Today we’re breaking up our bi-weekly schedule, don’t worry, we’ll still be back next week, and with the next character reveal, but this weeks a little bit special.

Tomorrow marks the 1 year anniversary from the beginning of project Atropos!

When Kadan designed some characters and unveiled them this time last year, there was no expectation that anything would happen, until Dan stepped in. Suddenly a Concept Document was being created for a game that was dubbed “Kadan’s Butt game” (for a short while). It was over a month into the project that it gained the title Atropos, a name that would stick around.

We started this blog a couple of months ago to document the project and share it with the world, but when looking back over the past year it can feel like not much has happened development-wise. Admittedly a lot of the work has been background work that we can’t really show off here on the blog. But putting everything into perspective, we’re surprised by what we’ve managed to complete on top of full time jobs!

• We’ve managed to churn out 200,000 words of Concept, plot and dialogue
• Multiple conceptual music pieces are underway, including the much loved but halfheartedly named Tense2
• We’ve made 10 character models, with five of them running around a virtual Manchester, even though they’re still a little confused about how walls work.
• We have our first dungeon greyboxed, a dialogue system, animations, characters, locations and so much more that we can’t wait to show off!

Our first year has been eventful, it’s shown us the truth of indie game development, staying up late and working through weekends, spending every minute we’re not working on the game wishing that we were working on the game. We didn’t get as far as we hoped at the beginning of the year, but it’s shown us what we’re capable of and where our limits are.

Now that a lot of the groundwork has been laid, we’re ready to really start getting into the tangible parts of development and having more of that fuzzy feeling we get when we hit a milestone and remember that this is a game that we’re making. A lot has changed since the start of the project, and we’re sure there will be more changes as things progress, but now we want to take you along for the ride.

Here’s to Year 2, and whatever it throws our way.

Kadan & Dan – Team Atropos