PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:
Hi, I'm Slava! I'm a developer of Monterona - a cozy city-builder game. I have a full-time job and a family I like to spend time with, so I work on the game in my spare time. Monterona is my very first experience in game development, and it's been super fun so far!
TELL US ABOUT MONTERONA.
In Monterona you are in the imagination of a small kid who is going to visit his grandma in Italy soon. Grandma tells him stories about her hometown, and you, as a player, try to build places and scenes from these stories. But there is no "right" way to build these scenes, no one is going to judge you in the end, so you can relax and just create however you want.
Creating the scene starts with placing houses, pavements, grass, and water. After that, you can put decorations and little citizens of the city. The exciting part about decorations is how objects adapt to their surroundings and your actions — if you take a flower in a pot from a table and put it on the grass, it will become a bush. If you make it bigger, you get a tree. This mechanic encourages players to experiment and brings them joy when they get some unexpected variation of an object.
Once you're done with building a scene, you are prompted to take a couple of photos in camera mode to fill out the storyboard. At this time, you can also check out how other players "imagined" the same story and maybe learn something new.
HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN
This is my first game, so every new "chapter" of the development journey brings me a lot of surprises and new things to learn. I've been working on the game for roughly 1.5 years and now have a small demo that more than 7000 players played and seemed to like :) Because I have a "real" job, I am not pressured to finish the game by a specific deadline to earn money. That gives me the freedom to choose what I want to do and how I want to do it.
WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?
I tried to make the game in Unity but quickly got confused about small things (e.g., render pipelines) and switched to Unreal Engine 5, which unexpectedly was easier for me (I'm not afraid of C++, and blueprints are actually very nice). I guess with the experience I earned, I shouldn't have problems with any engine, and overall, I think you shouldn't care too much about choosing the "right" engine.
WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?
Initially, I wanted to make a bit more "strategic" game, but once I built the first mechanics, I decided they're fun on their own, and I could make a game more about creativity rather than anything else. The whole idea of being in the imagination has a purpose to give me room for imperfections in graphics and mechanics :) On the other hand, grandma's stories give players some light guidance, which I have always missed in similar sandbox games.
Developing a (hopefully successful) game is not only creating models or 2d art and coding. Social media, store pages, applying to events, playtesting, project management, maybe finding contractors, etc — there are a lot of things you need to do to actually finish the game and get it to the players. Finding time for all of that and prioritizing the right things and the right time is the most challenging part for me. But it's also rewarding when something works out.
ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?
The usual advice is to start with small projects, and I absolutely agree with that. But I understand that not everyone wants to do that. In that case, I'd suggest at least splitting your "big" project into small parts. The important part is that each small part should have something nice as a result, even if it's just a tiny thing. Without these small wins, you'll quickly lose motivation and abandon the project.
Another thing is that if you're making a game not just for yourself, you need to start showing your work to others very early in development. If you get some good feedback, it will be another motivation to move forward. And if you get bad or, more probably, no feedback, it's a sign that you need to change something. It's tough, but it's better to change something at the project's beginning rather than after months (or years) of work.
ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?
Game development is fun but challenging. You spend most of the time on rather boring things. But once things come together, even just some small parts of your game, it's a very nice feeling :) Have fun!
-Slava
❤️
