Hey everyone! 👋 We are super excited about the Kickstarter campaign, and we want to thank every single one of you who decided and will decide to support Zoria: Age of Shattering!
Many of you may not know the story behind the Tiny Trinket Games. We think that for the first Dev Diary, it will be perfect to introduce ourselves and give you a little backstory on our first steps in the gaming industry.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet our team!
Stefan Nicolescu (Fane)
I have worked in the gaming industry since 2004, in several roles, from QA tester to QA Manager, to PM, Level Designer, and Game Designer. I have been working on mobile games in my spare time, but my mind was always set on a full-fledged PC RPG game. As time passed, my dream came true, and now I am in charge of all creative aspects for Zoria AoS - from mechanics to level design and environment design, UI, SFX, and animations. I love games, but most of all, I love making them. Nowadays, I enjoy the day-to-day process, as I am doing the thing that defines me.
Stefan Nitescu (Neles)
Passionate about games since childhood, especially RPGs and story-driven games, my background is not what you would call a classic game developer background, with studies in architecture and business.
Working on a game like Zoria was something I always wanted to do - to participate in the creation of a big, detailed, magical world that you can lose yourself into.
Apart from the day-to-day administrative activities of Tiny Trinket Games, I'm in charge of the implementation of quests, actions, interactions, triggers, in short, Quests, Events, and Dialogues (QED). Together with Fane, I have written the lore of the world of Zoria and created the story's overall narrative structure, a part of the quests you will be playing throughout the game.
I hope you will have as much fun playing Zoria: Age of Shattering as we had creating/working on it.
Gabriel Ivanica (Gabi)
I've always been fond of video games and computers, but the road from playing them to making them was long. While studying, I discovered my passion for graphics programming and game engines since they are the perfect combination between complex technical sciences and the visual output of my work. I’m a software engineer with a master’s degree in Advanced Techniques for Computer Graphics. I worked on various University Research Projects to expand my knowledge of real-time graphics computing and general application software architecture. I also love sharing the things I learn, so I started teaching computer graphics and game programming at university or in the game industry in collaboration with Ubisoft Bucharest Studio.
Working on Zoria has been the part that I enjoyed the most in the last five years. My dream is not only to launch this game but to continue to work on feature versions and expand the realm of possibilities of what gamers can do in Zoria through new features, mechanics, and visual feedback. What motivates me is the opportunity to work on a personal project that I love and grow it into something that others may experience and find enjoyable.
Tiny Trinket Games took its current form in 2017, and our purpose was to develop games for PC. The first game under the name Tiny Trinket Games, Azuran Tales: Trials, was launched for PC in 2018, about the same time we started working on the concept that would later become Zoria: Age of Shattering. In 2019 we managed to port Azuran Tales to the Nintendo Switch and have been working on Zoria since. We launched the Prologue in 2020 and the updated Demo in 2021, iterating and improving the systems and the game's overall quality.
One downside of working on a large game as a small indie team is the time involved in taking the game to where we wanted it, especially since we had to support ourselves in the meantime and could often only work on it in our spare time.
Origin story and how we started project Zoria.
We (Fane and Neles) have been friends for years, and we've spent lots of hours playing together at Lan parties back in the day.
Years ago, we’ve been talking about making games and were both very excited about the idea. One thing led to another, and we decided to try to make it work. After many prototypes and a long search for a third partner to complete our team, we met Gabi at a gathering at TechHub Bucharest.
We set up a meeting, we met, Fane (Stefan Nicolescu) showcased what he did in Unity, and Gabi liked what he saw. From there, it is history, and we are here, now, all three of us, after many, many, many sleepless nights, iterations, meetings, calls, and lots of coffee and green tea (for Gabi).
The idea for Zoria evolved, and Fane’s and Gabi's skills progressed. Originally the game was supposed to be a Mobile game, but Fane wanted something a bit more and later discovered that the rest of the guys also did. One thing led to another, and from 2D mobile, we moved to 2D + 3D characters and Heroes 3 style combat to the free-roaming combat we now have in Zoria.
We started in March or April 2017 when we presented Gabi with the mobile game design document. Many years and a lot of free time spent on nothing else but this. For Stefan Nicolescu, it was a learning curve in terms of level and environment design; with each iteration each year, the levels would improve. It took him around three years and thousands of hours to reach consistent levels. The same goes for Gabi to understand more the mechanics Fane needed and for Neles (Stefan Nitescu) as well for understanding and requesting features in the Quest Editor. Gabi and Neles did an excellent job with the Quest Editor, something that was built from scratch to fit our needs. It is still being upgraded as we discover we need it for a thing not tough possible.
WHAT WAS THE BIGGEST CHALLANGE FOR US?
Keeping the team together for so long without seeing a financial gain, fueled only by grit and hope. Then came things like: as the design expanded - keeping track of all the mechanics, skills, triggers, and progress for creating a quest or a new enemy. There is a lot of information overload at some point. Another challenge for us is trying to keep things small; we are kinda failing at this as the Demos we released so far are like small games in terms of gameplay hours.
The game changed a lot- an unrecognizable - from 2D mobile game to a 3D party-based, free-roaming, open-world CRPG.
WHAT IS THE BEST FOR YOU ABOUT ZORIA, WHAT ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF?
Subjectively here: it's made by three guys in a "living room," as we don't have basements. We're also proud that we landed a good balance between too easy (Heroes 3) and too complex (Divinity: Original Sin combinations), so you can easily get into the game.
That sums up our story; there is nothing more to say. We’re a group of friends with the privilege to do what they love!
Cheers,
Tiny Trinket Games Team
