Behind every good game is a QA team that helps exterminate all those pesky little bugs and ensures the game is fun and shippable! But the bigger the game, the more complex the puzzle of identifying all those bugs becomes! Speaking as one half of our QA department duo, Mei is here to break down her methodology on how to kill it at QA for this month’s blog post!   GAINING XP Mei got into QA with an entry level job straight out of university, where the company she worked for was hired by game developers to test their games. It was a good start for her to learn the basics and familiarize hers ..read more

  For today’s blog post, we thought we’d take a few steps back in exploring the game’s art style by bringing it back to the concepting phase! To help us do that is Connor, our Concept Artist!! Here’s a look at how Connor illustrated portraits for some interesting characters – the Lost Raiders! When flying around Drosera, you may come across ‘audio fragments’, which contain stories from raiders who never escaped the planet. To give these stories more life, we knew we needed to put a face to them! This is where Connor came in – let’s check out the process!   CONCEPTUALIZING THE IDEA In ..read more

To start off 2024 with a bang, we wanted to pull back the curtain on our characters and how we went about designing Drosera’s raiders! Here with us to explain the creative process, we’ve got Jasmin, one of our character artists, giving some insight into bringing a character to life.   MEET CALISTO, “THE DESTINED SCHOLAR” Calisto comes from a rare alien race known for their keen senses and impeccable memories, often making them the best explorers, archivists, and historians. Although Calisto’s family are no strangers to this stereotype and have left their mark on galactic discoveries for c ..read more

For this month’s blog post, we wanted to talk all about STREAMING. This phenomenon has no doubt become one of the most popular forms of video content, making it a vital ingredient to any dev’s recipe! As indie devs with a passion for showing our creative process, we couldn’t help but jump on the streaming bandwagon to show the ongoing progress of our upcoming game, NO LOVE LOST. Thankfully, we have a resident Twitch expert in house to guide us on this new streaming adventure! Our QA Dev Lead, Britany (who is also a streamer herself), is here to explain how she became captain of our monthly Com ..read more

As a new Raider on a strange planet, there is much to learn and discover about the Nectar Raiding trade. However, a lot could get lost in transmission if the games UI fails to properly explain what you need to do to be a successful Raider! Here to guide us this month is our very own UI artist, Keiana, as she explains how she went about designing NO LOVE LOST’s HUD!   STAND BY – DEFINING THE HUDS STYLE The HUD is the in-game screen containing all the player's important information such as Health, Score, Items, Objectives, Compass, mini-map, etc. This was the first screen to redesign becaus ..read more

In NO LOVE LOST, quests are one of the most important design elements! Ensuring that they are clear, easy-to-follow and in-style with the game is not always easy and it takes a creative mind to check all those boxes! Thankfully, we’ve got Olivier on our side, who has bravely taken the helm as NO LOVE LOST’s quest designer and turned the hunt for nectar into a addictively fun adventure. To help us understand what goes into the design of a quest, here’s a breakdown of how a quest is implemented into the game:   BURYING TREASURE IN DROSERA – CONCEPTING QUESTS ON PAPER THE DRAFT: There is n ..read more

One of the things we find most intriguing about game design is how many pieces and people it takes to make a game whole. In the past few months, our team has grown considerably and with it, so have the changes to NO LOVE LOST! One of said changes we’re most excited about are all the magical touches, Jordan, our VFX artist, has been peppering throughout the world of Drosera! In this month’s post, we will be discussing some of the most significant VFX additions to date and how we went about implementing them! Let’s get started!  CONJURING MAGIC The very first step before even figuring out ..read more

It’s time for another dev blog post and this time, we’re discussing the audio design of NO LOVE LOST! We’ve taken a lot of time to imagine the planet alive within the senses – what does it look like, feel like and in today’s case – sound like! To discuss that process is the mastermind who’s transporting our ears to Drosera — James W. is here to take us through how he made the game’s creature sounds! SETTING DROSERA’S TONE When it comes to audio, the project's aesthetic will decide your approach to how you'll design the sound. You can have games where all the sounds need to replicate real worl ..read more

Can you imagine NO LOVE LOST without its sleek and speedy hoverbikes? As the way to traverse the dangerous lands of Drosera – we can’t either. But if you read one of our earlier dev blogs or checked out our earliest footage of the game over on our YouTube channel , you’d know it wasn’t always in the plans! Travel down memory lane with Guillaume, one of our 3D artists, as he brings us through what his 3D modeling process was with this futuristic, fantasy form of travel!   CONCEPTING THE HOVERBIKES - THE PRE-PROCESS When getting started, we usually begin gathering references using Pure ..read more

As indie devs, we’ll be the first to tell you that planning and executing a tradeshow can feel like an enormous undertaking – but it’s also a rewarding one! The team was Boston-bound in March for PAX East, and while this wasn’t our first event, it was NO LOVE LOST’s first tradeshow! After rounding up all the experience we’ve collected over the years showing own indie games, we wanted to share this quick guide on how to plan a tradeshow! PLANNING THE FANTASY (on an indie budget!) First things first — get organized! Once you’ve been officially registered for your event, you’ll be given a contac ..read more