The longer you do any job, the harder it is to start over and do anything else. At least that's been my experience so far.

After 15 years in a specific professional domain, this make things significantly harder even though the desire to change is high... Potentially everything has to be learn from scratch, or almost... and that's really hard for middle age guy to change... *sigths* 

@czg

When we developed Payday 1, me and my buddy Ilija worked very much alone with great responsibility, more or less how you work at home with your own stuff. We designed and built the levels from whitebox up to shippable, that included the gameplay, scripting, art-pass and lighting.

From the start it was only us, then a third level designer joined, but all in all, we worked a lot, slept at the office and in the end, turned out a really fun game.

I've worked 10+ years now as a "Professional Level Designer" with various projects.
These days I'm running my own biz, which me and a friend started, that was 3+ years ago.

@SpecialBomb
Really, try and convince your friend to start with a smaller thing first, it takes ages for a single person to make a long full feature ARPG, even if it's top down.

We started with Hammerwatch as a smaller hack and slash, instead of a larger RPG, just because we kinda "knew" that you can't make a real ARPG in short time and keep the quality up. We worked full time for 9 months with that, developed our own engine, made more or less all art, all levels, tweaked etc etc

Had we we gone for the initial idea and done a real diablo clone, we would still be sitting with it I guess... (maybe not, but you get the idea). 

Played it coop with my buddy and loved every minute of it 

I use to say that I did everything you see and hear and my friend did everything you don't see and hear =)

Not 100% true, since we didn't create the music ourselves and we had some help with boss graphics... so almost true =) 

But please, dear Hipshot, make the characters in your next games at least x2 faster. ;) 

It's very different, but I do like speed, I do...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3AVjgIgtUE 

Movement needs to be 2x faster in that! :) 

That's tiptoeing speed! 

Omg... I should have leveled up moved speed a lot more... 

Kinda odd to see a developer like you up on this forum. Unless I am completely unaware. 

Your work seems to have inspired a new Dreamcast game:
http://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=72&t=103950 

@ SpecialBomb, there's probably at least a few around here. Often you don't know, since when people are employed at a larger developer - they try to avoid talking about that outside work, AAA titles are surrounded by a lot of hush hush and paperwork to enforce that =)

@ mankrip, cute =) didn't know people still made things for the DC. 

 

A pretty large proportion of people here have worked on "AAA" games (whatever the hell "AAA" is supposed to mean nowadays).

But yeah, NDAs and whatnot tend to stop people mouthing off about what they are up to. 

I ain't worked on shit 

AAA is not an acronym, but a way to classify games, in some cases, referring to it as an equivalent to a movie blockbuster.

:=) 

That reminds me, my AAA membership expires next month. I need to remember to renew it (wouldn't want to get stranded on the side of the road). 

I only joined this forum like 2 months ago, so I have no idea who does what really, only a couple.

@Kinn
I only want to know what they did, not what they are doing. Plus I originally never said I wanted to know anything, lol. 

I haven't developed anything professionally yet, but I like to talk to creative knowledgeable people and there are many brilliant ones here. 

Today was the last day of my contract for the project I was working on, so if you're lookin' for someone with 10 years of professional experience, I am available!

(As far as I know it wasn't just a cruel April Fool's prank to have the last day of my contract be April 1st but the day is still young) 

I'm always interested in knowing what people can do or not. Do you have any portfolio or cv? 

Since you developed Hammerwatch, I must ask this:

What rogue-like elements inspired you to make the ones in your game? I'm looking to buy it since I play a lot of rouge-likes like nethack and Caves of Qud, as well as more action rogue-likes like Risk of Rain. 

Well, to be honest, I wasn't really sure what a rogue like was some year ago, I'm still not sure what exactly it is, except for it being all random?

I don't like that, I don't like random, so I haven't really been inspired by that.

And you don't need to buy the game, just add me on steam and I'll get you a key. Same name as here and there's a tiger as avatar.