Can you tell me about your coding job at Goblinz Studio?

I mainly take care of sprites integration and views creation (HUD, game scenes UI, icons, tooltips, skill tree, etc.), sounds and musics, text files management for content addition (UI, descriptions, dialogs, localization double check) and level and items creation.

I’m also creating functionalities or features needed for the development of the game in general, for UI and UI ergonomy. And of course, a lot of debugging and improvement of what has already been done. The more we do, the more we have to polish and the more we are nitpicky about details. But this is important and it helps a lot regarding gameplay experience… and it satisfies our inner perfectionist.

On which project are you working? What did you do before?

I’m currently working on Robothorium with Goblinz Studio’s team, a turn-based RPG with rogue like aspects in a sci-fi universe. It’s the first time I’m taking part in the creation of a project. Before that, I joined Goblinz Studio on Dungeon Rushers’ project, which was already fairly developed, a bit more than 6 months before it reached Early Access.

Steam Page

How did you start coding? Languages you’re using to code? Why them? Any advices for those who want to get started?

I started by myself thanks to tutorials on the web to get prepared to get back to studies in a new field, with the aim to do a professional retraining. I started learning web coding (html, css), then I switched to C++. I finally couldn’t get back to studies because I didn’t find any work-study contract in time and I had the chance to find Goblinz Studio at the right time. I’ve been able to learn everything on the field to finally be enrolled in the team and I’m now coding in C#, the language used for Unity.

Having a quite uncommon path, I can’t give any other advice than to follow lessons and tutorials on the web to get familiar to all this. One must be ready to call oneself into question and to develop one’s logic and analysis abilities. I think that being eager for knowledge is highly appreciated, that it needs a lot of motivation and that one shouldn’t be disheartened when discovering the huge universe that programmation can be.

Can you tell us a bit about Unity? How is it to work on this engine? Why this one more than another? The tools you’re using that you like?

Unity is a free editor which is often used by indie studios for its easy to use aspect, its internal tools and its structure which helps with creating 2D things pretty quickly, as long as you have graphic assets. It’s practical, ergonomic and versatile.

Aside from Unity, I’m using Visual Studio to code, NotePad++ for the data files and Sourcetree to work remotely (project stored on a cloud). We are using the Google Drive tools a lot for Game Design and Level Design documentation, todo lists, graphic assets, sounds, musics and spreadsheets for text files or communication and marketing. To communicate between us, we are using Slack for the text part and Discord to work on a voice chat. I find this more convivial to code and it sometimes helps to fix tough bugs and to help each other. And this is way faster than a keyboard to talk to each other.

And the recurring question: what is you favourite game? Or the one you’ve passed the most time on?

It’s always a tough question which is difficult to give an answer to. There are a lot of iconic games or that are worth to play, that had a particular place in our gamer’s life or that made us play for a huge amount of time. I’ve played a lot to games like Pokémon, Final fantasy, Age of Empires/Mythology, Warcraft 3, Diablo and Borderlands, but I’d say that The Witcher 3 is the RPG that impressed me the most and that I’ve really enjoyed finishing it completely.

On another hand, I played for almost 3 years to the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, to finally get disappointed and bored because of the lack of interest from the devs for the PvP community. I’ve also played for more than a year to the MOBA Paragon during its open beta phase, before the studio decided to stop the project to focus on Fortnite, *hum* “due to lack of resources”...