PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:

Hi, I'm Maxime. I live in the French Alps, between Annecy and Geneva. I've spent most of my career before 2019 as a “classic” developer, mainly in the banking industry, but even though I've had some big non-writing breaks in my life, I've always had this need to tell stories. And video games happen to be an excellent way of telling stories.

At the end of 2019, I decided it was time to embark on a full-time game development adventure, and even though I'd been preparing this move for a few years, believe me when I tell you that I wasn't ready for what was about to come!

TELL US ABOUT WILD DOSE.

Wild Dose is a horrific immersive-sim, set in future where people are using virtual drugs to escape from reality. Players will explore the reality, a divided society, in small Deus-Exian environments, complete missions to buy their dose and survive sessions of forbidden programs. During their journey, they will make choices that will impact the whole world and the characters they’ll meet.

I often try to sum it up by saying: Imagine a cross between Observer and Deus Ex, with a retro aesthetic. And that's where I lose people!

I'd just released my first Steam game when I started brainstorming on the next one. Inspired by my long mountain’s runs, I was hesitating between a relaxing adventure, where you explore vast, luminous spaces (this became Fresh Air, the legal virtual drug of my universe), or a more “fierce” universe, icy and worrying, the dangerous side of the mountains, with a retro-PSX aesthetic (this became Wild Dose, an illegal drug where members of the Pack gather).

And then I also had this desire to create a cyberpunk adventure, an ode to Deus Ex, with these very rich but oppressive, almost claustrophobic cyberpunk environments. I thought you'd need realistic assets to make a game like that in 2020, but Cloudpunk had just been released and proved that you could make a great cyberpunk game with a highly stylized aesthetic.

I had the feeling that the Steam audience preferred more ambitious projects, and I had time and money on my side (well, that’s what I thought), so I went for it.

HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN

At the time, there was a big wave of redundancies in my line of work. Initially, I promised myself that if I got laid off, I'd finish my novel and get it published before finding another job. But as I discovered Unity and began to analyze the independent video game market, an idea began to take shape: if in France it's almost impossible to make a living as an author, wouldn't it be possible to make a living as a game developer?

The Unity tutorials became my routine, and several times a week I'd block off two hours (which often became three), and the further I got, the more I discovered the extent of my ignorance, the more I needed these tutorials. If I had to be self-critical, I'd say that at that time I should have learned how to design games, in addition to learning how to develop them.

In May 2017, my wife's medical situation worsened and she - among other problems - lost her hearing completely. I stopped working for two months to absorb the shock and adapt to this new life. I asked myself if it wasn't time to take a break to look after her and my writing or game creation projects. My doctor, my shrink, my boss, they all convinced me it was not the right time, as let's be honest, I had no energy left. I went back to work, gave up writing and game creation (I did keep the mountain trail-running, though) with one goal in mind: when I got back to my “former energy level”, when I started to get bored again, it would be time to quit my job and go full time on my artistic projects.

Those two years went by so quickly, and at the end of 2019, I knew the time had come and left my job. I spent several months working on a shooter that alternated isometric and FPS views, mainly to train myself, but I wanted to develop everything myself and it was progressing very slowly. Then COVID 19 came along, the world changed, and I heard about David Wehle's Game Dev Unlocked course.

I took a break to go through his training and realized that, probably because I was a developer, I wasn't making enough use of the technical assets that could boost productivity. I had to make a game, finish it and release it on Steam. That's how Breaking Lockdown was born, a (too?) frustrating game requiring (too many?) skills, quite influenced by the fact in 2020, the outside world was hostile.

WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?

I discovered Unity in 2016. It had been a year since I'd worked on the second draft of a novel, and while I waited for feedback from my beta readers, I took a writing break. I still remember launching the first Unity tutorials and not seeing the time go by. It was then that I realized that video game development had really been democratized, both by the accessibility of the engine and by the mass of documentation, both official and unofficial, that could be found on the Internet.

WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?

I made the decision to release a prologue to Wild Dose at the same time as a small Kickstarter campaign, and although it paid off in the long run, I think it was the hardest month of my gamedev journey.

After that, I was lucky enough to be accepted into the Digital Dragons accelerator program, which in addition to providing mentoring and coaching from industry experts, enabled me to get additional funding for Wild Dose. It was unexpected, but it had significant side-effects.

Wild Dose's production was professionalized with two 3D artists for a year, which left me much less time to work on my game, while the game became more ambitious, which lengthened the necessary development time even more. So, in June 2023, I decided to go solo again and complete the final phase of development.

But otherwise, the biggest problem we're facing is that production has been put on hold since July 2023, as my wife has had other serious health problems that have left her almost blind (in addition to being deaf).

ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?

We can't stress this enough: make small games!

Even the “minimalist” version of Wild Dose that I had originally planned was far too massive. The prologue was already quite an ambitious project. I'm convinced that after Wild Dose, I'll be concentrating on smaller, rapidly-released games for a while, a bit like I did with Breaking Lockdown.

That's not to say I don't intend to do any more big projects - I've still got a lot to tell - but a small game is always easier to manage, no matter how big the team, how much money or how much time you have to devote to it.

ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?

When it comes to becoming a full time game dev, I think there are too many people (including much more talented people than me, who have worked on excellent games in great studios) who don't prepare financially enough their game dev journey. I've sometimes been criticized for waiting too long, for not putting myself financially at risk, but believe me, you never know what life has in store for you, so it's best to be prepared. If you're going full-time, remember that making games takes money and time.

But... on the other hand, life is short and there's no telling what might happen. So it's a difficult balance to strike between comfort and risk. So go for it, even if it's just a hobby, the journey is worth it.

Maxime❤️

Wild Dose on Steam