This promise to be a colorful heaven filled with kindness, so stick around !

The main goal of this blog is to not only present our ideas regarding the game, but mainly to share an adventure of building this game with it's up and down, take your suggestions and comment, discuss various subject around game design and share the more we can about how we do it. This is impossible to achieve without a solid community and I hope we will get a warm welcome from GameDev community. I heard good stuff about it

Ironically, this first entry is the needed boring one to tell you who we are and who am I. Ok, I did promise you a "rich in color" experience, but you know... word can be colorful too ! I'll try to make this quick so you all know what this is all about. Just read what may interest you and drop be a welcome word or just a hello !

This blog commitment

My intention is to have this blog updated as much as possible to share each step of the creation of the game. By that I mean at least once per month, but i'll try to do it twice a mount. I prefer to do short but frequent blog entry. Once per week would be cool, but we will see. I'll cover all kind of stuff, including what we fail at too. We want to be transparent to ourself and too people. We learn a lot from that. I want to share concept art, talk about game feature, talk about our philosophy and thinking of what a good game is for us, i want to ask you what is best for the game.

The current game process

We are not on day 1, but we ain't achieve alpha build yet. For me, an alpha build is when you have at least 1 complete level with some finish and unfinished asset with a general set of the basic feature. We don't have all that yet. We do have completed many important feature of the game. Thousands of line of code is already there and we are working inside a dev level to test code but we have very few asset ready. You will be able too all that come to life here ! Another blog post will cover what the  game will be and on what ground we started from.

Who is Gon'Interactive ?

Gon'Interactive was funded in 2009 by a group of 4 college in Montreal (QC, Canada). The main interest was, at the time, to provide multimedia services of a professional level with a budget friendly price to accommodate smaller business and independent people that couldn't afford the big studio.  The company was producing website, flash game, 3D illustration and photography. As it evolve, the company became more and more focused on 3D Animation and illustration as it was driving it's main design interest. The company focused on creating marketing illustration and animation for a varied kind of client sets. A clear line grew over the year to establish Gon'Interactive as being an artistic studio capable of producing cool video and animation production from A to Z (Asset production, video montage, sound edit, post prodZ (see from A to Z) ) to accomplish. The Interactive part of the studio was to mix modern traditional medium such as video and enhance them with new multimedia medium. We became strong at building complex AS (action script 2.0) games and website. Unfortunately, as you may know, AS2.0 became AS3.0 and flash was already dying on it's own and replaced by html5, webgl and other medium. The interactive part of the company naturally evolve into Unity C# coding where we felt for the first time completely free to achieve whatever we wanted, and that feeling was awesome ! We started a new learning curve around Unity a couple of years ago to mix our arts with modern tools such as unity. After being involve in projects for other client, we felt it was finally time for us to do our own game. The one we always dreamed of and finally feel comfortable enough to do. Gon'Interactive have always been about putting all the work require to achieve the best image possible and this apply to the game. To keep a focus on this project, we cut down the amount of job we will take during the time of development because we are really committed to it.

Who am I ?

Well, that's a philosophical question I won't be able to answer in this life probably, but on a more scientific approach to the question, I'm Stéphane L'Abbé, president and owner of Gon'Interactive. For as long as I remember, I was addicted to drawing cartoon and superheroes. It was my first contact with art. I started learning photography in high school and also started programming. It was TurboPascal and I was doing boring animation and game with  terrible fabulous graphic. Photography became one of my favorite hobby that eventually evolve to a ProAm level. Photography is a complementary skill to any 3D work as it involve a lot of understanding in light, material and composition. I like how lights and composition could affect perception and emotion. In college I started to learn and use 3D application to complement my work on a daily basis. I went to university to study architecture. During those years I learn a lot about, how to design, how to communicate emotion out of space, how space can affect people, how our mind read stuff, philosophical approach of what space is and how 3D software work and I got my master and became an architect. This was my professional answer to merge multiple interest into 1 job. Design, mathematics and arts. The real life of an architect is mostly project management and team management. You reach a point where you get very good at dealing with tough project, impossible schedule, budget, team management and those skill apply to every type of project management. The need for more artistic freedom is always inside me and building a game like Third Encounter Of A Kind is a dream come true ! I'll manage the community (if we ever succeed to create one) and i'm responsible of design and do a lot of coding too.  My native language is french, so please, be nice to me regarding my English. I also understand a bit of Spanish. I try to do my best at each language, while not being perfect with any of them !

My favorite game was Space Defender.

On the personal side, i'm a gamer. My gamer life started with Colleco vision, I still like the game !

I was lucky enough to have a mother working for a Commodore Store and we were owning soon after an Amiga 500 computer which was way ahead of his time in terms of graphic and processing power (3mhz ?) I then skip to SNES. Big lover of Mario of that time. The first console a bought myself was a Sega Sturn, my brother went on the Sony side at that time. We join back on Xbox, xbox 360 and xbox one. I'm not a fan of console brand, i'm a fan of good game.