PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:
My name is Joel, I’ve been making games for about 6 years now. I’m based in the US. I went to school to become a mechanical engineer and always had an interest in game development. In 2019, I decided to learn Unity and started making small projects. Things grew from there and I released my first game in 2023 called Attack of the Karens, now I’m working on my second game Boardwalk Builders. Me and my brother Grant run Studio Primitive where we both collaborate on projects, although Boardwalk Builders is a solo project by myself.
Outside of game development, I love spending time with my wife and kids, snowboarding, and playing my bass guitar.
TELL US ABOUT KORONEKO
Sure! Boardwalk Builders is my attempt at creating the type of game I loved growing up- simulation builder type games. I spent a lot of time playing games like Sim Theme Park and the Sims when I was younger, and I’ve always adored city builder games like SimCity 4 and Cities Skylines. Lately I’ve gotten into more chill management/sim games like Minami Lane, Chillquarium and Game Dev Tycoon.
That’s where Boardwalk Builders really hits home, it’s a game designed to have the elements of a tycoon management game but also have a very chill vibe. The whole goal of the game is to start with small stands and grow them into large rides, shops and restaurants by combining them together. It’s also a lot of fun just to watch shoppers go from place to place and go ride things.
HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN
After I finished Attack of the Karens, it didn’t really do that well, so I knew I wanted to try a new genre. I studied indie game marketing a lot which led me to do some market research on which games are doing well on Steam. Simulation games are doing well right now (and traditionally have done well on PC for a long time), so I decided to make a game in that direction. After studying games in my goal revenue bracket by buying and playing them, I decided on a game where you build out an area and manage shops.
Early on, the game was going to be quite different. It was going to be something like a shopping mall where you move in stores and watch people shop there, but I decided to change the theme to boardwalk because there aren’t very many boardwalk-specific games on Steam, and there already were a few mall tycoon sims like Another Brick in the Mall and Mall Craze.
I think development has been a bit slower than I would have liked. Going from a shoot ‘em up genre to a simulation genre required me to really re-think how to code a game. In shoot ‘em ups, everything deals with colliders and the code is a little simpler. There’s a lot of fast-moving particle effects and a linear approach to design and player progression. In a simulator game, it’s a sandbox. You need to program systems that can always interact with each other, and account for endless combinations of what the player will do, so it requires you to approach development in a different way. Saving and loading data is also a lot more complicated than it was for my previous game.
Despite all of that, I have developed Boardwalk Builders much faster than Attack of the Karens. AotK took me nearly a year to get to the point of having a trailer and Steam page. I’m there in just over 6 months with BB. I think it just boils down to being more experienced the second time around and being more disciplined in constantly working on the game, where with AotK I wasn’t as disciplined and would get burnt out easily.
WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?
I use Unity.
WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?
The hardest thing has been programming the logic for the shoppers. There are so many conditions that they can be in, that it’s hard to predict exactly what will happen. It’s been the biggest source of bugs so far. Also, I’m trying to keep optimization front and center because there are so many loops running for each customer’s logic simultaneously and it can bog things down. Optimization will be a big priority to make sure the game can run on a wide variety of machines. Even though it’s pixel art, the CPU can still take a heavy load.
ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?
If you’re new to game development, you really need to abandon your ideas of what you think will be successful on Steam and have an open mind. This means probably steering away from linear, character-driven games like people see on consoles and thinking more in terms of sandbox-style games. Chris Zukowski has this theory of developers getting into game dev because they want to make the same kind of games they played as kids on Nintendo consoles. I’m from the 16-bit era so for me that is Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana. The trouble is a good linear story-driven games don’t translate well to Steam at the indie level. The resources required to make those type of games succeed is just way too great. They require tons of programming, art, and story development that would take a small team years to do. But developers don’t listen, and they decide they are going to make the game they want no matter what.
Real companies don’t act like that, they do research on what their customers want then decide what to make and even continue research throughout the development process. It’s done this way for a reason – what you want to make isn’t always what other people want to play. Game development is a heck of a lot more fun when you’re making something people are excited about rather than something that nobody notices.
ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?
There was a movie called “Tick, Tick… Boom!” where the lead character Jonathan learns his play that he poured his soul into wasn’t picked up by Broadway producers, and he is crushed: (https://youtube.com/watch?v=gMvH7nkW_98)
The advice from his agent is to “Start writing the next one”. Remember that the first game you make should never be the last. Each game is a stepping stone, so don’t get hung up on it and don’t sweat the small decisions. Make it, launch it, and “start writing the next one”.
-Joel
❤️
