Disclaimer: The next text could may or may not have grammatical errors; I'm sorry.

Sovereigns was the first big project where I worked on. With total honesty, it was the first game in which I worked consciously as a game designer. Before it, I had some projects mostly Castlevania fan-games (one developed in Flash Builder, coding in ActionScript 3) and another in Unity 5.4; I also made a turn-base RPG in FlashDevelop and some other jank stuff which are now forgotten.
It all started early March, 2017, when I started the final year of Escuela Multimedial Da Vinci (degree in videogame development). The Final Seminar was to be done in a year (two subjects in the first semester - sorry if subject is not the term for what I'm trying to say, I go "confused unga boonga" when googling stuff - and a final subject with double the hours in the second semester).
The first semester was comprised of two subjects: programming and game design (there was no dedicated subject for art), and game design should have been first to discuss about ideas for games and/or features; this didn't happen. We had programming first and we were obligated to assemble a team. Martin and I were and still are really good friends, with similar interests, so we teamed up and chose two kwnown classmates rather than choosing people with similar interests as ours.
We chose Fabian, as Lead Programmer and Pablo, artist, making us the team of 4 (the other team was made with 3 people, because we were 7 in the class).
The teacher told us:
- Take note that, if you choose to be the team of 4 people, the exigency for your team will be higher than the other one -

Well... we accepted.
It was a clusterfuck, I start to have no filter, I know.

A few days later (I don't really recall if it was one or two days after) we had our first Game Design (for Seminar) Class.
Those classes were imparted by the great Balthazar Auger (ex-Ubisoft, ex-NGE). He asked us all what we would like to do in a game (not even a particular game, just concepts or ideas). ¿What did I say? I remember three things: emergent narrative (in the sense that anything the player would be allowed to do could change the entire story of a game), customization of skills and classes (like CoD loadouts) and the theme of heaven against hell.
So we came up with three ideas:

• Action RPG with world hubs, fighting, inventory, kinda like Darksiders 2 maybe, but we didn't even considered this idea because of the time we had to make the actual game.
• The second one I don't remember.
• Moba 2v2 with jungling, looting, carry, support, and souls-like controls.

(Quick note here, I'm actually making the Moba 2v2 idea in Unreal Engine 4, so I'll show some progress in a few months)

The team was assembled this way:
Fabián as the Lead Programmer.
Pablo as the Artist.
Martín as Level Designer and Producer.
Lastly, me as Lead Game Designer and Programmer.

Little teaser of part 2: we considered a procedural dungeon crawler with different classes and traversing skills like hooks, blinks and that kind of stuff when things went wrong. It also had at least four different themes attached to it, and then we went back to the drawing board.

Here you can see the first prototype for Sovereigns. Really ugly.

See you in the next part, thank you for reading.

Spanish Version on my blog: https://ivanpiccione.blogspot.com/2021/04/9-meses-de-pasion-y-dolor-pt-1-origene...