Indie Developers Showcase, Day 9: Secondhand Lands

Welcome to Day Nine of The Escapist's Indie Developer Showcase, a 10-solar day festivity of the designers and programmers who have affected out on their own to make the games they want to make. Daily we'll feature a new game or demo by an upfield-and-coming indie developer along with a little interview. Some games are already commercially available, some are works in progress, but completely are escaped to play. To pick up who's along the agenda or look into what you've missed, click here. Enjoy!

Bobby Thurman is the Manager of Callipygian Games and the developer of Secondary Lands, a free-to-spiel MMOG that takes place in a fairy tale world full of wolves, sheep and anthropomorphic catgirls. Bobby has been a professional software engineer for 19 years, including stints at Aspyr Media and Stray Bullet Games. We spoke with him about Secondhand Lands and what it's like to break games connected your own.

On Secondhand Lands:

Click screenshot to download game.

"Secondhand Lands is a set up where old stories and fairy tales advert out and mix with each other. Everything's in balance and the world isn't in peril of being destroyed by ultimate evil. You play as a critter, not a mechanical man – this was very important to Pine Tree State when I was designing the game. The point is to cause fun exploring the creation, determination away the stories and secret lives of the non-players characters as you go. Each of the four races has 24 skills with 200 levels of configuration points. We have guilds, factions, PvP, dueling, quests, collections, crafting and a commercialise. My favorite part is the player-to-player mounting. It lets players team heavenward and actually mount together into battle. In essence, Secondhand Lands has the feature correct of a big MMO … just cozier!"

On the most tedious vista of having to do everything yourself:

"Content is the hardest affair. I can usually calculate programming tasks within 10 pct of the labor duration, but I just totally blew it when information technology came to content. I wrote over 120 quests myself, and at first I was really missing my estimates. By the fourth island, my estimates started to get pretty good. The other dull affair is to date from and revisit old crummy or grindy quests and making them better. True, they're working just fine, only players may plain they're boring, so I return and spice them up. I could write a all book on this topic alone."

On knowing when a game is finished:

"When suggestions outnumber the bug reports, you know you're near the end. That's a good rule of rif. Secondhand Lands was at this state in July, but I realized that the game was as well teensy-weensy and trivial. We only had ii races. After talking a lot with Brian Green and Kelly Heckman, I decided to follow such of their advice. Instead of just adding more quests, I found ways of multiplying the satisfied by adding two additional races, crafting, collection quests, a special dancing area for catgirls and player-to-player mounting."

Happening what inspires him foreign of gaming

"Music, movies and YouTube. I discovered the entire Pufnstuf movie uploaded the other Day. A lot of my friends would give me blank looks when I'd refer to it. Also, I get very restless if I'm non making something, so when I'm not programming I employment on individual projects – flyblown glass, sewing operating theater woodwork. Taking vacations longer than two days get me in truth eager."

On the biggest challenge confronting the industry:

"I think the biggest gainsay is for the big companies to stop putting their money in high-end graphics (bump mapped/photo-realistic) and to concentrate on high-end gameplay instead. If we had made the advances in gameplay that have been achieved in the last 10 days in 3-D art, then we'd have any really awe-inspiring multiplayer games. I'm a dissembler along this issue, only the Wii guys entirely catch on."

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/indie-developers-showcase-day-9-secondhand-lands/

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/indie-developers-showcase-day-9-secondhand-lands/

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