Ian and I go back to our college days at Niagara College, graduating together just prior to the global march of the pandemic and covid-19. During our time in school, we didn’t have much opportunity to work together on games, instead working on group projects and discussing code, design decisions, and art.
The perfect partner to complement my skills as a coder, Ian excels at 3D animation, 3D modeling and texture. Being a coder, I can make white box assets and while I can make full assets I tend to take much longer and come up with half the results. I don’t have an eye for art, I have an eye for logic and code.
On our first title “Digital Dan,” which never saw the light of day, he was the artist making every asset from including a police station, houses, cars, computer chairs, weapons, miscellaneous assets and more. Sadly, our lives went different directions and we moved on with other priorities. In the years that followed no work was done on any games. Titles were shelved, ideas floundered. Nothing went anywhere.
Some time in the summer of 2022 we reconvened and picked a title, a prototype I had poked at for a little bit. We were behind in the production schedule so we made an audacious decision to push out a game in two weeks. Now I’ve done game jams, albeit only one successfully, so I thought it was entirely possible, but what we produced took us between 3-5 weeks of work, and while it did work and was positively received it was a very small game with glaring decision choices.
Fast forward to Monster Factory updated version and the assets and ideas that keep coming out of Ian’s mind are astounding. His progression, speed, and design has become an exciting topic every time I wake up to images on my phone. Ian has taken over the map design aspect of the World. First producing the recreated “city” map. Starting with a single road intersection he added on streets, and curbs, signs, and lights. Populating the streets with parking meters, trash cans, potted plants, and anything else to make the World feel alive. Very limited asset flips, one or two colours for a small hand full of buildings, and also making multiple fresh assets of similar design. Culminating in a downtown cityscape with high rises, balconies, rooftops and scaffolding to climb across. Streets that you can get lost in, with a sprawling network of shops and houses mixed into the country side.
Ian’s progress has been a treat to watch. All of Digital Dan’s assets were “high poly” and hyper realistic. A tall order for a first game. In contrast, Monster Factory was primarily low poly and little to no serious textures outside of the cartoony block colours, but for a cartoony game it works splendidly. With that being said this blog is about Ian, and with that I’ll hand it over to Ian himself:
Gallery of Ian's works
“Hello everyone! I guess its time for me to ramble on a little bit about myself and what I do here at Slothful Media. Some of you may know me by my artist handle InciteGames, behind the scenes and all the wizardry my name is Ian Decloedt.
I’m a digital artist from Paris, Ontario. Initially I wanted to do special effects for movies! As a few were shot along this way, “Silent hill” to name one, was shot in Brantford Ontario, just outside my home town! I got hard to work writing a screen play in my early teen years and by the time I was 16 I was ready to shoot my first super hero movie… with no actors to fill my rolls the project was scrapped pretty quickly.
I was introduced to a little program called blender by my art teacher back in grade 10. THIS changed everything for me I could make anything I ever wanted! My first ever 3D creation was an old 67 challenger done back in 2013. From there I fell in love with game development and haven’t looked back since!
I met Mitchell on my first day of college. Eager to start learning we all shared our strengths and weaknesses. Where Mitchell took over programming, I filled in the art. We separated in our 3rd year to make totally different games.
For our Capstone project, Mitch and his team created a beautiful adventure game called "When I was Alone" and I took part in creating a VR bullet hell game called “Firebreaker” My task was everything art. I started with the hand models the player would be starring at the whole time. These needed to be perfect. As they were the main feeling of immersion. Weapons were next and my personal favourite was the spitfire. Its super fast fire rate cut through the enemy drones like butter!”
Gallery of Firebreaker Assets
After release our school was entered in a few competitions where my team, Moonlight 7 Studios, placed 3rd place out of 95 teams for overall game play! It was one of the best days of my life I have to admit.
Mitchell and I came together after graduation to make a little fps game called digital dan. By then the world was undergoing a pandemic and my mental health was crumbling. Digital dan was scraped and we split apart. I spent many a day working on myself, but I never stopped art. In fact, I kind of dove further into it.
I started digital painting! I had a baby, and life started making sense. I felt like I had robbed Mitch of so much potential. So, I reached out, and we had our doubts. But Monster factory was born! Being a new dad was rather challenging but it’s been the best possible thing for me. I would like to show my baby all my hard work someday and maybe gets to teach her a little something and maybe she’ll will join the team! How cool would that be!
I can’t wait to continue moving forward and growing with my new family, and company."
Post Script
If you have any issues, questions, or comments about this post please let me know, you can reach me at mitchell@slothfulmedia.com and I'd be happy to engage in a conversation with you about any of the above. Your time is appreciated!
I've also made Monster Factory available for download right here from the website!
You can find the game here
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