Mar
15

About page now up

It was about time to write about It’s probably overdue to have an about page up. I’ve written a general high-level summary describing the game we are creating. Details about each aspect of this will be further detailed on this blog as the weeks follows. As mentioned at the bottom of the About page, we are also working on a website with, among other things, a forum. Once our product webpage is up this blog will become a sub-part of it where we can continue to blog about our development processes, share what we learn and engage you directly into […]

Razcrux   General Info, Hiring
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Mar
12

Introducing our Directors

Hi everyone, today it is with great enthusiasm that I unveil our Board of Directors. We are very fortunate to have such great people guiding our new company! Not everyone on this list has started yet on the board, but all things remaining equal, by April our board should be fully operational with the following members: Skaff Elias Owner of Three Donkeys and Computer Game Consultant. (George) Skaff Elias was one of the original playtesters for Magic: The Gathering and helped edit the early Magic sets. Richard Garfield got him to start working for Wizards of the Coast around 1993. […]

Razcrux   Business Aspects, General Info
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Mar
04

Seeking community manager

We are looking still for many people to add to our team, but I thought I would highlight the community manager / promotions / public relations position today specifically. We are now about 4 months away from completing our Alpha and about 6 months away from our kickstarter. We’ve learned and know that a successful kickstarter is in part dependent on having enough interested followers to support it. March marks the beginning of us starting to really share what we are working on. We’ve begun to spoil some of our UI designs and our most recent test-party results post went […]

Razcrux   General Info, Hiring
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Mar
03

First Alpha test result

Test results, as promised from our first test session of our Alpha 3.7 build. It was a fun road trip down to LA, our writer Amy got to meet Rob and we all got to meet and talk with: Mick our video editor. Chris delivered last minute by fixing code items and drinking tea so that he could stay up late from his home in the UK to battle us in California. Improving the gameplay The laptop party resulted in about a dozen or two items ranging from bugs to playability concerns and card pool suggestions. I was really pleased […]

Razcrux   Game Design, Game Play, Previews
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Feb
27

First Game UI Spoilers

From this point forward we will really start to show you more and more of our art and information about the actual game. March marks the beginning of this slow reveal process. Lorcan, one of our UI designers has been working on our 3D space-interface, below are samples of his work: Space UI Our Space UI has 3 zoom levels: far, medium and close. The far zoom is the “galactic” level, where you can see the entire map in one go. The “sector” zoom is halfway zoomed in to let you see a subset of space with several stars/planets and […]

Razcrux   Creative, Previews
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Feb
17

Shaping the story

So the last time I posted about the back-story I focused on the conditions that could lead to a 4X scenario: cataclysmic events, empires collapsing, war, titanic galaxies colliding. I tossed this concept towards Amy Ballinger (Creative Writer) and in the process a much more refined and compelling story is taking hold. Instead of transporting ourselves to unknown corners of the universe, our game is going to take place here; well almost here. See we are going forward ~4 billion years in time. What will this place be like then? Well two important things will have happened: Earth will no […]

Razcrux   Game Lore, General Info, Storyline
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Feb
10

Tempo heating

Wow it’s been quite the last few weeks. Creative writing We hired a new creative writer / production assistant, Amy Ballinger, who I’m sure you will read more from in the weeks/months to come, is going to be handling everything that has to do with the lore of our game. Right now she is reviewing the existing giant creative soup and turning into a coherent back-story with far better defined alien factions. In addition to working out the world and factions, Amy is also going to provide creative guidance for our future illustrators. If all goes well this week with […]

Razcrux   Business Aspects, Creative, Game Lore, General Info
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Jan
31

Out from the Shadows

You know the thing about finding a great partner is that you want to work with someone with similar interests but yet with different skill sets.  It is an interesting mix that can be very hard to accomplish! GalaCollider and the company we have formed to create and manage the project is a tale of finding that tough mix.  Sebastian and I met at a Game Convention which led to a number of discussions that became a partnership.  Sebastian has already told that tale form his perspective and I will endeavor to do the same in my next post. This […]

Robert Masson   General Info, Storyline
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Jan
27

Sources of inspiration

If you are trying to make a great game you probably need to take a look at a lot of other great games. Here are some of the others that have inspired GalaCollider, and why we like them. Masters of Orion II™ Masters of Orion II, Wikipedia This is a classic, oh the enjoyment. I remember staying up many nights until dawn, and then somehow going to school the next day and not failing my classes. This game is a general source of strong inspiration into the 4X genre as a whole. From MOO2 we are taking the general principles […]

Razcrux   Game Design
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Jan
20

Art, Finding Direction

Lorcan was working on the 3D interface and Chris was completing our first Alpha build in parallel. I still had a giant list of prospect artists but none had worked out thus far as a hire to fill in the supporting game UI needs, I wasn’t getting any luck. I found some artists who were clearly talented but would need close guidance, or there were language barriers, or they were not responsive enough or… Like anything that takes time to resolve, you learn along the way. What came to the surface was that I really needed to find someone who […]

Razcrux   Creative, General Info, Storyline
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Jan
16

Creative hiring process begins

With funding secured to build up our game for a kickstarter we moved our attention towards all of the necessary creative components we would require for the game. Our game needs quite a large creative team to make it happen, some of the roles we knew we would need included: Art Direction Interface / UX design Card template design Logo design Logo animations (cinematics) Icons 3D modeling 3D animations Sound design and composition Character illustration (Concept artwork) And anywhere from a half a dozen to a dozen or more contributing artists of various technical and creative styles. I started by […]

Razcrux   Creative, General Info, Storyline
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Dec
23

Fundraising scales up ambitions

Happy holidays everyone! In today’s dev-blog post I’ll talk a bit more about the fundraising side of things. Not sure if that’s the best topic for the holidays, but maybe it is if you imagine the funding helps to create presents under a tree! With Rob, Chris and myself on board we now moved in earnest to creating a presentation and an overall plan. We did budgetary planning when we decided to code GalaCollider and we knew that we would need funds to get our product developed enough to reach a kicksarter. In our experience and observation, a successful game […]

Razcrux   Business Aspects, General Info, Storyline
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