Kevin Zhang [Dead Monarchy Studios] (Dead Monarchy) - Interview
Welcome to yet another developer interview. This time we are talking to Kevin Zhang, the man behind the recently released tactical RPG Dead Monarchy. We talk about the hardship of being a solo developer, dreams of the future, and what is planned next.
Tell me a little about yourself - who is the solo developer behind Dead Monarchy Studios?
So I'm Kevin Zhang, that part is probably quite apparent. I'm a Chinese man born and raised in Australia previously with a Thai surname. Yes, I am quite culturally confused. Dead Monarchy is my first game, I started development when I was 24, so the start of 2017 basically. I had no real experience prior to that, I just took on a relatively useless multimedia/games design degree that didn't really teach me anything other than good folder management.
How come you started the difficult task of becoming a solo developer?
Depression and curiosity. Came out of a hurtful relationship and wanted to find meaning in my life. For a while games became the crutch then when I healed myself, I wanted more and more from gaming and eventually that curiosity made me take the plunge. I essentially see my whole solo game development journey as "real-life ironman mode", I'm enjoying each step of the way, discovering new things and implementing things I've always wanted to do. It's become a way of life for me now.
Is it your full-time job? If not, is it a dream to make it so?
Nah, I got other part-time jobs. It is my dream to be able to make games for a living but considering my games are super niche, it might always be a dream. That's alright though, gives me enough reasons to keep pushing forward.
Do you do everything yourself - programming, sound, writing, etc?
I suppose if you want to get really technical, I designed the entire game myself but I didn't develop the entire game myself. That is to say I didn't make everything from scratch, I assembled various pieces that on their own are just tools, pieces of the puzzle. They have no real inherent meaning until they are put into the context of a game. I used to fiddle around with LEGO a lot, so in my mind it is like assembling a giant LEGO set. The music, those are all non-exclusive pieces, though I scour the asset store for suitable tracks which is surprisingly very hard to find. The writing, that's all mine, it's not particularly great but it gets the job done. I have various tools that assist me in programming and I invested quite heavily into those tools to get tailored solutions for Dead Monarchy. The only custom assets are the vast majority of the armour/weapon models and the animations, which I got help from by various contracted freelancers. It is still and I really mean this, an ungodly amount of work, especially when dealing with 3D which can quickly become a blackhole.
Let's take for example the armours, when the models come in, I break them down into smaller pieces so I can get more customisation from them. I then rig the armour, decimate the polygons, create the alternative textures needed, like blood, scratches etc. Then I need to do the icons, do another pass for clipping and then set up the item in-game. I'm not a great animator either, so I got a freelancer animator to do my animations however for each attack he needed to animate, he wanted me to do a video of each attack taken from multiple angles. He would then use that video as the basis for the animation. So I spent about 100 hours of my life with a mop, hammer and umbrella bashing and slashing away like a maniac. After those animations are done, I then need to sync them with the various death and hit animations, etc, etc, etc. So when you take a step back and look at the entire picture, the assets make up about 90% of the overall game development process.
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