Hellboy Studios Developer Diary part 1 – Introduction and handling placeholder content

Kicking off the first of our Developer Blog series are Daksh Tandon & Mike Knight of  Hellboy Studios, a Delhi-based development team working on their first game.

Look out for the continuation of their blog series over the next few months as they build and market their new game. If you’re a developer and would like a development blog right here on Androidizen get in touch.

Daksh Tandon

I’m currently perusing architecture from Delhi. With so much free time after college, and a passion for games, one day I started a tutorial for java, and got hooked. It was so easy; quickly I completed that, learned Android. And what started as a one month trial, soon expanded and two months from then, I am still coding, and adding more stuff to it.

Gaming is always my favorite  Some might be quite hard but are challenging. Suddenly I thought about my life a little. I had to make a game always. There were so many games already. My life would take a big leap. I am in my final stage of concept and design. I am gonna make a game that people are gonna spend days clicking buttons.

The main concept behind the game was to make something that people of all age groups enjoy playing. And since it’s on the cell phone, I wanted something that people would enjoy playing in the train, bus, while travelling, to work, or back home. A casual 2D game, that people feel relaxed after playing, and also didn’t require stressing themselves about. I wanted everyone to enjoy playing the game, kids , adults, gamers, casual gamers. The game would cater to people who just spend say 10-15 min, playing on their phones while travelling, but at the same time, there will be something in store for people looking to complete objectives and are looking to spend more time on their mobile.

Mike Knight

Hi, I’m in my final years of business studies. Soon I’m gonna take a big leap in my life. But I was a little undecided about my future. There were so many options- I had to choose one quickly. But now I restarted my life a little. It sounds quite hard but not impossible. Gaming was always a pleasure.

When I met Daksh, he had already begun on the game. He had asked one of our mutual friends for some help with the promotion of the game. He had his final exams coming up, and I was always into games. So he introduced us two as he was busy around that time.

Right now it is just the two of us in the core team. Daksh works on the code, mostly alone, while I am responsible for getting coverage for the game. Because of his architecture background, his graphics is good, but for the final game, we will be taking help from someone. There are a lot of things that need to be covered apart from the coding, and that’s the graphics, website, promotion, and sounds of the game. And I’ll be responsible for either finding the right person for these things.

For the graphics, we both are working on it together, and but are also contacting freelance artists whose work we like.

The beginning of the development process: Placeholder content

The important thing regarding place holder content is, that the performance of the game shouldn’t get affected once you replace it with the original content. So suppose I’m using a temp image for the main character of the game. I will make sure that the size of the image file is (if not exact), around the same size and dimensions of how I want the final image to be.

Also, if I have a background sound that’ll be looping. Even though we have not finalised on the track, we still use an audio clip looping in the background. Because if I integrate the audio track only at the final moment, there is a chance that the thread might start to lag, or might crash because of some reason.

So, the basic idea is that, when we have the final content ready and integrate it with the game, there shouldn’t be any errors that causes the thread to crash, or slow down; that is the main thing to remember.