How to not make a game in 7 days

Hi everyone, I'm Jay - the leading developer of Thorny Route visual novel. I have been in game development industry for a little over a year, from the moment I’ve got an idea to create my own game.

Actually, I've had some web development background before, but I can't say that it influenced anything. So, if you are in doubt whether it is possible to make a game without a specialized education as a developer, I can answer - yes, you can. Although it won't be easy and not everything will work out right away.

How to find an idea and get started?

I came up with idea to create a game in summer 2020. I think you can imagine it well: quarantine, everyone is under stress, it was necessary to find where to invest energy in order not to go crazy.

Suddenly I came across an excellent series of Noclip videos about creating a Hades game. The process of creating games has always seemed to me to be something incredibly difficult, almost impossible, if you are not part of a large company. And then ... It turned out that a relatively small group of inspired people made a game that unconditionally entered my list of masterpieces. It was so inspiring!

All that remained was to find a team among friends: there was no money for salaries, which means that in order to survive, we needed enthusiasm (and courage). We managed to assemble the team, but, of course, we understood that with such zero knowledge in game development, we need to start with something very simple. By that time, I managed to find an artist, and I write in my free time, so the choice fell on visual novels. There were several plots and settings in mind, but we settled on magical fantasy.

We chose Unity as the engine, as it seemed the most suitable in the long term due to some features and the possibility of making a mobile version later.

At first, three people worked on the game, then for a period there were only two left. I also managed to find a wonderful freelance artist who helped with the backgrounds, as well as a second programmer and text editor. Plus, we summoned volunteer testers. Everything, it would seem, should go like clockwork. And then we remembered the social media...

How to promote social networks?

To be honest, none of the core team knew about marketing. And since everyone was combining development with other survival work, no one had time to manage their accounts. Someone will say that it does not take so much, but just try to communicate in several accounts on an ongoing basis...

In general, the question stood squarely. My first idea was to ask people for advice on Twitter, and that's how we found our first marketer! Tanya is just a sorceress and helped us a lot!

A little later, my friend also joined us in the role of a marketer, and the epic with promotion began!

How not to give up?

There were enough obstacles both with promotion and with the development itself. The main problems are commonplace: time and money.

From the process, the most difficult thing was not to fall apart and bring the project to the demo stage. There were a variety of situations: depression, illness, months when there was not enough money that you had to push the project into a distant box for the sake of earning money for survival. Now, for example, we have a second developer and one of the marketers is temporarily out of service for a number of reasons.

But we survive and continue to work, isn't that the main thing? As they say, from the very beginning we had some kind of tactic and we stick to it.

The entire team can be individually praised for their ideas. There are still more of them than our capabilities to embody these ideas, but we will try.

And we also overcame the translation of the text into English! Oh, it was not easy, and it is still not perfect, but since we had to do it completely on my own for long sleepless nights, I consider this to be our greatest achievement.

What are our plans for the future?

What will happen next? Preparing the release of the first chapter of the game and raising money for its release. We would like to do full voice acting, animations and much more, but alas, this requires at least a minimal budget.

Of course, even if we do not collect anything, we plan to continue, but more slowly and on a smaller scale. In any case, more characters, more features and a redesign await you.

Follow us! Any support is vital to the project! And not only ours: support your local game developers, they really deserve it!