Hi!
You’re now reading the inaugural post of our development blog. We figured that if we would be able to write down and document interesting pointers during our first game’s development arc (and beyond!), you could hopefully learn from our mistakes and perhaps get some new ideas of your own.
We have a vague idea of what we want to do with this blog and have some content planned out, but if there’s something specific you’d like us to cover, we’re very open to communication through Twitter by messaging us at @Headnought or looking us up on Facebook. In the age of instantly accessible social media sites and rapid fire tweeting, maintaining a blog seems like it’s becoming more and more rare. We’ll have to see how this actually pans out and if we’ll be able to attract any readers – let’s hope so!
Future topics will likely range from the creation of our chopper character and all the steps that went into making that happen to more technical aspects of game creation, such as using various plugins within Unity. This time however I thought I would write down some general info about us and our game.
WoodChopper got its’ humble start during the 2012 Finnish Game Jam as a simple prototype called Sommerkopter. Very much like the current iteration, it involved a silly, anthropomorphic chopper with a face. It received a fair amount of positive feedback despite being very rough around the edges. This prompted our CEO Pauli Jutila to go forward with the project and start assembling a like-minded and motivated team to bring the game up to a presentable state. As a side product of us having to be able to work as a commercial entity, we were faced with setting up a company. After much deliberation, this company would end up being called Headnought. Turns out coming up with a name for a company is really hard!
The team itself consists of five individuals; our CEO Pauli Jutila, lead developer Miikka Kosonen, animator/level designer Joona Kosonen, 2D/3D artist Saku Hatakka and bodyguard/muscle guy/financial guru Valtteri Kekki. Last but not least there’s our trainee Isto Sipilä who’s done a great job of reworking our website into a presentable state. Coming up with titles is mostly a silly formality for us at this point, because we’ll do whatever task we’re capable of.
Recently we entered the GameLab indie game competition held in Barcelona. Against all expectations we ended up winning, which we certainly weren’t prepared for. This was a positive little surprise and has since opened some new doors for us. It’s enabled us to visit an event called the ChartBoost University early next year. The team gets to travel to San Francisco, which the whole team is very excited for.
Our plan is to get the first iteration of the game out later this year, so there’s still a lot of work to do. Realistically I expect to get a blog post out every one or two months covering the aforementioned topics – and more.
Thanks for reading!
Angry Birds plushie handed to us by Rovio’s Jussi Immonen who was one of the GameLab competition jury members.