It happened when I was in 8th grade. My beloved friend and I discussed the problem of the ozone layer of the Earth at breakfast in the school cafeteria, mentioning the negative impact of Elon Musk's developments on him. After a little thought, I said: "Well, since this very layer protects from cosmic radiation, can it be that when it is destroyed, people will turn into terrible mutants under its influence." To this thought, I received the following answer: "Well, what a good plot for a game like Fallout!" So we started developing the project The Sun Was Really Bright (TSWRB), calling ourselves DExit Games.
Coming to my house after school, or just walking in the evenings, we thought about the scenario of our game. We bought a lot of goodies, and then we sat down at the computer, opened Google Docs and wrote our amazing story. Probably, like any other novice developer, especially at such a young age, we did not have to doubt that we were trying to climb too high and simply would not pull such a project, but, probably, this approach is good because you are working on him incredibly motivated, without the slightest suspicion of failure. The plot was being written, time passed, and we slowly began to move on to preproduction. Since we live in the city of Norilsk, until recently there were serious problems with the Internet. I went to my grandmother's work and, using almost 3/4 of the traffic,allowed for her work for a month (about a gigabyte in total), downloaded video tutorials on Unity from various YouTube channels (mainly from the channel "Vladimir Svet Igrodelskiy"). Having skills in writing music (and my elementary music education after graduating from music school in the trumpet class), I made several tracks for the game, and our classmate, whom we connected to work on the art of the game, drew us a couple of concepts of mutants, which by today , unfortunately, have not survived, but the music and script are available:which we connected to the work on the art of the game, drew us a couple of mutant concepts, which, unfortunately, have not survived to this day, but the music and script are available:which we connected to the work on the art of the game, drew us a couple of mutant concepts, which, unfortunately, have not survived to this day, but the music and script are available:
Music and script
But still, almost a year later, it dawned on us that it was too ambitious and the development was stopped. Perhaps we will someday resurrect and release it!
After several months, I came to a pretty logical conclusion - I need to start with something simpler, for example, mobile games. Moony Games is born, and I become a lone independent developer (by the way, the name Moony was invented by my girlfriend (already a former). The eye fell on hyper-casual games, they are easy to develop, at the same time they perfectly train in understanding game design, and the mobile segment is full of available publishers and in general allows you to understand the marketing of your creations.After doing a small project, which I had not finished, but got enough experience in development on the Unity engine, I started to create a Helix Tree (Jumping Tree in the future).
For two months, along the way with learning some things in Unity, I devoted almost all my free time after the lessons to this project. There are no interesting implementations of game logic, however, as well as there is nothing interesting in the structure of the game.
And so, my mother gives me 2000 rubles, and I, having quickly dressed, fly out into the street in a severe frost (degrees, that was -30 ° was) and run to the nearest ATM to put this money on my card. I come back home and pay a $ 25 fee for the cherished Google Play account. Finally, my game will be in the store and all my friends and acquaintances will be able to play it!
After the release of the first version of the game, I decided to update it with more content. I added a third platform in the row, coins to buy balloon skins and slower boosters, by renaming the game to Jumping Tree, which became version 2.0 of Helix Tree. My friends and I even shot a small ad about this:
After the release of the game and its placement on the Publisher Wanted site, I began to receive letters from various publishers, but none of them managed to bring the matter to the publication of the game - I had too low Retention rates for them. I am currently working with another publisher who advised me on changes to the game to improve retention rates, and we will be running tests soon. Hopefully something will come of it!
The next chapter in the life of Moony Games was Spooky Croocky. It was invented by me in history class already in the 9th grade and is fully described on paper, down to the frames of the gameplay and character design.
In the summer of that year (2019), I was vacationing with my uncle in Moscow, and he decided to introduce me to his acquaintance, a programmer who once worked at their institution. I went a long way and finally found myself at a very nice house. The same acquaintance, Vlad, rang the doorbell. Vlad created the Conundrum AI company, which is engaged in the implementation of machine learning and AI for production in various countries. I learned the answers to my questions about programming, took over from them experience in serious software business and real work of programmers.
My story about my doing games inspired them so much that they decided to "sponsor" me and gave me $ 100 to register an Apple developer account. So at that time the 15-year-old kid was given money by a company cooperating with Nvidia.
The next point of my trip was Kaliningrad, where I stayed with my grandmother, and at the same time went to DevGamm Talks.
I decided to make shooting advertisements for games a tradition and once, when I was on the bus, I literally came up with an advertisement in the same way, with inspiration (in general, it almost always happens to me that I immediately present the whole product and then I start selling and cutting like a diamond, yo)
Thus, I improved my skills in another area of interest to me - filming and directing.
We now move on to the next and main chapter of my story, to this day.
In the same summer, I came up with the file547 project, the main feature of which in favor of the immersiveness of the game was that you seem to be holding in your hands not your phone, but the one found according to the plot of the game. This project has become the most ambitious and large-scale, the highest quality of all that I have been involved in.
A game in the quest / interactive film / action genres implies rather high requirements for direction, music, picture and general cinematography, which just match my intentions to reach a new level.
file547 is a new experience in the mobile quest genre. Try on the image of an explorer of someone else's life and reveal all the secrets of a powerful company, find file547 ...
The main character of the game (you) finds a phone on the street. Digging inside it, you find out that this is not an ordinary device at all - it belongs to an employee of the world's largest conglomerate, who controls everything and everyone. Here begins an adventure full of mysteries and dangers, as a result of which you will decide the future fate of the public
There are cutscenes in the game, which is generally a rarity for mobile games, although initially they were all supposed to be filmed using real actors, which I could not pull due to the capabilities of the equipment, so I hired an artist and she rendered them.
It also becomes my first experience in more or less serious 3D gameplay.
There is also a gameplay video of the game on my YouTube channel:
This is the story of my gamedev journey at the age of 16. If you are interested in file547, then I invite you to the VK community of the game:
file547 - VK community