Hey! I'm Connor, AKA Banana Hardsoft, the developer of PARKSIDE: DECAYED SOUL MANIPULATION! I'm from New Zealand, and I'm developing this game as a passion project in my spare time.
PARKSIDE is a first person shooter under the umbrella of "Immersive Sim" set in the dystopian near future in a fictional city in California. You play as a hacker who is kidnapped by a mysterious organization with the desire to conquer the U.S Government from within, and they recruit you to remotely pilot a humanoid super soldier to do their dirty work.
The idea didn't come easy, I started out by making a very simple, crude shooter with no real immersive sim elements, just as something to do, as my partner fell quite ill and I was looking after her for a while, and I needed something to keep me busy in my downtime. The story, worldbuilding, and elements that started to gear the game towards the immersive sim design philosophy came later, so the game is a very strange beast in that regard as it's changed a lot over the course of development so far.
The development journey I would say has been, like many passion projects with no initial planned scope, a rollercoaster but an enjoyable one. At this point I still have a very long way to go to "finish" PARKSIDE, just in terms of raw content creation (levels, finishing the weaponry and ability arsenal, enemies) but I am progressing at a decent pace rather than going backwards by unnecessarily expanding my scope (something I really want to avoid.)
On that last point, when I started adding immersive sim elements and fixing up the game to be somewhat public demo-ready, it really felt like things would grow out of control and I wouldn't be able to handle it, but I ultimately overcame that anxiety by remembering of course, this is just a passion project with no set deadline, so chill out!
I chose Unity for my engine mainly because that's what I'm used to. I'm not a guru by any means but I had experience in the engine making small games and prototypes since 2015 so I just stuck with what I was familiar with. Before that I used GameMaker Studio and GameMaker 7/8 and created a lot of random dead prototypes ever since the late 2000s so I've been familiar with game development in some fashion for a decent amount of time.
My biggest development hurdle so far, which also leans into my advice for people doing their own projects, has really been keeping myself under control quite honestly. Not just in terms of the game development process, but also not letting myself get too stressed. I've already mentioned scope a few times and I can't emphasise enough the importance of knowing when a game element or feature has reached its logical extent and things don't need to get too much more complex than they are!
Of course as an immersive sim dev that's a moot point, with a pillar of this design philosophy being that there are interacting systems that can produce unexpected results and emergent gameplay.... but in the case of my game I'm trying not to go too overboard if there even is such a thing. I wanted to add a whole "psychic warfare" play/combat style to the game and I really had to stop myself from doing that otherwise it would have distracted my progress for months and ultimately having reflected on the idea, it wouldn't have added much flavour. That can be its own separate game idea...
Also, stress: just don't push yourself beyond what's comfortable, at least not TOO much. Look after yourself and your precious brain. You'll be thankful.
Finally I just want to say that I'm very grateful for this opportunity and for all the support I've had so far for PARKSIDE, even though the game won't be out for a while I'm so happy that people are continually interested and that they enjoyed the demo, and I'm looking forward to sharing much much more over the course of this year.
Thanks!
--BananaH
❤️
