Every developer in the world will arrogantly and self-servingly let you know about their progress. As we’ve been been working towards the launch of our games, we arrogantly and self-servingly thought that some of you might also be interested in process.

We’ve previously mentioned our use of GODOT for creating our games. In addition to GODOT, there have been a few other tools that have come in handy.

To start with, a bit of a confession. As much as we love our artwork, our process is currently a touch inefficient.

First up, preliminary sketches are done with paper and pencil. Then, on a tablet, we use the app SketchClub to digitize the designs. The app and tablet is a handy, cheaper alternative to getting a Wacom tablet! With the art done in SketchClub, it is then transferred from the tablet to computer, where it is sized and cropped using GIMP. We’re also interested in trying out some of the other tools out there, so for some of the art we’ve given Krita a go instead of SketchClub.

Next up, the art files are saved as PNGs. As we want the game to load as quickly as possible and for the game size to be as small as possible, we’re optimizing as much as we can to ensure the PNG files are as small as possible too. The website TingPNG is a great tool for reducing the PNG file size and keeping the quality. The whole process can take a while, but we love the hand drawn aesthetics of our artwork and we think it really adds something to the game.

We are very happy to be able to show you a screenshot of the title page of our first game: Icarus Postal Service!

The game will be a side scrolling game on Android. You are a postal worker for the ancient Greek postal company Icarus Postal Service (IPS), a company more affordable than Hermes. If you fly too high, you start to lose feathers as the sun melts the wax holding them together. As you fly around Greece and the surrounding area, you must avoid creatures in your way (including mythical ones) and go through delivery towers to drop off post.

We are currently in alpha as we add some more features and sort out performance issues. In the next post we will want to show screenshots of the game play as the art work is finalised.

We at Nimmles have no real experience at making games, but have always wanted to make them. We don’t intend on making AAA games, instead we want to make games inspired by the ones we enjoyed growing up: Games like Monkey Island, Theme Hospital, Sonic the Hedgehog, Cannon Fodder, R-Type …. The list goes on.

Discovering the game engine GODOT has been a huge step forward in us to realising our goal. GODOT is free to use and open source. GODOT is fairly new and as such is still evolving. We started playing with it at the beginning of 2015 just after the first stable release of GODOT (1.0) became available, as of writing the most current release is 2.0 Alpha.

One of the advantages of building games in GODOT is the growing, active community surrounding it. There are good tutorials provided by them, demos available to download and a growing number of YouTube tutorials. If you are intending to try GODOT, the two tutorial channels I would suggest are: Andreas Esau and Gamefromscratch. Another good source of help is the Facebook page and forums.

As with anything under active development there have been some interesting moments: for example finding one method of path creation for moving a player from one position to another, only to find it was depreciated, then making a new way, and finally finding that the next stable release of GODOT had solved the problem for us!

We have a couple of projects in the pipeline right now and are really enjoyed the learning process with GODOT, we hope to be able to show you some of our work soon.