I'm Francis or MindThunk, British game developer, I've come to game-dev fairly late in life (I'm in my 50s), before that I was a software engineer (non-games) most of my adult life.
In Ctrl Alt Ego you play a disembodied mind set loose in retro-scifi inter-connected sandbox environments in which you take ctrl of robots and devices and use them in creative ways. If you know what an immersive sim is (DeusEx, Thief, Dishonored, Prey 2017) then it's a bit like those but also not - but it's essentially an immersive sim with a focus on problem-solving.
It was going to be a 'simple puzzle game' initially, with ideas taken from The Sentinal (1986) and Imogen (1986), but once some of the mechanics were implemented it became too tempting to push the formula towards where it seemed to want to go - a more open and layered structure.
Development started in 2015, two of us working part-time on it. In 2019 I went full-time to complete it - thought it would be done in 6 months, but ended up taking another 3 years (game launched in 2022).
We chose Unity because in 2015 it was the most accessible and powerful engine - that has changed since and Unity have been making mischief, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend starting with Unity today.
Coming up with a coherent design from all the 'bits' was probably the biggest hurdle. We didn't have a design document or anything, so the game ended up being 'gardened' rather than 'architected'.
Former co-dev and I argued a lot. I went round and round in circles during those last 3 years trying to make it all make sense.
Promo/Marketing was (still is) the other big hurdle - it was very hard to get people interested in the game pre-launch because I'm unknown, the game doesn't look fancy, it doesn't categorize easily, doesn't have an immediate hook or gimmick, and asks players to become invested in it before it really takes off. I secretly like that this makes the game unusual / old-fashioned though.
I'm too much of a contrarian to follow the advice of other devs so I don't really like giving it out - just do your thing and if it doesn't work out, learn from it, try something else.
I suppose the best advice would be to just have fun making your thing. Enjoy the journey - so that if you never finish it, or if you finish it and no-one's interested, you haven't lost.
Thanks!
--MindThunk
❤️
