the prototype further. We also had some fun playing around with all the engine’s features. If you’re doing something like that, make sure you enjoy it! It’s always a great part of the development and designing. In the meantime, I’ve made sure that there’s more graphics and they are getting better. I was learning to create graphics from nothing. It was quite challenging to do…
To be continued…
Iguana Mercenary 