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Heya, I'm the author of the article. I've been working on Kandria full time for close to two years now, and on-and-off for some years while I was doing my Maste

Heya, I'm the author of the article. I've been working on Kandria full time for close to two years now, and on-and-off for some years while I was doing my Master's at ETH. The engine it's running on, Trial, is a few years older still, and initially just started out of the good ole university boredom and curiosity. Games is how I got into programming when I was about 6, and that particular fever hasn't left me yet it seems, ha ha! Kandria itself started as a "more serious" attempt at a game after I'd been making jam games with Trial for some years. I wanted to create something bigger, and had just finished playing through Celeste, so I just set out to replicate its mechanics in my own way. You can still find some demos of those very early days on my YouTube channel, if you're curious. In any case, the project went through several big changes until it turned into what it is now. During the pandemic in 2020 I finally decided to drop out of my Master's to pursue the project full time. At that point I also brought on a couple more people to help with the writing, art, and sound. We're currently also running a Kickstarter to get us some extra funds for the project. It ends on Thursday 14th, 12:00 CEST, so there's not that much time left in it. If you'd like to support our work, please have a look: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shinmera/kandria https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shinmera/kandria The campaign page has a lot more details on the project and the team, if you're curious about that. In the article I primarily cover the programming parts, giving a surface overview of the technologies involved and at least giving a brief hint at the methodology I employ to create games. I'm sure I've left out a lot of details that you might be curious about, so if you have any questions, please feel free to ask and I'll try my best to answer!

dboon 4y ago
How have you funded yourself (prior to Kickstarter)? I'm in a similar position to you (indie developer, working on my first project of size that I am polishing with intent to release). I haven't quite been able to square up a way to work on my game full time -- I suspect out of a lack of ingenuity or resourcefulness on my part. You seem to have solved this problem, though.
- Shinmera 4y ago
  By being lucky enough to have savings, and having a room at my parents' house that doesn't require any rent payments. Without those, it definitely wouldn't have been possible. Recently I've also received some grants, namely the Pro Helvetia interactive media grant, and the Poland Digital Dragons Accelerator. Both of those only offset a part of the money I had already personally invested though, and the Kickstarter barely makes a dent in anything. Selling games is such a gamble, too. If the stats are to be believed, only about 15% of games on Steam recoup their investment, let alone making profit. For the next project's funding, I'm going to try and look at some other source like Patreon, to at least offset my own measly costs so I can spend longer in pre-production. Making games is just really expensive, and any funding source is heavily fought over, or comes with huge caveats attached. I don't think I have this figured out yet either, so all I can say is best of luck!
doty 4y ago
From the post: > The same doesn't apply to the player sprite, as Aseprite takes minutes to compile the atlas for the nearly 1000 frames we have. Why does compiling a sprite atlas for the player take 60ms/frame?
- Shinmera 4y ago
  I'm sure Aseprite could be further optimised to press down the constant factor, but it is performing a rect packing algorithm among other things, which is an NP-hard problem.
  - rednab 4y ago
    The bin packing problem is NP-hard, but rectangle packing is "merely" NP. However, most people just use a recursive biggest-fit-first ¹), a simple heuristic that is surprisingly hard to beat for most workloads. I couldn't figure out what Aseprite is doing from their website or documentation, but if it's not that then it might be worth it writing your own sprite packer. ¹) https://codeincomplete.com/articles/bin-packing/ https://codeincomplete.com/articles/bin-packing/
    - Shinmera 4y ago
      Yeah I don't know what they use either, but so far repacking that atlas has not been frequent enough that writing my own packer would save time.
tmountain 4y ago
This project looks awesome! I really like art, and it's exceptionally cool that you're using Common Lisp. As someone that often gets lost in the engineering (aka "fun") aspects of building things, my one piece of advice would be to make sure you put enough energy into marketing your game to ensure it reaches as wide an audience as possible and none of your efforts go to waste. Looking on reddit, I see a lot of posts in r/lisp, which is cool, but I'd work towards building as much buzz as you can in the indie gaming community (little teaser videos, etc). I'd also consider posting on the Tigsource forums, as that's a good way to build roots in the indie community. Anyway, looking great, and best of luck with your launch!
- Shinmera 4y ago
  Thanks! Yeah, marketing is definitely a weak point, in large part because it's just something that goes very much against my character. I've tried posting to reddit before, but most communities' strict posting rules about promotions make that a pain, or simply not worth bothering with due to low conversion rates.

dboon 4y ago

How have you funded yourself (prior to Kickstarter)? I'm in a similar position to you (indie developer, working on my first project of size that I am polishing with intent to release). I haven't quite been able to square up a way to work on my game full time -- I suspect out of a lack of ingenuity or resourcefulness on my part. You seem to have solved this problem, though.

Shinmera 4y ago
By being lucky enough to have savings, and having a room at my parents' house that doesn't require any rent payments. Without those, it definitely wouldn't have been possible. Recently I've also received some grants, namely the Pro Helvetia interactive media grant, and the Poland Digital Dragons Accelerator. Both of those only offset a part of the money I had already personally invested though, and the Kickstarter barely makes a dent in anything. Selling games is such a gamble, too. If the stats are to be believed, only about 15% of games on Steam recoup their investment, let alone making profit. For the next project's funding, I'm going to try and look at some other source like Patreon, to at least offset my own measly costs so I can spend longer in pre-production. Making games is just really expensive, and any funding source is heavily fought over, or comes with huge caveats attached. I don't think I have this figured out yet either, so all I can say is best of luck!

doty 4y ago

From the post: > The same doesn't apply to the player sprite, as Aseprite takes minutes to compile the atlas for the nearly 1000 frames we have. Why does compiling a sprite atlas for the player take 60ms/frame?

Shinmera 4y ago
I'm sure Aseprite could be further optimised to press down the constant factor, but it is performing a rect packing algorithm among other things, which is an NP-hard problem.
- rednab 4y ago
  The bin packing problem is NP-hard, but rectangle packing is "merely" NP. However, most people just use a recursive biggest-fit-first ¹), a simple heuristic that is surprisingly hard to beat for most workloads. I couldn't figure out what Aseprite is doing from their website or documentation, but if it's not that then it might be worth it writing your own sprite packer. ¹) https://codeincomplete.com/articles/bin-packing/ https://codeincomplete.com/articles/bin-packing/
  - Shinmera 4y ago
    Yeah I don't know what they use either, but so far repacking that atlas has not been frequent enough that writing my own packer would save time.

tmountain 4y ago

This project looks awesome! I really like art, and it's exceptionally cool that you're using Common Lisp. As someone that often gets lost in the engineering (aka "fun") aspects of building things, my one piece of advice would be to make sure you put enough energy into marketing your game to ensure it reaches as wide an audience as possible and none of your efforts go to waste. Looking on reddit, I see a lot of posts in r/lisp, which is cool, but I'd work towards building as much buzz as you can in the indie gaming community (little teaser videos, etc). I'd also consider posting on the Tigsource forums, as that's a good way to build roots in the indie community. Anyway, looking great, and best of luck with your launch!

Shinmera 4y ago
Thanks! Yeah, marketing is definitely a weak point, in large part because it's just something that goes very much against my character. I've tried posting to reddit before, but most communities' strict posting rules about promotions make that a pain, or simply not worth bothering with due to low conversion rates.