From Vision to Execution
Hey pioneers - and welcome to another community post, as we branch out from our regular dev-centric stuff to give you a glimpse into our creative process. With Dawn Apart’s sprawling world, fascinating interactions between colonists and aliens and intricate (and fully destructible) factories, we want to offer automation and colony sim fans an experience that goes beyond your average builder. While we’re not shy to admit that we have been inspired by the greats (especially Factorio and Rimworld), putting our unique spin on the genre requires regular, hours-long brainstorming sessions on top of already tight coding schedules.
But before we dive into the process of how our four-man-team comes up with new ideas - here is a friendly reminder that you can become a part of that creative undertaking too by joining Dawn Apart’s Discord server. There we share a lot of first ideas and concept art, discuss which Sci-Fi movies have influenced us lately and ask you about small, but important details and directions of the game. Heck, we even launched a “Tales from Aurora” sub-channel, in which we share short stories that further flesh out the universe of Dawn Apart. You should come check it out, it’s a fun place!
[h3]Take a look in the Miro[/h3]
The heart and soul of our day-to-day operations is our Miro board. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Miro is an “collaborative platform that enables distributed teams to work effectively together.” Think of a fridge door on which you can put sticky notes - but online and with infinite space. You can access it in your browser but we have also installed it on a giant touch screen at our office which gives us some serious Minority Report vibes when moving notes with pictures and ideas around.
When developing a factory and destruction sim like Dawn Apart the Miro board is the perfect place to geek out over chimney designs, share photographs of decayed factories, and draw diagrams that show in which directions debris is flying after an explosion. For example, above you can see a tiny snapshot of our giant whiteboard where we collected and categorized pictures of factory walls, floors and roofs that serve as models for our voxel artists. And below, next to our bi-weekly sprint schedule, you can see a section where we looked at burning houses to refine our fire destruction physics (as detailed in our last announcement post).
[h3]From concept to completion[/h3]
Since we are not only developers but have remained fans ourselves, the Miro board is also plastered with references from other games. Doom Eternal’s collectible viewer, Noita’s particle system or The Sims’ ‘look through the roof of a house view’-feature all served as inspirations and were posted there in the form of screenshots or videos before adapting and building on those ideas for Dawn Apart.
Of course, all of our original concept art, created by a network of trusted collaborators, is placed onto our virtual whiteboard as well in order to get dissected, critiqued and updated. See for example this very early concept art of the It’ak, the indigenous species that roams the planet of Aurora and is going to play a major role in the final game.
In short, by connecting all our creative synapses, Miro has become the collective brain of Dawn Apart. At the same time it is also great for streamlining the development process through assigning tasks and evaluating past sprints. We can’t wait to move the last sticky note to the ‘finished’ section of our scrum board and let you finally play the game. Until then, we’ll keep you posted. See you next week or on Discord!
But before we dive into the process of how our four-man-team comes up with new ideas - here is a friendly reminder that you can become a part of that creative undertaking too by joining Dawn Apart’s Discord server. There we share a lot of first ideas and concept art, discuss which Sci-Fi movies have influenced us lately and ask you about small, but important details and directions of the game. Heck, we even launched a “Tales from Aurora” sub-channel, in which we share short stories that further flesh out the universe of Dawn Apart. You should come check it out, it’s a fun place!
[h3]Take a look in the Miro[/h3]
The heart and soul of our day-to-day operations is our Miro board. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Miro is an “collaborative platform that enables distributed teams to work effectively together.” Think of a fridge door on which you can put sticky notes - but online and with infinite space. You can access it in your browser but we have also installed it on a giant touch screen at our office which gives us some serious Minority Report vibes when moving notes with pictures and ideas around.
When developing a factory and destruction sim like Dawn Apart the Miro board is the perfect place to geek out over chimney designs, share photographs of decayed factories, and draw diagrams that show in which directions debris is flying after an explosion. For example, above you can see a tiny snapshot of our giant whiteboard where we collected and categorized pictures of factory walls, floors and roofs that serve as models for our voxel artists. And below, next to our bi-weekly sprint schedule, you can see a section where we looked at burning houses to refine our fire destruction physics (as detailed in our last announcement post).
[h3]From concept to completion[/h3]
Since we are not only developers but have remained fans ourselves, the Miro board is also plastered with references from other games. Doom Eternal’s collectible viewer, Noita’s particle system or The Sims’ ‘look through the roof of a house view’-feature all served as inspirations and were posted there in the form of screenshots or videos before adapting and building on those ideas for Dawn Apart.
Of course, all of our original concept art, created by a network of trusted collaborators, is placed onto our virtual whiteboard as well in order to get dissected, critiqued and updated. See for example this very early concept art of the It’ak, the indigenous species that roams the planet of Aurora and is going to play a major role in the final game.
In short, by connecting all our creative synapses, Miro has become the collective brain of Dawn Apart. At the same time it is also great for streamlining the development process through assigning tasks and evaluating past sprints. We can’t wait to move the last sticky note to the ‘finished’ section of our scrum board and let you finally play the game. Until then, we’ll keep you posted. See you next week or on Discord!