PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:

I’m Simon. I've worked in the Games Industry since 2006. First as 3D Environment Artist and now as VFX Artist. My shipped titles are: Sacred 2, X:Rebirth, RiME and The Invisible Hours. Right now, I’m working on Maestro.

In my spare time I have several game development related projects: a blog about game art tricks, a German game dev podcast and several tutorial YouTube channels. Links in my linktree. And I made a game.

TELL US ABOUT COZY SPACE SURVIVORS.

My game is called “Cozy Space Survivors”. It’s a survivors-like in space, but cozy and with cute NPCs and quests. Meaning: You mine chocolate asteroids, find weapons like the “rainbow of love” and need to survive for 10 minutes which then unlocks new ships.

I like space games and then basically copied vampire survivors 1:1 (but in space) and while developing the game design emancipated itself more and more from the original design (for example by adding quests).

HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN

It has been great! If you want to know details about my “what went good” and “what went bad”, you can give my “post-release summary” a read. But in general, it was a very good experience: mainly, because I was very careful in taking decisions to avoid feature-creep. For example: I knew making a game is a massive undertaking and so it was clear to NOT go 3D and stay in Pixel Art because everything else would make complexity and asset production time explode in my face.

WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?

I chose Godot because it’s good for 2D, free, sympathetic (because it’s Open Source) and can export to HTML5. The latter was VERY important to me, as I wanted to make people play-test my game, and just giving them a link where they can play directly in the browser generated the least amount of friction.

WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?

Besides marketing (annoying!) and gaining wishlist, getting the performance to an acceptable level was/is hard. Took me quite some time to improve the performance (especially when many enemies are on screen) but I’m still not at 60 FPS at all times.

ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?

Respect the game development process! Everything is more complicated and takes more time than you think! This means: Start small(er) but then finish the game. Better having a mediocre finished game then 10 unfinished “dream games” rotting on your hard-drive. Don’t let the idea fairy distract you!

ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?

- There is no “best” engine.

Just choose one which speaks to you.

All of them are well documented, and covered with tutorials.

The gained knowledge will transfer quite well into other engines.

-Simon

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2657850/Cozy_Space_Survivors/

❤️