Now making – TUNGUSKA: A Call in the Woods
I’m absolutely hyped to announce our new title that have been in production for a year already.
TUNGUSKA: A Call in the Woods is a path-finding survival adventure, with an accent on a “paper map & compass” exploring made in Unreal Engine. Coming for PC Steam in late 2022.
What to expect:
• Path-finding with a paper map & compass is a core gameplay aspect. Be aware of your surroundings at all times, put notes on the map, look for landmarks, learn to take bearings – and you will not get lost. Probably.
• Rewarding exploration. The more you wander off-trail, the more chances you get to piece together what is happening here.
• Dangers of the woods. This forest has something far more deadly than bears or a swarm of ticks. Watch your step.
• Gorgeous visuals. Forests and swamps, fields and rivers – all with fully dynamic lighting and hi-res textures made with Unreal Engine and Megascans.
The game is already in steam, so go wishlist it if you are interested!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1732980/TUNGUSKA_A_Call_in_the_Woods/
Global Game Jam 2021 – how it was
Yet another GGJ is a month behind us, but it still gives me some shivering – both with pleasure and pain.
This time the whole event went online, meaning no room for a partying (or rather showing off in front) with fellow game devs. But what’s more important, the new format isn’t quite convenient for maintaining rule No1 here – to build up a team on site. Well, we are notorious outlaws here, always coming in zerg numbers, but I feel like many single devs might have been out of luck because of the online thing. Anyway, you know what they say – better safe than sorry!
The theme was “Lost & Found” which is, by miracle, nicely describes the new project we are working on. Too bad we couldn’t use it, hehe. After a smaller than usual brainstorm (mainly because our numbers this time were not so zerg) we picked up yet another heavy concept and went off to production.
The idea was in a new kind of PvP (yes, it means an actual multiplayer here) puzzle – one plays as the Spy, roaming through terra incognita in search’n’steal of particular item, and the other (who can observe the whole map but not the Spy) must prevent it, playing as the Guard. You will be surprised by how blastedly PAINFUL it was to balance even that simple concept. Yes, we did all the playtesting with pen and paper (the game meant to be turn-based), but still it was a rough road. Can’t envy fellow table-top game creators, that’s for sure.
Anyway, somehow we managed to sort out everything. As always, it felt just like a miracle – a several hours prior to the deadline there was nothing, just separated sprites and ideas, but in the end it really looked like a game. And quite an enjoyable one! We had lots of fun playing Mission Possible (silly name, I know) later with friends.
Funny, that we made all the core stuff in just two days, but spent almost a month to bring up some minor polish like FX, extra UI’s, and standalone builds. Ruthless rule 80% / 20% has no exceptions.
Gladly it’s all behind us now – the game is published on itch and Play market, so what are you waiting for?! Go check it out now! And take a friend with you, because we don’t have bots, and the game is solely multiplayer. Hope you will like it!
-Links-
Our GGJ 2021 submission:
https://globalgamejam.org/2021/games/mission-possible-1
The most recent version (Web, PC, Linux, Android):
https://dividebyzer0.itch.io/mission-possible
-Credits-
Dmitriy “Stranger” Troitskiy – code
Nikita «Smi1ey» Dubatov – art, animation
Maria «Marry_mind» Prokopyeva – art
Georgy “R0ller” Yushkevich – audio
Nikita “DNK” Pavlov – gamedesign, direction
#indiedev #gamedev #ggj #ggj21 #Dividebyzer0
Neon Climber – out now!
This is it, THE RELEASE. It’s been already a couple of days, but I still can’t believe in it completely. So what are you waiting for? Go and see the results of our joy and suffering for the past 2,5 years:
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/ru/app/neon-climber-a-cyber-runner/id1519074967
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Dividebyzer0.NeonClimber
It’s meant to be a simple 3-month project, but somehow we got what we’ve got. I have no regrets – in the end, we got tons of new experiences. And the most important thing – a complete game.
Sadly, Neon Climber is a failure, in commercial terms. We’ve tested it 3 times with major publishers, and it turned out that hypercasual audience not a big fan of vertical runners in TRON aesthetics. But nevertheless, I liked the game.
I don’t have words to express my gratitude to our Dividebyzer0 team – for overcoming time, space, and procrastination, and for making this long journey from idea to app stores:
Nikita “teuz” Zhimkov
Georgy “R0ller” Yushkevich
Dmitriy “Stranger” Troitskiy
Also I want to thank our friends and colleges, who helped making Neon Climber in many ways:
Anton Jebrax
Daria Kalinova
Daria Sukhorukova
Mikhail Pomakhin
Dmitriy Soloviev
What’s next? Full speed ahead towards new game! So stay tuned for more.
Global Game Jam 2020
Oops, we did it again – the most legal way to slack from long-run projects is here. And of course, we couldn’t resist to participate in it this time again.
The theme for this jam was “Repair”. Quite wide one, if you ask me, so our brainstorm spawned some crazy shit, from cheap engineer sim (need to fix crap gadgets from AliExpress) to tower-defense about saving woods in Australia and Greta Thunberg. In the end, we stepped even beyond, and picked up “re-pair” for a project’s name.
You are a cupid, and your manager just asked you to watch over her animals for a couple of minutes. Animals won’t mate by themselves, and without your help will simply die from aging. So player needs to shoot poor bastards with love arrows so they will spawn new animals. Fun part starts right after first mismatched pair (which is fairly easy – took shooting mechanics from Worms series) – a newborn creature will have parts of both parents. So yes, you actually can create a giraffe with a goose head, or an elephant with ibis’s wings (may be it will even fly!). The more crazy pairs player create, the trickier is to keep a “clean” species.
As always, our asses were in flames no less than a jet’s afterburner. Almost without sleep, we worked day (on jam site) and night (café), nonstop. The team this time was so huge (8 people), we even had to split in a day and night groups.
But the hard work paid off – our project was one the best among other 30 on showcase, and on top of that, we won “Game of GGJ2020” at Moscow’s jam site IThub.
But truly, looking at happy faces of players is a best possible award, and for this, I must thank my team again. Guys, my hat’s off to you all.
-Links-
Our GGJ page:
https://globalgamejam.org/2020/games/re-pair-8-3
The most recent build you can grab here:
https://dividebyzer0.itch.io/re-pair
-Credits-
Nikita “teuz” Zhimkov – gamedesign, code
Georgy “R0ller” Yushkevich – gamedesign, audio
Dmitriy “Stranger” Troitskiy – code
Anton Jebrax – code
Nikita «Smi1ey» Dubatov – animation
Maria «Marry_mind» Prokopyeva – art
Maksim Sharamok – art assist
Nikita “DNK” Pavlov – gamedesign, direction
DevGAMM Moscow 2019
A major milestone for our team has been recently accomplished – we showcased and participated at SpeedGameDating at DevGAMM Moscow 2019!
The SGD went smoothly, despite the fact that I was a little bit nervous at the beginning. The rules are simple – you have to pitch your game in 3 minutes. After the nasty alarm bells, publishers switch their sits, and another round of pitching starts. Good thing that our little game caught an eye of so many publishers and investors.
The showcase went pretty good, too. We received tons of positive vibes about our game, from players, publishers, and in between. Some even said that Neon Climber is in top-5 mobile games of this DevGAMM. So cute! The only complain we have is about timing – the final list of games that will participate at DevGAMM was announced only 2 weeks prior to conference itself. And a major part of this time frame are holidays in Russia. So we almost burned our asses in a hurry to make promo materials (especially that huge poster).
Now, we need to do our homework based on showcase feedback, and drive further. And I can’t shake the feelin’ that something big is gonna happen very soon…just hope it will be a good thing.
Showcasing Neon Climber
Great news! A few days ago we participated in our first showcase! Nothing big, just a local event named #GamedevHouse, but still!
It was almost a disaster at the beginning. Me and Roller arrived at place and realized, that our table just near the center crossroad. Our neighbors already installed some fancy screens, set merchandise, hung branded wallpapers, you named it. And we got..well, two notebooks (one of them was my 10-years-old MBP with battery that died right on a night before the event) with looped alpha trailer, one iphone with 2 months old build of #NeonClimber (don’t ask why), some business cards, and our silly faces. Oh, almost forgot – we were absolutely sure that no one will bother about our game, so Rol took a switch with smash bros with him.
All of a sudden, one by one, people stopped before our table, looking at trailer, asking to play. I cant really describe how joyful these moments were – when complete strangers play in your game and they liked it. Some even returned to play more. No comments.
Of course, there were bugs, known and new ones, comments, critics, suggestions, everything. But overall, people liked mechanics and visuals.
Now, we are gathering it all together. The Release is nigh, I feel it.
P.S. Many thanks to hosts of the #GamedevHouse and to everyone who tried our little game! It really matters, especially for indie devs like ourselves.
Neon Climber – first gameplay trailer
We are still:
- Alive (not that it matters, but anyway)
- Working on Neon Climber
In fact, plenty of cool new features has been added for the past half year, so we decided to make a little video to demonstrate how the game looks and feels right now. Enjoy!
Now making – Neon Climber
Another year – another game. Meet Neon Climber – our very unique runner for iOS and Android about rogue programs looking for shiny stuff in cyberspace.
…I just hope that THIS time we will make it to His Majesty Release itself.
After countless protos and genius paper ideas, now we try to focus on something reeeeally simple. And what can be simpler than a mobile runner game? So we have: Physics-based world; Experimental controls; Combo of 2D/3D art with tricky animations; Characters with unique gameplay mechanics. What could possibly go wrong with this one?
The idea came from Metroid series. See, I’ve always dreamed about making own metroid-like game, but right now we are too lazy don’t have resources to do it. So we just took a little piece of Metroid mechanics to build a much simpler game on it – and thus, runner with walljumps has been born.
As for end of April 2018, the game is somewhere between alpha and beta stages. The core elements of art and gameplay have been set. What’s left is to add some more of everything, polish it, and call it a game.
KanobuGamesJam2017 – how it was
You know the most creative way to procrastinate over your long-run project (BYTE, in our case)? Of course, a gamejam! And then another one! And then..! Don’t worry, no one will blame you, because technically you are doing an important job – farming new experience in short terms, improving your gamedev skills and adding new ones.
So yeah, we did it again. A quite some time ago, actually: Kanobu GamesJam2017 was running from mid-March to mid-April. The theme was as dumb as usual and sounded like “No survive without physics”.
GGJ17 – how it was
According to the rules, coming to GGJ with team is pretty unwelcomed. So we were already mentally prepared to play the dramatic scene of “meeting” each other, when suddenly it turned out that the locals in timecafe GeekTime (which is a single location of GGJ in Moscow, which is a shame) has nothing against already formed bands. As a result, only a few (of about 30-40 people that made it to the Moscow GGJ) came alone, looking for a party.
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