Training and our Think-Tank

Tiki Hub Games is a little more than an Asset Store Publisher already. I've personally been training a small group of people down here in SouthWest Florida, with what experience I have, to make the things they've always wanted to create. We've already got a wide array of ideas we're working on, some particular ones among them that I think will really take off in the game design world, as it represents what seems like a natural evolution to me. I can't bring myself to say anymore, except maybe that I'm proud of the new Lord of the Ring "Wraith" game for taking the first baby steps towards what we're working on.

Hopefully we can get some basic demonstrations up soon and be able to kickstart, early access or otherwise crowd-source, but we're still setting up the base systems of our games at the moment and don't want to present our ideas until we feel we've appropriately portrayed them.

In the meanwhile, the game we're farthest in production on is the one we'll be using CityScaper in, and we have a couple of other assets planned to go with it as a result, both of which play into our game. So without giving away the game, I'll say we'll be releasing an engine that generates a single street in much, much more detail, and attach it to a CityScaper generated city during load times, which will be used for a sidescrolling city-to-city gameplay. The third asset is a "snow engine" that recognizes particle collisions and raises x points per frame on a terrain mesh after converting the texture to snow, each of those points being based on actual particle collisions, creating the illusion of slowly gathering snow.



We can't wait to get all of these other things out to you, but right now we're limited by the time we have to work on them.

Personally, I work a part-time retail job and am back living at home temporarily, so what time I'm not spending doing irrelevant retail work, I often spend trying to drum up extra funds or keeping an eye out for other job opportunities. My lead designer has 20 years of experience with USA Today as a graphics and 3d designer, but he's recently moved as the Newspapers make more and more budget cuts, and spends much of his time doing freelance work. My newest designer is fresh out of high school with lots of time on her hands, but very little experience, so the last couple of weeks I've spent 2 days each with her training her in Unity, C#, modeling techniques and more. Finally my coder is still in his higher education system taking programming lessons, and hasn't much time outside of classes and working to pay for it.

So unfortunately, the pace goes rather slow right now, and I try to push every hour I can into this work, but without the budget, I'm left without much choice most of the time. The sooner I can get a company budget going with these assets, the sooner I can get crowdsourcing from a solid demonstration, the sooner I can be doing this full time, and start giving others the chance to do this full time.