Week 1: Shall We Play a Game, Dr Falken?

We started Neosofo Studios because we love playing games and solving puzzles. (not just to use cheesy 80’s movie references in posts. Though expect a lot of that. We love 80s movie quotes. =] )

And for the last few years we’d been seeing less of the types of games we loved playing. Not all, to be sure, but increasingly pricey, broken, licensed, complex things that semed ot have more marketing around them than gameplay.

Plus, we had a bunch of ideas (heck, an entire back catalogue) that would only ever see the light of day if we started getting serious about committing time to making them happen.

And as neophytes with hard won skills from other industries, and having seen how other games get delivered, we were pretty sure had some innovative ways to deliver things better, faster, and cheaper than industry leaders.

So, here we are with our new wisdom and ideas.

Even though it’s not the safest title in the lineup to start with, our first game is Scion, a not-so-secret love letter to a real-time tactical space combat and strategy riff on the earlier days of the internet.

We’re making some unconventional choices for a studio. We’re building in a non-traditional lanhguage, we’re using an off-the-shelf engine, we’re doing a hard real-time server and client game and we’re targeting multiple platforms.

It’s ambitious, possibly audacious… and we’re doing it with a small team that ships fast rather than a large studio behind us.

Why build in the open?

Because the best indie studios should do. Everything we learned about games, programming, and design was because other people sahred what they did. In fact, it’s safe to say if it wasn’t for those thta went before, we would not even be attempting this.

So, more than just building games, we’re hoping to also inspire a whoile ecosystem of game designers, artists, engineers, and musicians to see that it can be done, learn from us (and our mistakes) and hopefulyl be inspired to builkd thier own games (and studios!).

And also, because writing about what we’re building forces us to think clearly and succinctly about what we’re actually building and why.

I’m sure it won’t always be pretty, but seeing how the sausages are made rarely is.

We want to be the indie studio shipping smarter. Stick around.

What’s next

Scion had an early PoC when we were trying to convince ourselves technically that this ship could sail and we had an innovative method to deliver good games, faster.

Just this week we got stuck back into things and seem to have licked a bug that was messing with our smooth movement under high speed in the game. We’ll be posting on that shortly since it was interesting and imagine it’s something that would probably trip up other engineers trying to do similar things. Cool story.