Devlog: Entry 2

Today I want to share with you my story of creating Survive to Save. The game is being developed by two people from Latvia - a husband and wife. Budget - 0. To begin with, let's go very far back into the past.

How the desire to create my own game was born

Kaveori: One day I came to my cousin's birthday party. The gift they got him was extremely strange - a so-called computer. He was screaming with joy, and I was seeing this miracle of nature for the first time. My cousin didn't get flustered and immediately taught me everything: "You need to register an email... Now you can play!" He downloaded and launched a game called Mu Online. That's when my eyes popped out of my head. Every time we came to visit, I couldn't tear myself away from his computer. And when he showed me RollerCoaster Tycoon - I secretly sat up all night playing it. From that moment on, the only thing my mom heard from me was: "buy me a computer." Even though it didn't happen right away, she did buy it. Along with a few games. Those were Caesar III and Riddle of the Sphinx. And later The Sims appeared in my life. That's when my mind completely went off the rails. It was at this very time that a burning desire to create my own game appeared, and it followed me throughout my entire life.

Bziks: Back in the days of GPRS, when wap-games were popular, I liked one such game. I had absolutely no idea what programming was, I thought back then that if I copied all the pages of the game, I would be able to edit anything I wanted in it. But it turned out that it doesn't work that way, and I had to dive into the world of Web.

The first attempt

Kaveori: I continued playing games and at the same time I was learning new things. One day I had my own server for Mu Online, and then for Counter-Strike 1.6. I was creating a website for them and persistently studying html and css. Everything was working out until the moment I touched php. What kind of monster is this? After numerous attempts, books, and even outside help, I realized that programming is not for me. At that time I had my own anime website. And it seemed like I could do and knew everything. Especially considering its popularity. That's when I decided to try creating a game based on my favorite anime, Naruto. Browser games were insanely popular. And on the internet you could find tons of game constructors. That's where I started. I created a thread on one of the forums dedicated to game creation, and one programmer guy agreed to help me. As a result, I did what I'm better at - graphics, and he was programming. A lot of work was done, and it seemed like the release of the game was just around the corner. But we were growing up, and real life kicked the door open. There was no more time, energy, or desire to do anything.

Bziks: Over time I realized that programming is something difficult and not for me. So I found a community for game development, learned about game constructors, and the first successful attempts were - small games on a constructor that allowed making a 2D JRPG with lots of dialogues. After a while I wanted to dive deeper into programming and started with Flash 2.0. That was the time when this technology was at the very beginning of its decline. A few years later it disappeared, and HTML5 replaced it. During this time I managed to create a few small Flash scenes with various effects and sets of scripts for games. But understanding that the technology was disappearing, I decided to return to Web and make various browser games. They were quite popular at that time, and they were diverse.

The second attempt

Kaveori: After a long time, the guy who had agreed to help me with the game came to be called - husband. And my desire to create my own game was getting stronger and stronger. Well, since now he wasn't just anyone, but my husband - I made another attempt. Survival on a desert island. It seemed not difficult, and the game was of a small type. The only thing was that my ambitions got the better of me. I wanted the island to be generated randomly. It turned out I wanted too much, and the project was also abandoned. After that, for very many years, I locked my desires in a cage.

Bziks: I got a good chance to work on creating a browser game from scratch, and after its release I had a huge amount of experience that contained one truth - creating games is hard. So when I came across a thread on the forum about a girl trying to create a browser game, I wanted to help her. So that she wouldn't step on the same rakes I had managed to gather. And so my story with my future wife began. My wife and I tried to implement games of various complexity, but because we had big ambitions, almost all the games shut down due to difficulties in implementation. But after a while I realized the limits of my abilities, and we decided to put away the childhood dream of having our own full-fledged game in a far drawer.

The finale

Kaveori: Over time I realized that I was very dependent on my husband. I always wanted to create something incredibly complex, and all the workload fell on him. Then I started thinking, what can I do on my own? Without his help. I needed to simplify everything. For me this is incredibly difficult. A seemingly elementary thing came to mind. A text-based game! All you need is to write. Write a lot. I'm not a writer, of course, but why not try. And so I started studying this niche. My husband found free editors for me where you could create a story. The more I sat in them and wrote, the more I realized that this isn't even 10% of what I want. These editors were terribly inflexible. The games they made came out boring and linear. Hearing and seeing my outrage, he sat down to coding again. Within a few days I received an editor that was a hundred times better than all the others. And so Survive to Save was born.

Bziks: After some time, my wife decided to create a game on her own, without my help. After watching what she was doing for a bit, I figured that in this case it would be possible to create an editor that would suit her concept, but at the same time would allow making games in other genres too. Overall, the idea turned out to be not complicated, essentially a text editor with the ability to switch between pages. But that was only the beginning, over time the editor's capabilities only expanded, but that's another story.

Right now the editor is practically completely ready, and it can do things that I couldn't even dream of at the start. I'll tell you about it in the next post.

I hope you found it interesting!

Čau, čau.