Hey, Steam community! 🌵✨
If you played the first ÁRIDA, you know that our passion has always been telling memorable stories and creating a unique atmosphere inspired by the Brazilian backlands. But behind the scenes of that 2019 launch, the truth is we were working in a very handcrafted, manual way.
For the development of ÁRIDA 2, we realized that to truly give wings to our creative team, we needed to evolve both our processes and our technology. The answer? Building our own in-house development tools.
Today, we are showcasing three custom tools that transformed our bottlenecks into absolute autonomy!
In the first game, tweaking balance parameters and items meant manipulating code files directly (like JSON or XML), running a constant risk of a single misplaced comma breaking the entire system. For ÁRIDA 2, we created the Balancing Tool to bring safety and speed to the team.
"I created the Balancing Tool with the goal of easing the balancing process for ÁRIDA 2, turning a tedious manual process into something visual and intuitive. Seeing the impact on our team's productivity through tools like this is incredibly rewarding." — Gabriel Salazar, Programmer
Narrative has always been our strongest suit, but creating dialogues and setting up cameras used to require an absurd amount of effort and constant consultation with the programmers. With our new Dialogue Editor, the design team gained superpowers to coordinate all the cinematography directly inside the engine.
"Developing a tool that allowed our design team to have more freedom and agility in dialogue production was a massive game-changer." — Andy, Lead Programmer
"The design team was thrilled! With this tool, we have so many more possibilities when creating dialogues and directing scenes (angles, characters, animations, and camera movements). All of this brings fresh ways to tell our story!" — Filipe Pereira, Lead Game Designer
ÁRIDA 2 is a much more robust game, featuring interconnected systems and an expected playtime that surpasses the first title. Testing all of this manually would be impossible. That's where our Q.A. (Quality Assurance) automation comes into play:
"I've been using the Unity Test Framework for isolated rule validation and gameplay tests. Integrated with QA, we can monitor coverage and interpret bugs accurately to ensure the ecosystem reflects the game's actual intended behavior." — Gabriel Salazar, Programmer
"In a game with so many interactions, automated testing tools bring a lot of practicality, allowing us to validate multiple scenarios much faster. This creates a more collaborative workflow with programming and gives us the confidence to keep evolving the systems." — Mari São Paulo, Q.A. Lead
Recently, our leaders Filipe and Víctor took part in the BGA Dev Talks panel by Brasil Games Accelerator—an incredible national acceleration program we are proudly participating in! In the video, they look back at the technical and maturity gulf between both projects.
It is highly worth checking out the full chat to understand how these tools were born from our biggest pain points. Check out some highlight moments:
[11:58] The Chaos of ÁRIDA 1's Launch: They share what it was like to launch the first game without even having powerful enough PCs at home to run it perfectly, forcing us to learn everything about optimization the hard way.
[16:47] The Old Dialogue Bottleneck: Filipe details how painful it was to alter a single line of text or adjust a camera angle in the first game.
[39:34] Decentralization and Trust: Víctor explains that creating in-house tools isn't just about speeding up development, but about giving market intelligence to the company and autonomy for every professional to shine at what they do best.
Watch the full panel on YouTube:
To wrap things up on a high note, we have some awesome news to share with you! For the very first time, Aoca will be participating in Retrocon, which takes place from July 24th to July 27th.
If you are from São Paulo or happen to be in the region during the event, make sure to drop by our booth! Anyone who swings by will get the exclusive chance to play the brand-new version of our demo, which is packed with new features and updates!
See you in the next devlog or over at Retrocon! Feel free to leave any questions about our tools right here in the comments. 🌵🎮