Hi, I'm Hadrien, Resina Salvation's solo developer. I'm originally a compositing artist for the film industry, but for a few years now I've been using the development skills I learnt at work to learn on the side how to make games independently.
Resina Salvation is a strategic clicker set in Roman times. You have to collect resources and defend your town, which is in danger of being destroyed by a volcano and waves of lava monsters.
The idea came to me because I'm a huge clicker fan, but especially of Universal Paperclip, a game that for me is the best clicker I've ever played. What I love about this game is the fact that it manages to tell us a story and convey a lot of emotion with very little.
For Resina Salvation, I wanted to make the player feel the same way, but try to remove the “idle game” aspect and add a more dynamic and stressful dimension, through a strategic aspect.
Well, listen, there are ups and downs. On the whole, it was difficult because I didn't come from this background, so it was hard for me to feel legitimate. It took me 5 months to communicate about the game because I was afraid of the feedback.
And in the end, even though the feedback has been very positive, my personal and professional life have become much more complex, so it takes a lot of energy and motivation every day to keep moving forward.
I'm trying to remain reasonable about the scale of the game, and to make sure every day that I don't overdo it, so as to be sure of finishing the game on time.
It's still my first game, so I'm trying to keep a cool head.
For the engine, I chose Godot because for my work, I was developing in Python until then. And Gdscript, Godot's language, is the one that comes closest. That enabled me to progress very quickly and not be demoralised by the amount of knowledge I had to acquire.
Developing a clicker means creating lots of interconnected systems that respond to each other. It took me a while to write and rewrite the code at the start of development, just to find the right way of approaching things. Like making an addon to create my own spreadsheets directly in Godot, to automatically manage all the upgrades UI of the game.
Don't just sit back and work on your game alone. We're often afraid of feedbacks from others, because if it's not as good as we'd hoped, we often think it's because we're bad at creating games.
I spent 1 year trying to create 3 games before I found the right formula with Resina Salvation. The most important thing is not to give up, because creating a game is difficult. It takes time to find the right project, the right idea, and above all an idea that you're passionate enough about to be prepared to spend several months of your life on it.
Thank you very much for reading these words and for contacting me. For someone who learnt everything about this profession on his own, seeing people interested in my game is the best reward I could hope for. And I can't wait to share this game with you when it's finished.
Hadrien
❤️
