Hi, Tarocco from Roaring Fangs here. In addition to my post about starting a company, I think it’s necessary to give a rough overview of the project I’ve been working on for about a year now. We’ll be sharing how our game is coming along shortly. In the meantime, here’s a summary of how things went.
Before Chizi and I started Roaring Fangs, we were just animator and a programmer. The whole thing started as an ambition to make a video game and soon became one of Chizi’s class projects. It grew over time, especially in the animation department where we had several animators join in to help us flesh out characters and scene elements for a playable prototype.
We had been using Unity and other animation software to make our game. I did nearly all the Unity stuff by myself, hard-pressed to make sure the majority of the code was not cookie-cutter “copy pasta” from the Unity forums or unserviceable nonsense spaghetti code. That extra help in the animation department helped enormously, and so we were able to finish our prototype on time.
But each of us had other college classes stacked on top of this project. Things were moving really slow. At the time, I was taking nothing but major-related classes for Computer Engineering at San Jose State University. I had to make time to work on the game, and since lots of important meetings took place near California College of the Arts in Berkeley (I was not enrolled at CCA), I was essentially adding an extra class and a 50+ mile commute on to my week.
Occasionally, Chizi was able to make it to SJSU Game Development Club meetings. We demoed our game, showed off concept art, and made a lot of fans (spoiler alert: kind of like how the game works). During an expo at CCA, we received feedback from early playtesting and got to hear what people think about the game’s mechanics, theme and overall feel, like difficulty or specific things that might need improvement. Based on the feedback we received, we decided that we’re ready to take this beyond a school project.
Things are better now. All of us have more time available to put into the game and we’re making it happen. Chizi recently graduated and I’ve decided to take a semester leave from SJSU. But we’re not ready to hit the ground running just yet. We’re looking for support, workforce and funding. We’re building a fanbase, finding people to help out with the game and figuring out the financial side of things right now.
What’s even more challenging is that we’ve decided to move away from Unity due to licensing restrictions. Some people might see this as a setback, but I see it as a great opportunity to take advantage of the fact that we will have a great amount of licensing freedom with our products, and the M.O. of our products will be under our control and not just a black box.
So there’s the gist of a year of highly-staggered development. We’re ready to fix that, and we have what it takes. We just need to get some things in order and get down to business.
If you want to hear more about our game and how things are coming along, follow our blog and stay up to date. More information about our studio can be found at RoaringFangs.com.
