2025 📆 Unity Prototyping
My internship was at Hookaria Games with Morgan Seurre aka Paci, a former colleague from Blanket Games. The studio was created in 2021 and released Tower of Spirit - its first game - in July 2024. For now, Morgan is working on Hold The Mine, the studio’s second game. The development started in 2023 and the game is financed by Goblinz Publishing.
My goal as an intern at Hookaria Games was to learn about as many things as I could on independent development. I have already worked in this type of environment before (indie small teams) but that was mainly as a programmer. With this internship, I had the chance to discover many other subjects related to the indie daily problems, such as making pitches, knowing Steam, making mockups and sometimes art, market analysis, pitching projects to publishers, etc…
I feel like I know enough about programming to make most of what I want to do : it might not be perfect but I don’t want to work in the AAA industry, I just want to make small games. And if I really have to explore stuff I haven’t done before with programming, I know I can learn it by myself.
What I really don’t know is all this “stuff” about marketing your game, making art, contracts, freelance, managing a company, Steam... And it’s something I really wanted to learn more about, to become a more complete solo dev.
Weekly prototype development
The first month was a bit special. The plan for me was to make a game per week, by myself, in four different genres. I also needed to make a short documentation in the style of a video game manual. To make those games, I had to learn about the genres, the codes, what works and what doesn’t, what are the most recent successes, the state of this market, what the public wants to play… And to think about what I could do quickly that would bring a twist to that. I had to manage the game design but also the graphic part of the game in addition to the programming. So it was a full solo dev experience.
For the first game, the theme was incremental. I had the idea to mix that with a more simple gameplay and chose the brick breaker.
Play Confractus by alvina-dr on itch
The second theme was bullet heaven. For this one I chose to focus on graphisms, not the gameplay. I have been wanting to make a game with a view similar to Animal Crossing for a long time, with a “small planet” look (you can see the curvature).
Play Bullet Heaven by alvina-dr on itch
The third theme was horror. I found this to be the most difficult one. I don’t play horror games - they scare me. In the end I decided to play more with the ambiance than some sort of big monster following the player. In four days, that would have been way too long to make. I chose to focus on a single mechanic around a camera that takes pictures. Except that some things in the world can only be seen with that camera. Taking shots of some objects will create weird interactions.
Play Mug Shot by alvina-dr on itch
The last theme was “Wholesome”. It’s not really a genre, more of an aesthetic. But it was still interesting to search for what exactly is considered as wholesome. During this week, I decided to reuse assets that I made during the second week for the bullet heaven. The “small planet” effect and the clouds were quite fitting for the cute aesthetic that I wanted to convey. I was able to improve it and see the limits of this type of effect.
Play Space Gardener by alvina-dr on itch
Market analysis
Another mission I had during my internship was to research several subjects and make quick oral presentations about them, backed-up by some slides.
I was able to answer, for the first three months, those questions :
- Is the deck-builder a dying genre on Steam ? Where does this feeling come from ? Analysis - Deckbuilders.pdf
- Is the big increase in game releases each year on Steam leading to a PC market saturation ? Analysis - Saturation Steam.pdf
- What explains the explosion of the bullet heaven genre after the release of Vampire Survivors ? Analysis - Bullet Heaven.pdf
The exercise was really interesting and allowed me to learn a lot about Steam and how to find Steam data. I was also able to read many articles by Chris Zukowski (How To Market A Game), which has helped me understand Steam exposure, the way a game works and gets popular, marketing strategy surrounding specific kinds of game, etc…
Bug report tool in game
During my second month, I was able to work on a bug report tool. We got inspired by the tool from Hades.
We wanted to make something similar, that would be easy to set up on new projects and open source (available on GitHub). Basically the goal of the tool was to open a window through an input decided by the developer, immediately take a screenshot of the game and allow the player to write a comment along with drawings on the screenshot to explain the bug.
I first made a prefab template in Unity that would do all that :
Unity project on githubThen we needed somewhere to actually look up all the bugs reported. So I made a web interface using Next.js and Vercel.
Web interfaceWeb interface project on github
To transfer the data without having to pay anything, I decided to use GitHub. Basically, what I do is push information automatically from Unity using the GitHub API :
https://github.com/alvina-dr/bug-report-unity/blob/main/Assets/Plugins/BugReport/BugReport_GitHub.cs
Then the website showcases the reports information dynamically.
Gumboss
For GMTK jam 2024, we teamed up with Morgan and Zakku to make Rolling Food Chain. The theme was “Built to scale”. The game was a mix of Vampire Survivors and Katamari Damacy, in which you play a small ball rolling around and eating monsters. The goal is to get big enough to feed your boss monster and survive to the next round. We ended up ranking 184 out of 7560 and were pretty happy with the result. Testers were giving us good feedback and loving the game, so we decided it was an idea worth pursuing.
During my second month, I was able to work a bit more on this game. The name was changed to Gumboss which sounded more catchy. First we decided that we wanted to make a pitch deck.
We already had a prototype and content ideas that would add a lot to the game. But there were also a few problems with our current gameplay that we wanted to fix. For example, we had some doubts about the 2.5D look we had originally chosen, mainly because the readability of the game might not be perfect. So I worked on a mockup for a full 2D version of the game. I also worked a little on a potential pitch deck and we had a brainstorming session around how to extend the game.
Demon Cannon
A few weeks before Gamecamp (a french video game event), we decided to make a prototype to show to publishers at the event that we will call “Demon Cannon” (code name). Inspired by Ballionaire, Star Vaders, BALL x PIT and Peglin, the gameplay consists of ordering demon cards and shooting them with the cannon in the chosen order. Each demon has specific effects that will be more or less efficient depending on their place in the queue (similar to how jokers work in Balatro).
The game also needed to be playable on SteamDeck (so I had to think gamepad first) because it would make it easier for people to try it at Gamecamp - no need to get a computer out of your bag. I spent a little more than two weeks on the prototype.
Creation of two pitch decks
After Gamecamp and pitching for the first time to Goblinz, we decided to leave the Demon Cannon pitch on the side, as it wasn’t exactly fitting with their catalogue (too arcade-like). We went back to a former idea that Morgan had, with a gameplay similar to Knightica that we will call Demon King.
It took around ten days to make / polish both pitches, including the graphical parts.
Hold The Mine
I've made a specific article about the game that you can see here : Hold The Mine.
Keeping an eye on trends
During the internship, I also had dedicated time to try out games. Simply to understand what works well at the moment and what doesn’t, see major recent successes that not a lot of casual players like me know about. It was a great opportunity and many of those games now inspire me as a game dev.
Non-exhaustive list : Ballionaire, Star Vaders, Digseum, 20 Minutes Till Dawn, Minami Lane…