About Daydream

Sep 22, 2017

This is where the Dream starts. 

While talking about Daydream, we must look back and talk about how Joyseed was found on the first place. My name is Joseph Putra, and I am Warchief from Joyseed Gametribe, or in short, I am a senior artist, and I proudly present you the “Journey of Daydream”… While I still doing freelance and artist work from another studio, Boydozan, our Chieftain has already build Daydream in his mind. Daydream was an arcade matching colour game, a simple game, and also a bit rhythmic. It was shown on a simple prototype, without Mondo, without story, without assets. The vision was to keep it simple, but with all-out quality of art and design. The design was flawless, you can even compare it to “Monument Valley” or “Alto” if I’d to say. I wasn’t on the team project when Daydream first developed, but I can also be proud about the art, I am an art person and I can really value the art behind the first Daydream. The art is actually proving itself, we won an Ingame award for best art and also we’ve chosen to be one of the Indonesian representative on Casual Connect Singapore.

Showcase

We took on our first journey to Singapore, it was our first time showing what we’ve made into international scheme. We were blown away by all the indie games quality on that day, and it is such a thrill knowing what other developers had in mind. There was also an awarding night for each category, there was also a party after each event day for us to networking and know each other. We also feel quite fortunate to know our neighbor, one is from Vietnam making some online midcore game with great art, and one is from France making a brilliant puzzle games and they won some awards, we are quite proud of them! Yes we didn’t win any awards, what we get are Networking and others are feedback, this is the start of maybe we could call it a mistake. The utmost feedback for Daydream is the gameplay, it is too simple yet the graphic sets a different bar for it.

The First Revision

We’ve back from Casual connect Singapore, had a meeting, a serious one, the topic was “what do we want to do with Daydream”, we were tackling and thinking, it took us a long week after we’ve come to conclusion to fix Daydream from the feedback. Wasting no time, we built several prototype, we still try to keep it simple, but we got a problem that we have no programer at that time, so the prototyping required us to pay some freelance programer to do the build. It took us about a month before we finalize what we want to do with the gameplay. It turns from the matching color in rhythm to endless skill-absorbing action game, we know that the changes are somewhat bold, also other challenge such as to keep the assets while working on the different gameplay, but we can’t turn back right now. We’ve miraculously managed to finish the first demo right before Gameprime 2016, we submitted the demo and started to showcasing our so-called second version of “Daydream”.

A Priceless Experience

What we believed wasn’t proofing, we’ve gathered some feedback from the Gameprime, and it was nowhere near our expectation to the game. We’ve come to realize that designing game especially action games is not something that we can learn in blink of an eye, we might play a lot of action games, but to make those feelings of action pack, hack and slash are not easy at all, and actually it was very very difficult. We waste way too much money and time for the single game, this article is maybe only 4 paragraphs, but the time and money that we’ve waste is a mountful of 2 years in total. So we took a step back, breath and said to ourselves that we’re not done. We took yet another turn, Joyseed now split into two teams, although there were only two of us, but we took the bold move. Boy will be in-charge for the money making for the company, searching for the commercial game project, and I will continue Daydream with those revision that we’ve got from Gameprime and working with a freelance programmer, while Boy will hire a new programmer to make more commercial games.

As time goes by, on January 2017, we’ve gather some temporary team to work on both project. One name Hollywhoot and one is obviously Daydream, and project them to be released on the same year, which is 2017. A plan is yet just another plan, in 3 months of development, Hollywhoot is on “assets making” stage already, but Daydream is still on game designing and proofing. It is not like that my team is lacking or just laying around, my team is working part time while Hollywhoot’s team is working full time, but it wasn’t someone’s fault, it is just our agreement that we want to focus on surviving first, so we focus more on Hollywhoot. From time to time, Hollywhoot required more assets to be made, and the can’t make it with just only 2 persons working, as a result I have to help Hollywhoot team and making those assets. It made the Daydream team basically nonfunctional since then. From that time, we decide to learn from our mistake, we need to survive, and in order to do that, we have to make some tough decisions, and that decision was to hold Daydream. After what we’ve gone through from Daydream’s experience, we are thankful to have Daydream as our first game, it is not finish, it is not perfect, but that shown what we are, it shown us that we still need to learn many things and Daydream is our payment for this course we took, to make Joyseed stronger and better. Note that we might revive Daydream in the future