Hey All,

Following a bit what was explained in last post, in this one we want to talk about the technical challenge that we have been facing as a team:

Building an engine and a game at the same time.

Ok, so what is this about?

The purpose of the Master’s Degree for coders is to know all the aspects of a video game, and to implement them in our own.

A common practice in the industry is to build games in top of Game Engines. For those who are unfamiliar, a Game Engine is just the software that encapsulates different aspects of games like graphics, input, sound, … And helps developers to build games quickly and efficiently. So, in order to implement our game within Master’s duration (1 year) we needed to use a game engine.

Perfect, I heard that Unity and Unreal are great Game Engines!

With all of those great engines out in the market, building Twinlight Souls seemed easy. But, teachers revealed us the dark truth:

The game shall be built in your own engine.

The challenge was set. We had to develop the game at the same time we were developing the software it was built on top of. To give a clear idea of what this means, we had to build the roof of a house at the same time that we were building the walls.

Seems difficult, are you still alive?

As we mentioned, we have been doing so since February 2020. The toughest moments were at the beginning, when the engine was taking its first steps. Some systems weren’t working properly and some systems were not implemented at all. After that, the engine improved little by little as well the game did, and now we are in a point where is comfortable to develop Twinlight Souls.

In next programming posts we will talk about how we implemented the different parts of the engine and the game, so you could have a better idea of how we have been facing the challenge.