The Art of Simplicity

Preliminary Dash Environment/Artwork 

I like to write code from scratch. My first attempt at a game involved trying to make my own engine from the ground up. I started with nothing and ended with… nothing. Well, that’s not completely true. I ended up with some software that rendered some basic 3D shapes and wrapped them in textures and was impossible to maintain. Did I mention it was my first time using OpenGL, too? Something about writing an entire game completely from scratch appealed to the part of me that likes to invent and tinker but I was completely unprepared for it! I didn’t even know what an engine was supposed to do and the mess I ended up with ended up stopping my development in its tracks.

I wanted Dash to be different. During our first meeting Joey and I talked about which engine to use and we settled on ImpactJS. Actually, the first game we decided to make didn’t resemble Dash in the slightest; it was a much larger-scale 2D exploration game that was going to use tons of dynamic lighting features, support a large world and be very interactive. I threw something together quickly enough, getting our Hero in game, strapping a flashlight to his arm and watching him move around was awesome and fun! But the further into the game we got the more limited we were by ImpactJS. I decided to avoid reinventing the wheel as often as possible and ended up finding a lot of libraries online to borrow from and use but I still ended up writing a lot of custom code to do the things we wanted with light, sprites and the environment. Things I thought were very clever! The problem was the more time I put into extending the engine the more attached to it I was getting. Our progress ended up slowing down because we were fighting with our tools and both of us started to feel discouraged. So we decided to change gears again. 

Dash is Joey’s brainchild. He came up with a trippy little idea that we figured we could make in a few months and proposed we change our goal to making something simple. I stashed all the code I had written and decided that a fresh start really needed to be fresh; we’d find an engine that handled more of the heavy lifting, made supporting multiple platforms easy and was used for commercial games. Enter Unity.

With Unity came a host of tutorials, a giant support community and the tools necessary to build something good without having to stress over the small stuff. Making Dash has been more about creating a game than about building a foundation and that’s exactly how it should be.

- Giuseppe