Devlogs
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Between Horizons Post-Mortem: The Curse Of The Second Game
Hi! This is Julian, CEO of German indie game studio DigiTales Interactive. We’ve created two sci-fi detective adventures for PC and consoles: Lacuna (2021) and Between Horizons (2024). In this post, I’m reflecting on the development, release and reception of the latter, while touching on a host of larger topics surrounding game development and this…
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Lacuna Devlog: Game Design
Welcome to our very first devlog! Let’s catch you up on the past five years of Lacuna’s development. Just kidding; Lacuna’s first prototype did exist back in 2015, but we’ll spare you most of the details of its long journey. Instead, we thought that we’d focus on its somewhat unique game design. Gameplay Since the game…
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Future-Proof 2D Render Order
Once you start working on a 2D game, the question of how to set up a proper render order will come up very early on. Render order, at least in the way I will be using the term, determines which parts of your 2D game get rendered (drawn, displayed, shown) in front of (i.e. later…
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Challenges in Game Writing
Compared to film and literature, games are still a fairly young medium. As we could see with films, it always takes some experimenting until new art forms find their very own means of expression. In games, this process is further complicated by the fact that, over the past few decades, technological innovations in hardware and…
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Stairs in a 2D Side-Scroller
Preface Movement on stairs has been the bane of my existence for a long time. I first added it to our old prototype in late 2017 and the code stayed more or less the same up until recently. It was barely good enough for our prototype, and it was never meant to stick around until…