Hi, I'm Clément Patalano, I live in France and I'm a Level Designer at Arkane Studios, Lyon and also an indie developer working on Workaholic Simulator: Leaving the Dream with two of my friends Cédric Amalaman and Nathan Péborde.
Our game is Workaholic Simulator: Leaving the Dream. It's a first person psychological-horror game where you dive into the daily life and dreams of modern workers. It's a satire about our work culture and the main thematic is alienation at work. You have to follow the characters through their journey, it's very abstract, surrealist and there is a lot of intentional gaps for you to put your own interpretation. There is a lot of secrets and mysteries with different endings. Our main inspirations are Amnesia: The Dark Descent, The Stanley Parable and Superliminal.
I had the base idea for this game 8 years ago, when I left my engineering job to start studying gamedev. We had to pitch projects to convince other students to work with us, so I tried to come up with a way to portray the dread I was feeling at my previous job and why I chose to reorient in a more creative career. My pitch didn't convince anyone, but I sticked with the idea and reused it for a game jam with Nathan and Cédric, two years ago. It was a game jam about horror and our game did very well (we won the "jury choice" award, they chose 13 games out of the 500 that were made during the jam) so we decided to take what we made during the jam and try to make it a full game.
The development journey had its ups and downs. Sometimes we progress really fast, we have a lot of great ideas and everything is awesome. And sometimes, motivation is not there, ideas are not so great and we're losing time trying to make something that we later decide doesn't belong in our game. But that's how every project goes, I imagine.
At the end of the day, it's always great and energizing to see people playing the game, making good feedback and getting excited about it.
We chose to work on Godot, because we all like the idea of an open source game engine, mainly. We also think it's perfect for the small scope of our game: not too many heavy and obscure tools, but still enough depth to make the complex systems we need.
Personally, I would say my biggest hurdle was definitely staying motivated to work on the game even after a hard day at work, working on another game. I tend to get "tired creatively" and after I spend the day trying to find cool ideas and trying to implement them at work, I have less energy to do the same task on our personal project.
Don't underestimate how important staying motivated is. Sure, you would prefer to make all your assets, code and everything by yourself. But if that means getting burned out after a year or two, it's really not worth it.
Keep focusing on what makes you happy when you work, take break when needed. It's okay to sometimes stop working on your game for a few day to refill your batteries. Just make sure you never stop for too long or it will be way harder to come back to it.
And stay committed to your project!! We all want to start a new "way cooler" project every 2 months or so. Everything stops feeling fresh and exciting after a while working on it, that means any "cool idea" you just had will also feel like that after a while. You have to keep faith in your project, that's the only way to get anything done.
Thanks for the interview and for reading my dev story. If you play Workaholic Simulator's demo, I would love to hear your feedback, even negative!
Clément
❤️
Workaholic Simulator: Leaving the Dream on Steam
