We're a husband and wife team consisting of Mattias & Sigrid. Mattias works full time on our projects, while Sigrid works on projects in the evenings.
We have widely different backgrounds and requirements from games which is a huge strength when designing our games together.
Seer's Gambit is our second game. With our first game Obsidian Prince we overscoped massively and we were determined to no repeat the mistake. As we started designing our second game it quickly became apparent that it was spinning out of control scope-wise. We scratched everything and kept only the battle mechanics we had designed. A group of characters auto-battling in a set room. Then we started thinking about a project we could finalize in 6-9 month with this core.
We played a lot of TFT (Team Fight Tactics) during this period and we had also just become parents for a second time. It was always frustrating to throw a match because our baby woke and the idea of an auto-battler inspired by TFT, but single-player and with a pause button was born.
On top of that we wanted to add some more RPG elements to the mix, to make it feel more meaningful to play your matches. In TFT you're working towards a higher league, in a single player game you need a purpose to keep going. We added an overworld with exploration to the mix and nodes that can be upgrades to unlock powerful group-wide buffs, unlock new characters or other things to incentivize exploration and continued play.
Our goal to create a 6-9 month game failed again, but at least we're probably decreasing our dev time with about 1 year compared to our previous game.
We are using Unity, since that's what we used for Obsidian Prince. We're looking at Godot and may swap over due to the many controversies with Unity, but that will not be for this project and likely not for the next one. The sunk cost is very high already.
There are a bunch of challenges. 1 is finding enough time in the day to work on the game when you have (and want) to also prioritize your kids. Having only one person able to do full time is a challenge as finding time to do design sessions when they are needed can be hard.
Scoping down is an ongoing challenge, but we're getting better. We're already working on designs for our 3rd game and so far it looks like it will be much better scoped.
Finally, UI. UI is always a challenge, with Seer's Gambit we wanted to ensure controller support and we've had to redesign the UI multiple times to make that happen because of initial assumption that we didn't verify early enough. (Make sure you don't make that mistake! :))
I have a bunch.
1)Polish matters a lot more than you think. With Obsidian Prince we released a game in early access with place holder sound or none at all. We had big influencer cover the game at that stage, then never return. The top results on Youtube for Obsidian Prince are of a very rough version.
2)If you are going to have controller support and localization for your game (and you should), design for it early.
3)Scope down! Kill those darlings (Yes, I'm speaking to myself as well here).
4)Spend time on your onboarding your players. The first 5 minutes is the most important and you need to hook people. If they are confused they will likely bounce and are unlikely to ever return.
I did a long post on Reddit with more details on learnings from Obsidian Prince:
https://reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/13qv2mw/1_year_ago_our_game_launched_in_10_on_steam_here/
I've been dreaming about making games for most of my life. It's not glamourous, it's often a struggle, there are some REALLY tedious parts, but NOTHING beats the feeling of someone getting excited about your brain-child.
Please don't give up if your first game flops. Learn from it, do it again and do it better. AND SCOPE DOWN!
-Mattias & Sigrid
❤️
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