About Me

My name is Stavros Dimou and I am an independent video game developer living in Athens, Greece. I'm currently working on a single player RPG game, made with the Unity Engine. Some of my favorite games that I'm influenced by are: Dungeons and Dragons (pen and paper), The Elder Scrolls, The Legend of Zelda, Mass Effect, Paper Mario.

Here are some of my Game Development Values:

Quality over Quantity

That means I'll choose to make less quests, but have each of them being unique and special, instead of having several cookie-cutter, copy-pasted quests. I'll make less dungeons if that means that each dungeon will be more special, with its own feel, character, architecture, puzzles, and story.

Gameplay over Graphics

Everyone likes graphics. But graphics take time (as anything else also does), and better graphics take even more time. The thing is that making graphics looking better requires exponential work for each step of improvement that is actually noticeable. Let's say you design the graphics of your game to have a quality level comparable to that of the Xbox360 and PS3 consoles. To move on to the next step and upgrade the graphics to the Xbox One and PS4 level, it would require more than double the time spent already on graphics. Instead all this additional time could be spent on polishing the existing game mechanics to be more fun, or even implementing a number of new gameplay mechanics to add more depth and support more playstyles. So from a point and on, investing more time in graphics instead of gameplay just doesn't worth it.

Depth over Gimmicks

What is a gimmick ? A gimmick is a feature that excites some people much but has no real value, so quite soon the excitement goes away and you are left with something useless. It's something flashy without much thought put into it. Depth instead is what helps in suspending disbelief, which in turn helps in getting immersed in the game's world, and thus enjoy the game more. Depth is putting thought in everything you make, so it has a reason to exist, fits with the world properly, and expands the feeling that the game's world is an actual real world that the player is in.

Buy once, buy a Full Game

I'm following the old-school and classic approach on this. I'll release a complete game for a given price, without day one DLCs, Loot Boxes, Micro-Transactions, or a Season Pass. After the game is released, I might consider making a handful of expansion packs, with enough content to add real value to the game.

You can find me on:

Twitter: @DimouSoftware