Game Design Document & Core Foundations

Creating the Game Design Document (GDD)
Whenever you kick off a new game, especially with a team, even a tiny one, the first thing you want to do is put together a Game Design Document (GDD). Back when we started, it was just the two of us: Vegatti and Ron. But we knew the team would grow eventually, so we needed something to act as our playbook.
The GDD helped us lock in the essentials: what’s the core experience we want players to walk away with from the demo? After some back-and-forth, it was clear, combat and gameplay fluidity had to be front and center. For any ARPG (and honestly, for most games), that’s the heartbeat of the experience.
From there, we broke down the combat into the key pieces:

Movement
Animations
Abilities
Boss encounters
Visual effects & timing
Sound design
Interaction & responsiveness

The goal was simple: make the core combat feel tight, satisfying, and true to our vision. Sure, we’re not aiming to match the polish of AAA titans like Diablo or PoE, but we wanted to squeeze the absolute most out of our tiny budget of… $2,000–$3,000 😅.
Next came quests and boss encounters for the Kickstarter demo. We mapped out a few main story quests leading up to a boss fight, plus some sidequests, puzzles, and hidden rooms to give it a slightly open, adventurous feel. Even though it’s a demo and we couldn’t pack in everything, we wanted it to feel more than just a straight line from point A to B.
On the tech side, Alex, Ron, and Anthony focused on building a solid code foundation from day one. Instead of cranking out buggy code that fell apart the moment we expanded, we took the time to lay proper groundwork. Now we can grow the game without constantly patching broken systems.
We also made all our systems modular, basically, each piece can be swapped out or upgraded independently. Think of it like changing car tires: you can swap to winter tires without taking apart the whole car.

World Building: Steps of Yjorn

Once we had the code going in the right direction, the next thing on our list was building out the Steps of Yjorn. It’s the southern part of the Arylind Tundra, not as freezing as the northern parts but still a bit cold, kind of like a late November weather in Scotland. The idea itself was simple, but actually making it took a while. Since the GDD already laid out how the area should look and feel, we jumped straight into Unity, built the terrain mesh, and started sculpting it to get the shape and elevation right.

Once we finished sculpting the terrain, we dropped in some rocks so the programmers could finally jump in. From there, they could start setting up quests, and even laying the groundwork for boss fights and the rest of the content. Of course, we kept tweaking things as we went, but at least this gave them something solid to work with instead of having to build everything from scratch.

So this is the wireframe of the level, later on we would add the rest of the environmental assets like Foliage, Trees, Bushes, Terrain Textures etc.

Character Development: Warrior Class & Animation

The next step on our list was building out the warrior class so we could start testing the basics, abilities, movement, animations, all that good stuff. We modeled the character in Blender and handled the animations in it as well.
The animation side ended up being a lot harder than we expected. Unity’s humanoid setup only works with a proper Humanoid Rig , basically the skeleton that makes the model move. Since this was our first time setting one up, getting the rig and model exported into Unity without breaking was a whole trial and error process.

We created our character using a method called 3D blocking. This is basically when you create each segment of the model separately, shape them exactly how you want, and then eventually merge and sculpt the finer details. Once you have a model, you need to do a process called retopology. Retopology is creating a new, optimized mesh with simpler, cleaner geometry from a complex or high-resolution 3D model, usually to improve performance for animation and real-time rendering. The image you’re seeing above on the left is the first step. There were several steps in between, but we just wanted to show you where it started and where it ended.