Life. Captured.
Life. Captured.
Sword fighting cyber ninjas against victorian era infused gladiatiors versus ancient samurai plus a theme where everyone in the game is blind. That was the intial concept for the game that would be known as Blade Symphony, the brainchild of myself and my good friend.
The game had originally designed to be a modification to an existing game platform, Half Life 2, and was more of a foray into game design than anything else. That quickly changed as the game development progressed forward. My partner handled the heavy lifting on programming assets, while I developed the lore and setting. Together we established the tenets that the game would be built on.
1) Individual Duels
2) Similar if not exact same moveset
3) Loads of movement and speed
This design came from a smaller branch movement of gamers in the Jedi Knight II community, a very tight and specific niche, where the two of us spent a good amount of our time in school. That niche community would drive the game forward.
The project quickly became more than the sum of our parts and we began to collaborate with others in the game modification community to increase our ability to produce. We developed documentation and marketing to entice talented individuals over and then managed them remotely, building up the games assets.
This also required writing several pages of documentation and user experience flows, ranging from menu interactions to development of the duel tree that the users utilize to access various move sets.
Our team, Ninja Workshop, was eventually absorbed by a much larger group and the game was escalated to full release. The documentation we prepared had been originally designed like that in the first place (despite our MVP being just a game mod), so it helped out in the transition. To purchase the engine the game went through kickstarter, and once that was established it was released to the Steam on 5/7/14.