Hello, I'm Casey Clyde, working under CLYDE games. I'm a developer from California, on the strange and exciting journey of making games. I've been programming for about 20 years, for fun and for work.
My current project is called Cursemark. It's what I am calling an action-exploration roguelike. There is a large hand-crafted world, inspired by the original Zelda. There is also a ton of cool equipment, and a deep customization system so players can find a playstyle they like, while also discovering cool synergies each run.
I was working on my previous game, Into the Necrovale, for like 2 to 3 years, and brought it out of Early Access late last year. During development, a lot of ideas occured to me, and I saw a lot of problems in the core structure of that game (as you inevitably do when working on something for a long time). It wasn't possible to rebuild the foundation of that game, but I wanted to roll those lessons forward into the next project. The world structure has taken a while to find, as I really wanted a sense of exploration in the game. Which isn't easy in a roguelike, because they generally have procedurally generated worlds, which are in a way anti-exploratory. There is no accumulation of knowledge about the world, because it changes every run.
The development has been a lot of fun, honestly. From Necrovale I had a really mature code-base, that I was really comfortable with.
It's all written in Haxe, using the Heaps framework. It's basically the stack that Dead Cells uses. I love it because it is open-source, very open-ended with how you develop, and the entire stack is the brain child of one man, Nicholas Cannasse. I come professionally from a Javascript and PHP background, so I find Haxe as a language to pretty much be perfect. It's a joy to work in.
For this game, I wanted more atmosphere and liveliness to each scene. So I had to get into shaders, which was a bit of a hurdle. But there are some great tools and tutorials out there. I also spent a lot of time building a world-generation system, where different terrain types "unroll" into complete levels with the right tiles, doodads, foliage, etc... That has paid off, because it lets me make a good looking level quickly, without fiddling around with placing tiles and all that.
My main advice is for people to focus on process over outcomes. If you have a good process, where you sit your butt in the chair every day and work, and you improve every day, you'll eventually get where you want to be. When you focus on outcomes too much, it can feel exhausting, like you're constantly failing and coming up short. Did I sit down and get something done today? Did I learn something today? If so, I've succeeded.
Making games is an awesome adventure. It asks more of you than you ever think you could do, but if you work at it, it reveals more of you to yourself.
-Casey
❤️
