Presented by Intel
A one-man game development studio run out of a fairly rural part of New South Wales, Australia, a couple of hours train ride from Sydney, can’t be the easiest operation to make a success. But that’s just the situation lone wolf developer Alberto Santiago is living, fronting his company, Studio Canvas.
Oh, right, he also taught himself game programming with the aid of YouTube videos! A background of 10 years spent as a 3D artist working on movies, TV commercials, and art for advertising billboards set the stage, until changing situations with studios in Australia caused him to consider new options.
Before his current game, GoatPunks, was close to coming to PC, Santiago crafted a small iOS app that controls DSLR cameras. “It took me two months to make, and it did fairly well…in fact it’s still making money today,” he says. That ongoing income afforded Santiago the flexibility to focus his time on learning game programming and start developing his own game.
“I wanted to combine programming with my background in 3D art,” he says, and that led to YouTube, “where little kids were explaining programming, and they get so into it…It was cool to learn that way.” It was also the start of a journey Santiago was not anticipating given that this planned three-month project “has ended up being three years!”
Assisting along the way, Santiago credits turning to Unity “which has been a huge help because documentation has been laid out very well” for allowing him to learn through trial and error when YouTube videos failed to address the specific needs he had for GoatPunks.
Despite living a two-hour train ride from Sydney, he also credits the Beer and Pixels Meet-up of local developers with the opportunity to share ideas, find help with testing, and other useful camaraderie. This was important as he witnessed studios in both his 3D art profession and game development come and go “so at times it felt like I was the only one making games here!”
GoatPunks? What? How?
To be fair, the question had to be asked: Just where did the concept for a game like GoatPunks emerge? The core gameplay is a four-player king of the hill battle between rocket-wielding goats. While you can play single-player against Santiago-designed AI, the game shines in four-person splitscreen action where it professes many of the same fun, competitive elements as some of the designer’s own favorites like Smash Bros.
“Well, it didn’t start out like that,” Santiago confesses. With an eye towards producing an iOS game that would take advantage of the gyro to rotate around a treehouse while swiping off monsters, the evolution was partly fueled by simple observations on his travels into Sydney. “It would be like a tower defense game,” says Santiago of the original vision, “and on this two-hour journey to the city, your mind wanders. I saw the treehouse, and there would be creatures…”
But while trying to figure out the programming method to make characters climb to the top of a structure, Santiago hilariously reveals that “there was a guy walking his pet pygmy goat…it was really like this dog with horns. I started…
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