In this section of the site, you can find out how we produce our games, what packages we use to create effects and what PCs are used to put the whole thing together.
The production times of our games vary wildly depending on the game in question, but generally a game will take several months to complete. So, how does a game get from an idea in someone's head to PCs all around the world?
The Design stage
Once we have a game idea, we set to work designing the game. This is usually done by sketching the general components of the game down on some tatty old piece of paper. It doesn't matter how scruffy this sketch is - nobody will see it except the Dymension Games team.
We use these sketches as the basis of the final product. We also write a few pages outlining what should be included in the levels and other important things.
The Game Production Process
We use Klik 'n' Play by Europress Software to design our games, as it's easy to use and quick to produce pleasing results. Most of the photo-quality backdrops that you see in the game will have been taken by a normal camera and transferred onto a Kodak PhotoCD before importing them into Klik 'n' Play. The sounds will have been recorded using Creative Labs' WaveStudio on an ordinary SoundBlaster 16. Some of our newer games also have sound effects and music that have been run through GoldWave to produce smaller file sizes.
Creating the game levels, especially for the Enemy Assault series of games, takes a painfully long time, as long as six months just for the demo for Enemy Assault 2. They only take this long because we have a lot of A-Level work to complete, and we sometimes work on a few projects at a time.
We use ordinary PCs to produce our games - a 16MB P166+ (which does a sizeable chunk of the work), an 8MB 486 DX2/66MHz and a 32MB 486 DX4/100MHz. The games are tested on the same machines. Once the bugs have been ironed out to the best of our ability, we create compressed executable disk image files using WinZip and upload these to the web server, along with the HTML code describing the game along with a few screenshots and update the main page to say that there is a new game available to be downloaded. And that's all there is to it!