For our first blog post, we wanted to go technical and show you our technical stack and why we choose each tool or framework. It will give you some clues about our first game without revealing too much. It can also give you an idea of our working philosophy.

1. Company

For VilainsVauriens, we don’t need a lot of different tools. As we don’t produce anything yet, we just need a website and something to chat quickly.

Discord

We choose to use our public discord to chat and give each other updates. As we are pretty independant and introvert, we don’t need to do meetings everyday, just quick informations and gif sharing are perfect. It’s also helping us to have the reflex to be available on discord a lot and use it as a communication tool when we will invite our players.

WordPress

This one made us think a bit. We wanted to go plain and simple HTML/CSS or using something like jekyll or hugo but in the end, we came back to classic wordpress for different reasons. First of all, Xavier, who made the web design, is really familiar with the tools, so it’s a huge time saver. Second, we wanted to have comments on the site without being dependant of something like medium for blogging. And third, it’s just our website, which is something we litterally spend two days making entirely (this post included) so we didn’t want to loose time to make something perfect, just something that works great and don’t ask for a lot of energy to be usable.

Gandi.net

All of our web content is hosted on gandi.net. It’s french, it’s no bullshit and the service is pretty great. I really recommand you to use this provider for your content, especially if you are based in europe.

pCloud

All of documents and files are stored in pCloud. pCloud is an european cloud service that encrypt our files and propose great pricing service (like one time paiment). We started with google drive to be plain and simple but switched to a more « indie like » solution.

2. Game#1

Game#1 is the codename of our first game. As we didn’t announced it yet, I will stay pretty vague about details but it will give you an small sneak peek of what to expect.

Gitlab

We hesitate a bit between using SVN or Git but now with software like Fork or Sublime Merge, Git became easy to use for non-programmers so we went with that. I use a plan and simple branching style (master, develop, branches for platforms and tags for releases). Gitlab is also pretty cool, have a good and easy to setup CI and some tools for bug reporting and project management.

Unity

Here comes trouble. We are using Unity as game engine. BUT, and this is a huge but (no pun), we are making our own framework inside Unity. We want to use what’s great with Unity: the toolchain and forget about all the garbage eating stuff. So you will soon see on this blog a serie about our VVFramework.

The VVFramework will be 2D oriented, compatible to make games of PC / Mac / Linux / Console (even if console stuff can’t be open sourced for legal reasons) and mobile. It will use the new DOTS stack and will try to be as data driven as possible.

For programmers still reading, we are using Rider Editor to code the game (instead of the classic Visual Studio). Rider is pretty amazing for Unity offer a lot of time saving options.

And that’s it for now. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below. New details are coming pretty soon.