Developer's Blog #1 - The Beginning

Pug & Dragon. The old saying “it doesn’t happen overnight” sure is accurate in this case. Well, kind of, the end result certainly did not happen overnight, but the start of things kind of went that way. Here’s a visual example to note our journey so far:

Now that that’s clear . . .

I’m Ben, co-founder of Pug & Dragon LLC. Along with Bryan, P & D is about to release our first game, titled The Garden, on Steam. In this blog, I’ll try to be funny and talk about The Garden and our experiences in some detail. To start, here’s a little bit about us . . .

Before we became top-notch game designers and professional artists (he-he . . . yeah, we get it, the graphics are not quite on par with the major releases yet, but we’re close), we were, and still are, successful classical musicians. I was a full-time professor at a university and Bryan was a full-time gigger (gigsta?), which meant that he had about 27 different gigs & hundreds of performances each year. He was (and still is) a road-warrior.

It was May, 2013 and I had dropped my wife off at the airport. After surfing the web and texting aimlessly while driving home (JK), I decided to give Bryan a call. He brought up the fact that he was a bit tired of bouncing around from gig to gig and said that he thought about starting to design a video game. Immediately, I said “I’m in.”

I don’t quite know what came over me that moist evening in Tennessee . . . perhaps it was the heat, maybe it was too much sweet tea . . . but there was no turning back! It was kind of like saying to someone “sure, I’ll help you move” – and then they take you up on it. That’s ironic in this case as Bryan has always been my go-to mover assistant . . . uh, foreman.

Anyway, that was the beginning of this journey. The next several days included us asking questions like:

“So, what do we do?” “Where do we start?” “What kind of game should we make?” “Should we have another beer?”

We would say things like:

“I don’t know how to program, but it can’t be that hard, can it? - Hello? Anyone there?” “How can we take parts of Fable, Skyrim, & DragonAge and combine them into one?” “Can you draw? No, can you? I made a turkey after tracing my hand years back . . .” “How much do indie game developers make? Thousands? Millions? . . . Tens.” “We made some progress tonight, let’s go play some co-op and continue this later.”

“So, where do we start again?” It didn’t take long for us to find our way. Within days, we were writing clean code, creating characters with depth, and designing intricate levels! Well . . . that’s how we wanted things to go! In reality, we were like rats in a maze, except that the maze had no beginning, middle, or end . . . and there was no cheese!

We didn’t know what the hell we were doing.

In the next blog, I’ll tell you how we chased our own tails for months . . . at least, that’s how it seems now looking back. “If I knew now what I didn’t know then!” Anyway, that is all for now, thanks for reading – hope you come back for more!

By the way, I made up the sweet tea comment – I can’t stand sweet tea!

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