Hey developers, I would like to know how you guys came up with your company name and what’s the story behind it. I’m also curious as to how did you guys first started developing games and what makes you want to be in the gaming industry.
Hi, last year I started a game development company called The North Studio, it’s currently one man. I live in Southern Africa (Zambia) where almost no one makes games and gaming hardware is very hard to find, so North is a nice title to remind me of the gap I have to cross for success. I started out with 3d modeling and animation with 3dsmax 8 years ago, and when Unreal Engine 4 was made free I formed the company and started doing a few prototypes for online clients, and now I’m in full swing developing my first game Save Our Souls. Last week I released the first Pre-Alpha demo.
It looks really good! It’s impressive for a 1 man team to do it. How long did you take to work on this project?
Our main dev had a blue budgie when he was a teenager. The budgie was always there during the years when he fell in love with games and during the many sessions. So back then he was sitting down and coded and coded to make his own Oil Imperium clone. Basically a text based C64 economics game, like most games at this time. Making back ups back in these days with floppy disks etc was not as easy going like these days. Plus he was young and inexperienced and did not make any back ups at all. He had the game all working with number of soldiers, money, gold all balanced and stuff, when one day he would leave the C64 on while going away for a few hours. The blue budgie liked hopping around on keyboards, when he was not busy drinking beer or trying to mate with the joystick, he was a single male budgie. So when our main dev returned home, the blue budgie had a good time on the keyboard because usually he would get shushed away immediately. He kind of caught up with all those keyboard hopping session that were not given to him before. The code was a mess. Every attempt to restore it to its working version made things worse with no back ups at all. In the end it was game over for the game and our main dev did not get rich and famous early, but instead went on to boring University and a boring ten a penny life.
This is an awesome idea! As we move farther with what we’ve got going on, I’d love to chime in. Right now, I’m afraid I’ll have to lurk!
I did a very small prototype 1 year ago, and development officially began 5 months ago. But I’ve had the idea for than 10 years.