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Postmortem: Rayhouse Productions' Kalaban
My recollection of the project, which took us over two years to make, and was also our first Steam game.
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First off, an introduction. For anyone that doesn't know: I'm the programmer, designer and artist on this project. The game was a labor love from a core team of four guys, and it was released on December 29, 2016.
Disclaimer: These are my personal recollections of the process, not the collective experience of the team. First, I'm going to go through a little bit of the earlier history, and then move into the actual development process of the game. I love all the guys who worked on Kalaban, and without these fellow developers, none of this would've happened.
And what's most remarkable: some of the people working on the game still haven't seen each other face-to-face. The project was created with the magic of Internet, utilizing Skype and a number of digital storage services such as Google Drive and Dropbox.
Rayhouse Productions was founded in November 2013. We were a bunch of indie filmmakers, who had previously worked together on numerous short film projects. In the beginning, we had this idea of doing commercials, content design and graphic design as client work. We were open for new ventures, with the possibilities of this newly formed company.
This was me, in April 2014, thinking that I'm going to change the world with my upcoming indie game. My first indie game in seven years. As a teenager we had done 3D game projects, but none of them ever got finished. And we made several smaller 2D games before that. I have been doing indie games since I was 10. It's always been my passion, ever since I saw the first computer games as a kid.
Not going into too much detail with my personal history, but I was not in a good place mentally during the spring of 2014. I had grown totally frustrated with the world of freelance work, and I was ready to shift gears from moving pictures into the interactive medium of games. It seemed like a real golden land of opportunities at that time.
I had moved to Tampere at the end of 2013, after graduating from my previous school at Pori. I had done a Bachelor's degree on audiovisual studies, and I was basically unemployed at the time, even though we had formed Rayhouse. I was still dreaming about my film projects, and I even out a draft of my feature-length script Warplay into the Finnish Film Foundation. The FFF is the biggest funder of scripts in Finland, unfortunately I got a negative response to my application.
But they good folk at Film Foundation pointed me to a screenwriting program here in Tampere, to which I applied, and got in. It was a Master's Degree in international screenwriting, and just what I was looking for. At the same time, my whole mental picture and mindset was changing. I had previously been an old-school 2D graphics guy, and had just started learning Autodesk 3ds Max. Getting into 3D graphics proved to be a great decision for me. Without that acquired knowledge, the pre-rendered characters and backgrounds in Kalaban would not have been possible, nor any of the stuff done since.