Being a small independent game developer can be very difficult and challenging, especially during the final crunch. There's a million things that can go wrong with the game itself, marketing, testing and schedules, any one of which ca...

In honor of the Halloween season, this week's devblog will be dedicated to the topic of horror game design (that's my favorite kind of game design). Although these questions may initially appear to be aimed at game developers specifically, ...

Here's the story behind the first NPC (non playable character) that you talk to in Twisty's Asylum Escapades. This is also an example of the kinds of challenges that game developers have to regularly solve when plotting gameplay. When we ...

One aspect of game development that I haven't seen discussed very much is the simple fact that a big part of it involves performing many of the same tasks over and over again. It has been said that one definition of insanity is doing the sa...

Yep, it takes a rare breed to be a game developer. Not everyone has the unbreakable intellectual fortitude, the raw creative nerve to just sit there and try to create their own worlds. The stern determination to push through all obstacles a...

This week I've been working on the boiler room for the remastered edition of Twisty's Asylum Escapades. The boiler room is the largest room in the basement level of the asylum and was loosely inspired by the character Freddy Krueger's favor...

Let there be light!   God's lucky, all he had to do is wave his tentacled arm to magically create light. We game developers have to go through our levels, methodically placing light sources and tweak numerous settings in order to ligh...

For the last couple of months we've been working on remastering our first indie game, Twisty's Asylum Escapades. This is a fairly sizable update, as we are remaking and improving large portions of the game, including almost all of the graph...

There will be a number of creepy critters featured in the upcoming horror game Reptile Zoo: The Sinister Mutation, that we are now developing. Today I'd like to introduce you to one of the residents of Reptile Zoo; The Turtle! And we ...

Here's a bit of semi-official back story or "lore" for the video game that we are currently developing, Reptile Zoo: The Sinister Mutation. The text below should be read as sort of a parody of a brochure or website or other piece of p...

It has been over a year since Gabe Newell, the founder of Valve, first began expressing his desire to phase out the Steam Greenlight system, and now it might be happening. At the time of this writing, the latest batch of games to be Gr...

The game that we are in the process of developing, Reptile Zoo: The Sinister Mutation, contains quite a few art assets. This is an entire environment that must be populated with scenery, terrains, objects, foliage, buildings and wildlife....

Lately we've been focusing a bit more on the environments of our upcoming game Reptile Zoo: The Sinister Mutation. We've made a lot of progress in creating various textures for some of the environments, as well as doing a few preliminary...

Work on our latest video game project, Reptile Zoo: The Sinister Mutation, continues to move forward. This week we completed mapping out the details of our strategy for implementing the A.I. Planning it all out thoroughly is very importa...

[font=Arial][/font] Reptile Zoo: The Sinister Mutation  has continued to progress. This week we created some new marketing material, did some more work on the main creature model and came up with a more concise plan for how the video game'...

Earlier this week I sent out a round of emails to various indie game sites about an update to my game (Twisty's Asylum Escapades).  One of the responses that I got was from indiegamemag.com. I must admit that I was a bit surprised by what t...

All of the human characters in the game are sort of exaggerated caricatures of real types of people and I thought about each character's individual body type when I was designing their attacks and how they would move. For instance, the larg...

Having asylum staff as the enemies seemed like an obvious choice since the game is about trying to escape an asylum. This basic decision was very intuitive, but a lot of thought went into the details of the enemies themselves. Most of the ...

I really like villains and particularly villainous protagonists. This idea was central to the creation of Twisty's Asylum Escapades. One of mankind's oldest basic types of stories is that of a hero going down into a dark place to face a mon...

I've learned to hate my game engine. Struggling with the technology has been by far the single most time consuming element of developing Twisty's Asylum Escapades. Of course it didn't help that we had quite a lot to learn about all of the t...

Giving the game away for free might be the best way to make it successful. There were several factors that led us to this conclusion. The first was the fact that we had absolutely no idea how this game would actually turn out. What we did k...

My elementary school became the inspiration for the insane asylum. Before we could really begin designing the specifics of the game, we needed a basic layout, a blueprint to work off of and I decided that the simple yet expansive hallway sy...

We decided that a brain in a straitjacket should be the subject of our game. This decision was pretty simple because that character was already the mascot of our website. Twisted Jenius was the name that we had originally decided on for our...

I'm an indie game developer. I can say that because I helped to develop a video game. It's publicly available now and you can download it for free. I was one of two people who worked on the project. Although I had to wear multiple hats, and...

"To create a 3D action game, fully featured with combat, puzzle elements and progression." This was the goal that we began with when we decided to make our first video game. We wanted to use this as a learning experience, to learn how to ma...