Hi all! My name is Yuldash, And I’m the head of the studio 0-Game Studios. Today you will learn about the history of the development of the first big game of the studio – Life of Slime (hereinafter LOS).
To understand why this particular game had to become the first big one will have to figure out how I came to Gamdev, what I created in front of LOS and how I came to the idea of the game.
Background
I wanted to start making games for a very, very long time, in about 7-10 grades (now I graduated from the university). Then the minds of schoolchildren in full captivated the franchise Five Nights at Freddy’s And I, charging mega with motivation, went to master Construct 2, I tried and Clickteam Fusion, which was used in itself FNAF, But he seemed difficult for me. Since development in Construct 2 Only the game presented in the screenshots survived. In addition to her, I remember that I did some elf simulator collecting New Year’s gifts from the conveyor (in addition, there was nothing more, although there was a lot of things planned), a quest where it was necessary in the SCP fund using objects to get out of the building teeming with monsters (except for the mechanics of using objects and GG in the form of a sticman there was nothing else). I also remember I took up the parody of FNAF, which had nothing to have beyond the mechanics of changing cameras. In those days, I just wanted to understand what I could realize, so nothing went further than such a demon, and I did not know anything important about the development – I just sat down to make games, the engine is very simple and even I, the humanist, was able to figure it out. After them, I abandoned the development, I don’t remember why, perhaps, there were simply not enough results, for further motivation to rivet games.
The very last remaining game:
However, the absence of at least some experience in programming completely knocked out all the hopes for me to do something cool-I simply did not understand the text code, the tutorials did not help, but it arose-visual programming, whose tutoria was easier to master, there was an understanding that I specifically make this block of code. One series of videos, another, and now I’m ready to do something myself. There were a winter holidays, I downloaded a lot of tutorials about visual programming, working with Unity, 3D modeling, pixel art, even downloaded tutoria on textual code. Then I had a desire to make a large, steep, graphite 3D horror with chases, scumers, references to fnap and even with cultists – such a mix of Outlast 2, Resident Evil Village And FNAF.
At some point, I realized that https://spinsheavencasino.uk/ I would not pull the game alone and left the game on the distant plan, in which it slowly surrounds meat. It was decided to do something small in 2D with pixel art. The holidays ended and while I was studying at a university in parallel I did Tanks Ultimate – her full -fledged first game that was able to get overall access. There was everything that was needed for the Arcade – random short levels, Achivka, a store at the end with the skins. This game became a powerful springboard for me, with it I brought the game to the release, worked on all important major aspects of games, such as graphics (which I myself drew from scratch), music, sounds and preservation. After that, I was fully introduced into Indie Gamdev. In the summer of 2021, I wanted to make a plot company for this game, but some difficulties in creating and an incredible scale stopped me at the first level.
After introducing a party in Gamde, I decided to participate in its events – gamjams – this is usually short in the duration of the event to create games for a certain time: 3 days, a week, a month, there are even gamjams a duration of several decades or centuries. In general, I participated in 11 gamdes from the period to development Los It is worth highlighting Blind Escape. This success game broke the record Tanks Ultimate, And I released her mobile version in Google Play. I got a lot of feedback from players and other developers, I myself like it myself. The most important thing in this stage can be called that I learned to bring the game from the concept to the release in a short time. As a result of one of the jams, I happened to win $ 100 for promoting the game in Google Play, So beginner developers, I strongly recommend not to miss such an opportunity to stay among enthusiasts among enthusiasts, rejoicing that someone liked the game that they noticed it and that it gave it generally pleasant emotions. Thanks to one of the jams, I was able to get into an even deeper indie party – the server discord.
There are a lot of developers of various ages in them. Somewhere there were servers of the development studio, and somewhere there were sites where the developers could release their girls. In them I began to communicate, get used, receive help, support. In these servers, I witnessed how the games were born, created, canceled, could just take entire studios and close. This is a boiling broth where so many events are taking place, so many changes that you simply dissolve in this stream of an incredible desire to create games.
I am delighted with how developers have been trying to get into this business from childhood and yes to do something. Now making games is very simple-the Internet is full of different tutorials, free ases, it remains only to get used to some niche, stretch out your hand, attach perseverance and start grabbing the gameds with your creativity.
The beginning of 2022. January. I am sitting in the village during the winter holidays, watching a video about the development of a game where a person prototyped of his game, in this game, at that time, the graphics consisted of cubes, and I had a thought-what if you make a game where everything is cubes, the plot will be about cubes that suddenly became infected with something and began to turn into triangles, all the surroundings will be in cubes? With such a thought, I began to think – how to realize it? In the course of thoughts, I decided for myself that it is impossible and it is necessary to replace cubes with something more complicated, it will still be difficult to do something beautiful from simple circles, so I came to the slines, creatures that are more complicated than cubes, but not as difficult as a person or some kind of animal.
The sketches that I made in the village:
The game was planned to be a platformer with booty elements, but as a result, the accents have changed with each other and now we have a gunpower with elements of a platformer. It is worth saying that I play mainly in plot, single games and really love the series Resident Evil, I consider 5 and 6 parts the best in the series, and 8 by some misunderstanding. I play games with the open world less often, but the last 3 parts of the scrolls, cyberpunk and the exclusive PlayStation 4 I went through not without pleasure, but I also love strategies and horror, I don’t have any certain taste in games, if the game is interesting, then I will go through it, so I will not be, so I will go Los As a result, I would call the plot linear hollow from different genres, in the center there was a basis from the plot on which a comedy, melodrama, horror, action movie grown up. Still, our life is hard to attribute to some specific genre-we can meet a pleasant person and the melodrama will begin, a person can turn out to be a maniac and a horror will begin, a person may have a whole gang of criminals and here the action movie can start when lucky. That’s why Los It came out so heterogeneous, it was my vision of life and taste in games (very versatile), even in the name there is a word "Life".
Having agreed with a classmate to create a game, I threw her a pack of tutorials on the pixel art, through which I learned to draw myself. While she watched the videos, I wrote the plot, made simple pixel arts concepts, designed a plan in Trello, then the game was planned for the exit on July 4, and the development itself started on February 13. The game was divided into 6 pieces so that the progress of development was felt more, and initially there were 3 pieces, in the game itself a three -chip structure is very easily traced. Soon, the pre -production ended and began to make the game in Unity, built levels from simple cubes, the characters were cubes, the classmate began to make their first art – I really liked them. She then published her progress on her new Instagram* channel. Everything started very cool.
But soon it became clear that the classmate did not keep up with the deadlines, each of the 6 pieces of the game had its own deadline, the very first piece was to be ready in a week, and all the following in 2-3 weeks. These deadlines were common, t. e. both gameplay and art should be ready for the same time. Yes, the volume was large, but I managed to do everything, it happened even on the last day at the last hour I had time. Without deadlines, the game would fall apart in the production hell, later it happened, but on this later.
The artist sent something less likely to me, she began to answer less often, she wrote everything off to employment, term paper, homework. In reality she avoided questions or promised to deal with later. I decided not to wait and start the search for artists in the discord servers. The searches were failure and only in April-May was the artist found that he would make the game until its release (hereinafter shadow).
By this time, the game Gameplay was completely ready, it was passable from the very beginning to the very end in May 2022. In case of interest, it was planned to learn how to create music, but because of employment by the deadline, this was impossible, therefore, a composer was very quickly found in Discord, who soon completely completed the creation of music and in June there was already a version where all the music was all the music.
How the game looked before adding graphics, on top of the left text for debugging, there is a level name, time spent in the game and the current playing composition: