The time has finally come! Yesterday evening we published our very first beta for Lava Golf.

You can read more about the game itself in the Itch.io Lava Golf Page, and you can also reach our Beta onboarding page where you can read patch notes and see how to give us feedback.

What I would like to talk about here is actually how this is the first complete game project ever that sees an official release (albeit in Beta stage) for me. Yes, I published a small game some time ago here on Itch.io, but that game was done in a couple of weeks and as a way to reacquaint myself with Unity 3D after a very long time without actually using it. Lava Golf is indeed my first "big" and real game published, so it definitely feels like a special moment.

I started programming when I was just a 12 year old kid and since the very beginning what would a kid want to do? Making games of course! Since then I created several games, using Visual Basic 4.0, The Games Factory, Warcraft 3 Editor, C++ with Directx 9... I've also made maps with World Edit, Unreal Editor (before the engine was even released!) , Build, DEU, Star Trek Voyager Elite Force Editor, DooM 3 Edit... you might say I've always had game/map making in mind since forever. And you'd be correct! Alas, all these little games or maps were never released to the public, and at best were shared with some friends. Today, well actually yesterday evening, this changes. 

Lava Golf is not only the first game to be really complete with a lot of hand crafted content, it also marks the first publicly released game for Hexagonal Experiences Inc. our very small indie team (we're two people!) which was born alongside Lava Golf itself. 

The work on the game started last year, around July 2020. We decided to try and make a game together and to pool our skills better, we decided it would've been a 3D game. It was not my first rodeo (I did manage a "indie" game dev team back in 2009, although the game was never finished nor released), but it was the first time I did so with the experience I got in over 20 years of making small games and maps (plus some experience I gained in my day job, even if it's not game dev related). After some weeks of brain storming to select an idea and to build it up, we created a prototype for the game. The prototype name was very imaginative: ProtoLava! 

Of course, before starting the real development of the game, we wanted to see if our idea "worked" and if it was any fun. So we started developing a prototype:

We felt the game idea worked and so the real development for LAVA GOLF finally started on August 10th 2020.

It was a long road getting from there to here! And since we elected to create everything from scratch (the only exception being music tracks and fonts, which we got from the internet with free licenses to be used even in commercial projects), we had a lot of work to do! 3D models, textures, UI sprites, shaders, sound effects, and of course the game code itself! With over 6298 lines of codes, Lava Golf becomes my second programming project in size (the first one is a pretty big software I used for my day job!), so that's definitely an achievement on itself for me.

The whole development was also a very good learning experience; not only in how Unity 3D works (and how to better tackle some things), but also how to handle a team and how to approach game making as an indie team that DOES release its games to the public.

There are of course a lot of lessons yet to learned, but I'm positive that after Lava Golf beta is done and the game sees an official live release, we can start thinking about "what's next" for Hexagonal Experiences Inc. and hopefully we'll have more to talk about soon.