How often have you had the experience that, while playing another game, you caught yourself thinking: “How cool it is to develop games.”? Have you thought that the “Developers are down” and it would be possible to make this or that aspect of the games much better/more interesting? So we thought so and decided to organize a startup.
In this series of blogs, I, Radeus Useus, will tell you about how we try in gay (m)dev, what worked for us and what didn’t. A long post is expected, so make some tea, make yourself comfortable, and I think I’ll get started.
Our startup was born in February 2021, when coronavirus was the only problem in people’s minds. The idea was simple and elegant. Gather students to make games after college. Experience and knowledge did not play a big role. The ideology was that if there is a desire, then the skills will appear.
How we started
How we ended
There was no specific idea of what to do, so we decided to do something simple and quick in order to understand how the engine works, and just to practice. The choice fell on Shoot ’em up. The ship flies upward, dodging asteroids, and sometimes fights against bosses. It was decided to christen the future creation (which was never published because it was cringe) SpaceRace. This miracle took us +- a month. Given that 4 people worked on the game, we took assets from free options, and the depth of gameplay was like a saucer, then a month is an prohibitively long time.
The first damn thing is lumpy, we decided. And so as not to lose face again, we approached the second project more thoroughly. This time, before development, we conducted as many as THREE brainstorms in order to clearly understand what exactly we want to do. The new idea was more elegant. A dark dungeon, into which, due to a dark ritual (where would we go without it), slime ends up. The special thing about this slime is that it glows in the dark. Looking ahead, I’ll say right away that Slime Journey (that’s what we called the game) has become both the most crutch game, and at the same time the most interesting in terms of mechanics.
Since the mechanics were slime and darkness, we decided to squeeze everything we could out of it. Slime should have been slime (t.e. full-fledged jelly, and not a sprite or something with a hard core), should have glowed, left behind mucus and exploded in a funny way in case of death. Oddly enough, we even thought of distributing areas of responsibility among ourselves. Someone was responsible for the slime itself, someone for the environment, etc.d.
And here our ideology cracked. We split up, but this led to everyone pulling the blanket in their own direction. Someone covered up technical aspects in such a way that they did not fit in with the code of other developers, someone tried to drag the gameplay from the platformer into solving puzzles, and one of the developers even became a designer, dropping his part. As a result, by the middle of the work one of us fell off, then another, and while I was finishing the project (fortunately just a little) I was already solo. Overall development took a little over 6 months.
Then there was an extremely difficult time https://slottio.uk/games/ when we were in a fever. We found new people and broke up with them. New projects died at the stage of initial tests (so-called POCs). The second wind opened sometime in March of next year. The session ended, everyone was able to relax, think about what and how. Of the 4 developers, there are only two of us left.
Realizing that there were only two of us, we decided to do something quick and without any special twists. As a result, we made an illegitimate son of our slime and Space race, namely Space Delivery. We tightened up the combat system, added new asteroids and pirates, and the gameplay was based on the fact that the ship used lanterns to illuminate its path in dark space. We even implemented a system for crafting modules and different ships (some are more maneuverable, some shoot better, etc.).d.). The main problem of this game was not technical issues, but gameplay ones. Do you need crafting?? If yes, what resources are needed for this?? Where can I get them?? What progression should the game have?? And further down the list.
Questions remain open, t.To. one of the conditions was to do it quickly. And we coped with this task.
Space delivery took us 2.5 months. Right before the session we released the game and went our separate ways again for a long time. We gathered back around August.
And then a miracle happened. Apparently, having filled all these bumps, we decided that it would be better to split up and do quick solo projects. As a result, NightCall became the surviving project. The theme of darkness did not let us go, so we decided to make a night driving simulator. We light our way with headlights, try not to fly into oncoming traffic, which is hard to see because of the cars ahead, and get a kick out of the Retrowave atmosphere. Despite the simplicity of the idea, NightCall became the first game that did not cause pain and was fun to play. And yes, they did this miracle in just 1 month!
Dynamic change of day and night
While NightCall was being polished, we decided to look back and admit that it was a difficult (disastrous) year. Development did not come as easy to us as we expected, but the slime and NightCall turned out very well. And then it dawned on us. Or maybe we should stop rushing forward? Maybe it’s time to dust off the slime? Use the skills we have acquired? So to speak, “Make Slime Great again”?
This is exactly what our blog will be about. We want to look at the main points that you will 100% encounter if you decide to also start developing video games. We will show you how we solved certain problems, why it was bad, and figure out whether it was worth solving them. I hope it turns out interesting, and if not, there will be another monument to our Abomination!
If anyone is interested in poking around at our creations themselves, then you are welcome:
A nice bonus for those who read to the end
Just kidding, that was for me, and this is for you
Best comments
And many indie developers start making their first game right away as a Dream Project.
They conceived it back in their school years, thought through every mechanic and other features. Almost in a notebook they compiled detailed “documentation” for themselves. Then we sawed our magnum opus alone for about 7-10 years.
In the end, someone actually came up with smart toys. For example, Axiom Verge, Owlboy, Timespinners, CrosCode. For others, the project was bent under the weight of complex technically unrealized ideas. Having never been officially cancelled, projects remain without news from developers for many months and years. And the developers, drowned in routine and everyday problems, only occasionally remind about their work in short posts on Twitter.
But for decency, it is still necessary that the team has not only a good programmer, but also an artist, or even a sound master and musician. Just so that the game is not visually and mechanically similar to hundreds of other projects that use various free / default graphics and sound assets.
It’s cool when the author is so gifted that he is able to perform the tasks of all these positions at once, then most likely he is only 10 years away from the release of a good game, if during this time he does not burn out. But usually such loners turn out to be either good programmers, or artists, or musicians. And they make correspondingly not very good games.
Therefore, I think the main mistake in such a start-up is to do everything quickly.
There were a lot of mistakes, but the main one was rather that we didn’t think through the game to the end. Most of the problems in Slime could have been easily avoided if we had not put everything there. Let him blow up? Let’s make the main menu a book? Let’s make cutscenes before we make a stable Slime?
Everyone tried to close their part quickly so that the others wouldn’t wait for them. Since we had no experience at all, this led to the fact that we organized Jenga from our own crutches!
But as they say: “he who does nothing makes no mistakes”. I think dealing with all our technical debts, when we have already gained experience, will be an interesting and educational task, and then we’ll see how it goes.