PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:
Hey ✨🌸
I'm Doot, an indie game developer. I released two games in my first year: Froggy's Battle, and tiny roguelike with a skateboarding magician frog hero, and Minami Lane, a tiny and cute street management game that I made with my girlfriend Blibloop and my friend Zakku.
I love playing and making small games, I live in the forest near the sea in the south of France, and I like birds and beetles.
TELL US ABOUT MINAMI LANE.
My last game is Minami Lane, a tiny and cute street management game. You can play it on Steam already and it releases on Switch on August 15!
After my first solo game, we decided to try to make one with my girlfriend Blibloop. She's an artist and wanted to take a break from her online shop for a few months. We already did a few jams together and it went pretty well. Our latest success was Poda Wants a Statue, ranked 11th out of more than 1700 games on Ludum Dare!
We spent several walks in the forest trying to find an idea for the game, and it went a bit like this : Doriane has some ideas, and I repeat "But how can we make it smaller?" several times until it feels doable. That's how we went from "village management" to "street management", and the aesthetic of a japanese street felt like a really catchy pitch!
The composer and sound designer is Zakku, a friend who I already worked with for sound design on Froggy's Battle.
HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN
The development went pretty well. Of course, we planned for 3 months and it took almost 6. Of course, the final game is a bit far from what we had in mind at first. Our development process is very centered around playtests. I'm persuaded that game design is always bad on paper and you cannot know what's fun without prototyping and testing it, so we did a lot of that to get the game feel right!
Blibloop Zakku and I have very complementary skills, I feel like we made a good team.
WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?
We chose to use Unity, because it does everything we need and I'm quite comfortable with it. I'm currently learning Godot for ethical reasons, maybe I'll switch engine for future projects but nothing sure yet!
WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?
During development, the biggest danger was that Blibloop and I are a couple. Working together on a game can bring some tension, and we value our couple more than our game, so we set up a lot of things to make sure every conflict could be resolved. For exemple, we took 20 minutes every morning to take a short walk in the forest and each tell what we we did the last day, what we plan to do for the day, but mostly how we were feeling about the game and overall.
The hardest time for us was just after release. Yes, the game sold amazingly well and reviews were great, but two things made it hard: we were extremely tired, and we stopped all the processes we put in place to protect our couple. Tension accumulated, communication was painful. Luckily it didn't last, but I'll try to think more about post launch next time I work with a team!
ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?
- Scope small: no, no, smaller than what you think is small enough! Scoping the overall game small is a good first step, but you also need to scope all your design decisions to avoid feature creep.
- Playtest a lot: a good game is not made with a good idea. A good game is made with lots of playtesting and good decisions to fix players problems. Every single success story of game makers will tell you that. Nintendo based their successes on playtesting, Valve playtest like crazy, and I'm sure each and every indie game you love playtested more than you think.
ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?
One of the hardest thing as an indie game dev is to take care of yourself. Keeping a good work life balance and not working too much is sometimes hard but always should be a top priority. Take care of yourselves and everyone around you 💌
-Doot
❤️
