When we started to develop Stonerid in Autumn 2011, we were quite unexperienced in game development. That’s probably why we chose platformer as our first game. Many people who start their adventure with game dev, often choose platformers, maybe just because it’s one of the easiest game genre to do. In this post I would like to show you how Stonerid evolved during the development process.
Recently, when I was looking for the first level in Stonerid, that we’ve ever created, I found something what you can see below.
It looks quite different than levels in current version of the game, because it was only test level. Anyway, most of the key mechanisms worked correctly, so I started to design a few normal levels.
As you can see, they look rather good (however still significantly worse than the newest levels), much better than the previous one. We also add parallax background, which offered 3 independent layers to use. These levels were created at the beginning of 2012, a lot of time before the official release in december 2013. To design these levels I used a very cool editor, written by our programmer (my elder brother). By pressing one key I could switch to the level and immediately test it. It really speeded up the whole process. Take a look at the first version of our level editor.
This editor was constantly improved. It became a very powerfull tool, with a huge number of useful features. Below a screenshot from the current version.
One of the first screen, which you can see after you run Stonerid, is a game menu, located in fiery cave. This one below, from the first version of Stoneird, doesn’t look so bad, but in final version we significantly improved it.
As you can see we also changed a main character’s design, for both forms. Now they are also much better animated.
Atronast Mountain – main places in the game, also significantly changed. We completely rebuilded it and added more details. The Great Tree is now much greater and it’s covered with toxic substances.
During the development process we many times redesigned other important screens, like „options”, „loading” or „level summary” screen. It’s quite difficult to create something that looks good on the first attempt, that’s why we created so many versions.
At the beginning „loading” screen was a just black with a small centered caption „Loading”. I know this screen is not important for most of the players, especially that loading times in Stonerid are relatively short. However, in my opinion that simple thing improves a little the game’s mood.
We’ve worked on Stonerid for about 2 years, it’s quite long period of time. Why it took so much time? One of the reason are parallel worlds. The first version was a just simple platformer without that feature. But after half year of development we decided, that it’s not enough if we want to get players attention. That’s why we implemented parallel worlds. Because of that, all levels required much more time to create and were more difficult to design.
When I look at these screenshots today I wonder how come we made Stonerid. We didn’t make any „normal” game before, and so many obstacles appeared on our way. Main goal was to get on Steam and we also did it. I know that Stonerid was for almost 7 months on Greenlight, it’s quite long, but who cares about it now.
