PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:
Hello! We are Miriam and Lage, an indie game developer duo from Gothenburg, Sweden. We are both web developers, and have been making games in our spare time on and off for a few years. This is our first comercial release, so even if we have done some development in the past, things like marketing and deploying games to Steam are completely new to us.
TELL US ABOUT STIG.
Stig is a block shoving puzzle game about finding a path through colors. By manipulating the world around you, and using a variety of different mechanics, you solve tricky puzzles, and progress through the levels. We played a lot of other puzzle games like Baba is You, The Witness, and Chants of Senaar, and thought it would be fun to try to make a puzzle game of our own.
HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN
While writing the game in React has helped us keep the scope down, it has also forced us to solve problems that you get solutions for out of the box in established game engines like Godot or Unity. For example things like getting the background music to loop properly, making animations, adding controller support, etc.
WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?
We have developed the game from scratch using the Javascript library React. Our primary reason for this was to prevent scope creep, and actually finish a full game. We both use React in our day jobs so we are quite familiar with it, which means we can put more focus into the design of the puzzles.
WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?
The main hurdle for us has been staying motivated and doing regular marketing for the game.
ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?
Start sharing stuff about your game early. This way you will get feedback while it's still easy to change stuff. It is also easier to see big progress in the beginning of a project, which makes for nice content to share with others. Getting feedback regularly also helps a lot to keep the motivation up we have found!
A huge time saver for us has been to make a level editor. So we would recommend making whatever internal tools you might need for your project as early as possible.
ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?
Feel free to reach out if you want to know more about us or our game!
-Miriam and Lage
❤️
