PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:
Hello, It's Hephep from the Team RUN. We are a french dev team, fully indie, and we are about to release our second game on Steam. I'm am the lead developer, and we have other people in the team: EncreMecanique doing the art, MellyFroggy doing Press Relation and Community Manager, Yomoeh is doing the music and some SFX, Welrod for another SFX, Malyss is writing the story and Toadzilla developped the Twitch integration module coming in our upcoming game, Broken Lens.
TELL US ABOUT BROKEN LENS.
Broken Lens is a game about spotting the differences between two images. The trick here is that we wanted the game to be super relaxing, gorgeous to the eyes, and we added a pinch of salt with parallax layers, moving camera, and other layers of gameplay upon that (hidden objet and puzzles).
The idea started when, right after releasing our first game, RUN : The World In-Between, which is an pixel-art hardcore platformer, we wanted to reach more people, different people also. I've always found cool to make game playable for my kids, and among the team we are sharing this idea. Plus, our artist, EncreMecanique, is usually doing his art, he is a tatoo artist, not a pixel artist, so he wanted a project with more freedom. It was supposed to be a small project, and here we are after 2 years lol.
HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN
Development went great honestly, the hardest part was to fine tune the progression feeling for the player, as we wanted it to be rewarded by the progression but the game was intended to be "easy". You can finish it if you find half the differences, but it's much harder to get the 100% .
So everyone can play at it's own pace. Initially, it should not have lasted 2 years, we wanted to wrap this project within 1 year, but there were a moment were we thought that we wanted to do it right, to put all we could into it, because we like doing good work, it's a passion, so we took another year to polish the game and tune it as we could.
WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?
We kept Godot Engine, as it was our engine for our first game. I use it since 2018 and I'm in love. We are not changing the game with our games, we are doing stuff that can be seen as "normal" technically, so this engine do the job pefectly.
WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?
Well, it seems managing different resolution and aspect ratio, the way I programmed the game, is very difficult. To enable having a view with 2 different scene and so 2 camera on one screen, stuff has to be done with the inputs from the mouse, at first it was impossible to click on a difference because of the cameras, the parallax effect, I couldn't aim straight with the implementation I did, so I had to rework it several time, to take cameras movement into account, and also different aspect ratio, to avoid position offset in the click input.
ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?
Sure. Think small, since it will take twice the time you wanted, start smaller. Small game are cool, and finished game too. Being too ambitious can lead to failure, but even a tiny game release on Steam is a win.
ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?
I wanted to thank you to letting me express myself, I wish you the best with this website, and I hope people reading this will also enjoy Broken Lens if they try!
-Hephep
❤️
