PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:
My name's Tomasz Kaye. I live in the Netherlands. I'm best known for making crowd-funded animations about political philosophy. In the video game world I co-created Chalo Chalo, an abstract racing game I made together with Richard Boeser, and did the sound design for Richard’s game ibb & obb. Axe Ghost is my first solo commercial video game project.
TELL US ABOUT AXE GHOST.
In Axe Ghost you use strategic turn-based weapon play to battle a horde of monsters and their loathsome leader. If you imagine a Venn diagram with overlapping circles representing Tetris, Into the Breach, Puzzle Bobble, and Slay the Spire, Axe Ghost would be in the middle. If this sounds like your kind of thing, try the free demo on Steam!
HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN
Axe Ghost grew out of the intention to make a whole tiny game, on my own, and publish it on Steam. The earliest motivating question was ‘What’s the smallest scope game I can think of that would still be fun?’. A couple of years ago I worked up a little prototype that set out the core mechanic, a bit like Tetris, but turn based, with different ‘weapons’ to manipulate the blocks (‘enemies’) with. But I didn't go further with it at the time. Some aspects of working it out seemed like too much of a chore. Then, with the advent of LLMs like GPT4, suddenly a lot of the friction involved in navigating unfamiliar APIs and languages vanished. Over the course of a few weeks there was a shift and the whole project suddenly became fun enough to develop to completion, to be viable.
What I hope to do with Axe Ghost is polish this little game so it's close to its local maxima in design space, so that within the constraints I’ve set, I’m satisfied that this is close to a bullseye. If I can do that I think lots of other people will enjoy it too.
WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?
I'm developing Axe Ghost in Godot 4. I like that the engine is relatively small, the editor starts up quickly, and that the whole way it's organised fits comfortably with 2d games - that always felt like a struggle when working in Unity on Chalo Chalo. Godot being free and open source gives some peace of mind too, there's no company who can suddenly impose burdensome new terms on you part way through development.
WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?
Axe Ghost currently uses the Amazon AWS back end for the Daily Challenge logic. It was daunting to figure that out and build it. That was one of the first parts of work I did, as a kind of test, and a safeguard against hitting some really painful stumbling blocks later on. I used ChatGPT heavily for building out the javascript functions that live on Amazon, for score validation, leaderboard rotation and unlocking achievements for the day's winners. I would stub out pseudo code in comments, and have ChatGPT implement them with the correct syntax. I'd then sanity check the result, and ask for explanations whenever things weren't immediately clear. The whole process worked fantastically.
I did a similar thing for steam. Navigating the Steam site as a new developer feels like hacking your way through a jungle to me, things like ambiguous texts that can leave you wondering what *exactly* is going to happen if I press this button?, and Steam has its own metaphors that take some getting used to. I used LLMs extensively to research and get to grips with how Steamworks conceptualises all the parts of publishing a game. When you're confused about something it's a huge benefit to be able to just explain your case specifically, to an endlessly patient listener, and get a friendly and useful answer 90% of the time. Just for speeding up research this is a massive time-saver when you don't know the magic search keywords that would solve your particular problem.
ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?
I don't want to say 'make a small game first', even though that’s what I’m doing, because there isn't a dogma like that that makes sense for all people in all situations (and because Richard’s ibb & obb was an ambitious, and successful, first game). But it's good to bear in mind that making a small game from start to end is already a big project. And the bigger the project, all else equal, the less likely you are to complete it. There are important things you learn from the end stages of a relatively small project that you miss out on as long as you're not completing things, and publishing them.
Lean on ChatGPT, or whichever LLM works best for you. These are amazing tools. They're not perfect of course, but they can make your life a good deal easier and more enjoyable, and they can bring projects in reach that wouldn't have been otherwise.
Tentative advice: Make a demo early on that demonstrates the main thing about your game, publish it. start getting game feedback from the world early on and iterate on it. Make sure that within the game there’s an easy way for players to report bugs and share feedback with you.
Take feedback seriously, consider it all carefully, but remember that its purpose is to help you understand what your vision is, and help you approximate it more closely with the thing you’re building.
ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?
- Thanks for the opportunity to talk about my game, and some of the story behind it. I'd love for you to try out the Axe Ghost demo, give me feedback, and wishlist it if you like what you see! You can follow Axe Ghost on X.com too.
-Tomasz
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2712670/Axe_Ghost/
❤️
