PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:
Hey, I'm Jonas. I started making games when I was around 10 years old and have been making games ever since. I studied game Design at HTW Berlin where I joined the company that was founded by some of my friends there, Grizzly Games. With them I made my first commercial release ISLANDERS as a university project. We got pretty lucky and it was rather successful, granting us the luxury to pursue our indie dreams further full time without having to look for any additional funding. I started a YouTube channel with my name (Jonas Tyroller) to share my development journey and made two more games. "Will You Snail?", which I made solo and "Thronefall" which I am once again developing with a friend from the original Grizzly Games Team.
TELL US ABOUT THRONEFALL.
Currently Paul and I are working on a game called "Thronefall", a minimalist strategy game about building and defending your tiny kingdom. It's basically a singleplayer strategy game for everybody who does not have the time to play something as complex as Age of Empires anymore or who does not have the APM to babysit your army and your base at the same time. Thronefall tries to remove the frustration and stress from the RTS genre and make it more accessible to a wider audience. Compared to classical RTS games, you only control a single character and you can only build specific buildings on predefined spots. You build and upgrade your castle during the day and you defend it against waves of enemies during the night. Despite this simplicity, there is quite a bit of strategic depth. You have to find the correct counters to enemies, optimize your build order and make sure your troops are positioned correctly. It shares a lot of qualities with traditional RTS games, but intentionally simplifies it a lot to make it more approachable.
HOW DID THE IDEA FOR THE GAME COME ABOUT?
We like to get our ideas by prototyping and searching for ideas that are fun, appealing and also have a reasonable scope so that we can finish them as a small team. So we usually like to start in a very open minded state and just explore a variety of different ideas. The idea of building and defending a tiny kingdom vibed really well with us. We felt like it was appealing and like there was a gap in the market so we went for it.
HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN
Good. There are always ups and downs in various ways, both technical challenges as well as mental challenges, managing resources and motivation etc. We tried to play it by the book to the best of our ability with very early play-tests and just constant iteration cycles: Build, Test, Evaluate, Repeat. Developing a game can be imagined like searching an ocean for the biggest pool of fish to anchor your fishing boat and you need to make sure you deploy a suitable search algorithm to increase your chances of success.
WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?
We chose Unity because we were well familiar with it, it has a large community, many plugins and tools and good documentation. The Unity-Drama of installation fees happened during our development so switching engines was not really a realistic option at that point. We will reconsider which engine to use for the next game(s). Perhaps it will be Unity again, but Unreal and Godot are also strong contenders. We shall see. Probably also depends on which kind of game we make next.
WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?
Two things that come to my mind are prioritizing tasks correctly and making sure the quality of the game does not degrade over time. We're developing Thronefall in Early Access and receive tons and tons of feedback from the community. Sorting through that and prioritizing tasks correctly is quite an undertaking, especially in cases where the community has mixed opinions on where the game should be going. The other strange thing that seems to be happening a bit is that the review score of the game seems to degrade over time, while we keep adding more and more content and adding many quality of life features to make the game more enjoyable. Figuring out what exactly the real problems are and how to actually make an impact on the enjoyment of players while growing the game is surprisingly quite a challenge.
ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?
Make a small game. It's easier to compete on quality than on quantity. Explore multiple ideas and make prototypes for each one before you settle for one. It's easier to pick the best option out of a selection than to come up with the best option from scratch. If you are aiming for commercial viability, aim for fun, appeal and scope very early on. All three are equally important. Define clear design goals and treat the development process like a search algorithm to find the best design possible. Look closely at how the industry is change as the game dev industry has historically evolved quite rapidly and it is important to adapt to change (e.g. looking at AI). Have fun and prioritize your personal well-being over everything else. Helping yourself first is the most efficient way of helping the world next.
ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?
-The meaning of life is to make as many valuable experiences as possible before you die. As a game developer, that's what you do, you create experiences and help people experience things they could not have otherwise. Just make sure it does not take away from the other amazing experiences in life. Cheers!
-Jonas
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2239150/Thronefall/
❤️
