So, the game were released, and here is the release trailer!
Alongside Steam release I prepared a special "Black Flag edition" version of the game that you can find on ITCH and torrents. It is exactly the same as the base game, except for a little surprise (nothing malicious, just a bit of extra content).
Why I am doing this? I was pirating games since I were a kid due to my mother being poor. Now I am even more poor than she was, and rarely can afford to buy a game. But gaming always was one of the few good things in my life, and probably one of the reasons why I am still living. Also, I have a strong belief that every person on this planet should have access to art regardless of their financial situation.
This is why I made all my previous games completely free, and why I made free version of my first commercial game. You have no money, or not sure if it’s worth it? Go ahead and try it for free, you can always buy it later in case if you like it. And if you will help spread it on other torrent sites (since I mostly use local ones and hardly know global ones), or just share information about the game where you can, so more people will be able to try it out – I will be very grateful for that, since my main goal is not to earn, but to make people laugh and have a good time. And if some of them will decide to pay me back – they know where to look. My marketing strategy is to make game that’s good enough for some players to want to pay for it even after playing for free.
A bit more details about game itself:
Isekaing is a parody musical adventure\vn mix, with some RPG elements. Project originally started as a bunch of comedic sketches within the game engine, and slowly evolved, gaining story, better visuals and original songs.
Unfortunately, this game is not for everyone. There are no combat except two scenes needed for the story. Most of the time you will listen to dialogues or songs, and sometimes – look for stuff or solve a few easy puzzles. So people who require a lot of action to enjoy the game should probably avoid it.
Good stuff:
So what makes this game special? Humor. I always liked parody or comedy games, and finally decided to make my own. Here, you can expect to find unrelentless satire similar to South Park, where everything and anything can and will be made fun of, mixed with absurd humor similar to Deponia, where no logic or reason will stand in the way of our heroes, and spiced up with a bit of dark humor on top. Majority of the jokes are aimed at RPG games (both pc and tabletop), but other genres present as well as movies, anime, books, and even some of the real-world events (mostly related to gamedev). I tried to keep the main story funny without any additional knowledge, but there are a TON of easter eggs for the keen eye to notice. Be warned, though - jokes here don't walk on eggshells, and are not for easily offended people.
On top of that there will be music. There are 53 total tracks in game’s soundtrack, 18 of them have lyrics (others are BGM), and 11 of them are in the game (7 remaining ones are either bonus tracks or alternative versions). Funny, sad, epic, melancholic or lively – I did not focus on specific mood or genre and tried to give each character a unique song that would reflect the personality. Was I successful with that? It’s up for you to decide. Also, you can use soundtrack for your projects without asking me, just don’t forget to credit.
It’s not all sunshine and giggles though. There are… moderately dark moments in the game. Nothing extreme or gory, but the "grimdark" tag are there for a reason. For me it just felt that I reached good level of contrast between game not taking itself seriously and suddenly adding the heat to the drama boiler. Overall, it kinda reflects my current realities, when I just wave my hand towards another shahed drone flying over my house, and resuming development process because game will not make itself. I feel like if things are bad - it's a lot better to joke about it instead of being consumed by sadness, and that drama goes well along with comedy.
Bad stuff:
The game is short, and, while I tried my best to avoid that – sometimes not very impressive visually. I am a writer, without ability to program or draw, so I focused my skills on parts where it made the biggest difference. It does not mean that I ignored the rest – I spent weeks on creating certain scenes, months to make songs sound perfectly, and once even entire day just to make elevator doors open, and close after character walks in.
Since game were originally just a bunch of comedy sketches, story here is a bit of afterthought. It should be entertaining enough for it's genre, but do not expect some kind of masterpiece from it. As a writer, it makes me a bit sad, but i had only enough resources to focus on one thing, and since i already did serious stories before - this time I chose the humor to challenge my limits.
Also, VA in certain places is less than ideal and there might be typos (the ones that evaded many tests) and sometimes – unusual phrase structure due to my imperfect English skill.
Considering all that I decided to focus on quality instead of quantity, reducing game’s total length in order to make it look and sound better. Removing the combat was also a difficult decision, but default combat are probably bored everyone to death already, and since I could not make a better one – I decided that having no combat is better than bad combat.
Overall, it’s still an indie game with lots of stuff that could be better, but you can expect a certain level of quality that places it above majority of RM games. But quantity suffered because of that.
Here is some clips from the game with random jokes:
A bunch of references -
Dangers of being a druid -
Worm from outter space -
Can chest exist without treasure?
Typical mage gameplay -
Also, here is an example of song from the game -
Now, will tell a bit of my development journey.
I have a broken mind. Still not sure what exactly is wrong since psychiatry in Ukraine are not the best, especially free one (the only i can afford). I can't understand most people, complicated tech things, also my memory is bugged: i really quickly forget everything i am not interested at, and majority of things in this world are not interesting to me. I had a lot of problems with education because of that, and even more - in finding what to do in this world. I tried a lot of things but all of them felt pointless and boring for me. And since i also have physical disability it limited amount of things i could try.
Then i found the interactive storytelling, and it was perfect. I enjoyed creating stories and characters even before that, but all of my creations seemed very mediocre to me, and only when i tried video games i understood that the thing i always missed were variety of storytelling instruments. Only trough combining text, audio, video and interactive elements i coud create stories that felt meaningful and satisfying for me.
I started learning gamedev, and despite having limited sucsess with various level editors (tenchu, warcraft, cs and homm) my memory issues not allowed me to learn two of the most important skills in gamedev - programming and drawing.
First, i tried to compensae that by joining various teams. But every single one of them had members disappearing and teams falling apart. Max they ever produced were early trailer. Then i got lucky and after nearly 5 years of work with an artist we released our first RPG game on Steam. It gained mostly positive feedback but never became widely known because i had no idea how to market games and just... put it out and that's it.
Sadly, my partner were busy irl and could not dedicate more time to make games, so i was alone again. I made a big mistake of trying to join teams once more, since the result were as before, even in cases where i was paid for the job (but those were rare).
I also always kept the attempts to find a job in commercial team, but i also think that it was a mistake, because as my experience tells me now - to get a job of the writer in big teams connections and ability to present yourself matter far more than your skill. Thousands of letters send by me to various developers were mostly unanswered, the only time i had a test task is when i contacted one of the few developers from my country, team behind Stalker, but eventually they found someone with more experience for that job.
Then depression kicked in really hard and my health generally became much worse, so i don't really remember what i was doing, probably playing some games and selling game currency to afford at least food for myself and my cats. My creativity also dwindled - before i could come up with at least bunch of brilliant ideas every year, but after i felt lucky if i had at least one. There were a lot of doctor visits in attempts to fix myself that ended up nowhere. I also made one mini-game but it was super small and i only posted it in one sub, so just a bunch of people knows about it's existence.
Somwhere in the middle of that i started making sketches for the comedy game - the genre i never worked with before, but always wanted to try. I had so few reasons to smile in my life, so the possibility of making someone else smile or even laugh seemed very appealing to me. But when my country were attacked and everything became even more of a shitshow than it usually is, I felt even worse than before and completely forgot about the project, as well as temporarily lost interest to creation. Then I was busy making deeply personal project (basicly a summary of my life and feelings about this world in form of a visual novel) that nobody would care about because I felt like I will not make another game anymore.
But nearly year ago, during the previous autumn I finally found antidepressants that had a bit of effect on me, and felt desire to create again. Even more – I dared to make another attempt to step into the parody genre that I have zero experience with, even despite the fact that my sense of humor was often considered weird by people I interacted with, and that games of this genre are considered as extreme niche. So i took the few sketches that i worked on before and started turning them into actual game.
While i developed this game solo, i were not alone. With help of my friend I once again learned basic photoshopping to increase quality of the visuals. Then, kind person from reddit offered help with Steam publishing, and another person from steam forum helped solve technical problems i faced. Also, I am really grateful for all people from official RM forum who helped me with code, resources and advise. This game would not be made without help of all of those people.
Also, despite facing difficulties with unability to program or draw, this time it was easier because i learned to search a workarounds, and also new tools became available to ease the job. As i mentioned before - my friend helped me to refresh my graphic editting skills so i could make simple edits and personalize certain assets for my needs, or even sometimes make more complicated things like creating one picture from several elements from other pictures. Also RM community had a gigantic amount of assets - both free and paid, that i could use in my project. Finally, the AI services worked almost perfectly for my needs, and, among other things - allowed me to make my game fully voiced, with some of the characters having such emotional range that there is no way to tell that it were actually generated.
Somewhere in the middle of the development I thought "hey, I like the musicals, and always wanted to make one… so why not do it now? ". And just like that I switched to writing and implementing songs – one of the cool aspects of solo dev is that you can dramatically alter your project because you want to. Now almost every major character in my game had their own song, with various genres and thematics. Some of them took months to create, but i do not regret doing that - the result ended up being a lot better than i ever could expect to make without any prior knowledge. And that made my game even more niche because musicals are a genre that are as much rare as parody. People told me that I am crazy to even considering doing something like that. And I agreed with them, but it’s not the first time I swim against the current.
Then, a question of self-censoring arrived. Since my game were part satirical, i could not pass the chance to joke about all of the things that are oftenly discussed in gaming community, and knew that i might get attacked by people who take parodies too serious and personal. But making a censored parody is like making a chockolate bar without chokolate. And i decided that i will write jokes about anything and everything i could think about - mostly it were RPG games (both digital and tabletop), but a lot of other subjects were present as well: different game genres, movies, anime, and even certain irl events.
This year were also crazy so far. At the start of it I had to give up on playing video games at all or development of this game would be very, very long, and considering what’s going on around me I wasn’t sure that I have a lot of time. Only once I made a day off for myself to visit the beach and swim for a while. I went through remaking some of the locations and songs from scratch because I was not satisfied with the output. Got new illnesses, lost some of my cats, faced lots of legal issues regarding Steam publishing, and failed even promotional attempt that I tried, yet here I am… releasing the game only a few months later than planned. At least i still can get things done. And I had a lot of fun bringing this world to life, once again seeing how scenes that previously existed only in my mind are taking shape, sometimes even exactly as I wanted them to be.
This time, i decided to try going commercial for the first time, since my health are in ruins, my mother are in debts, and there was no hope to find any other job that i could do with my disabilities - and i need to live at least long enough to take care about remaining cats and give them a good life. But at the same time releasing paid game after years of pirating felt... wrong. I always wanted everyone to be able to play my games regardless of their finances. So i decided on compromise: apart from paid-only Steam release of game and it's soundtrack, i also made a ITCH release with optional payment, and completly free torrent release, and also asked the pirate community to share it. More than that - i made a 3 versions of pirate hymn that i put into those versions of game, just to give people a bit of personalized experience)
I did it because i do not believe that piracy can actually hurt a good game - if people will enjoy it and they have the money, they will support the developer, and if they don't have money - they can't pay anyway so nothing bad will happen if they play for free. So i aimed to make a game that good that people would want to pay for even after playing for free, and i can say even now that it's worked, some people really came to steam after trying the pirated version.
However, apart from that decicion i'm once again failed with marketing because i do not understand it. I think it's my biggest weakness, since i never bought anything from promotions and i do not know why people do that. So i tried to just inform players about my game's existence on various subreddits, but found out that majority of them do not allow to post your own creations. And those that do allow often refuse to post anyway simply because they want to, like gaming sub. Also i tried to send keys to people who played simillar themed comedy games - South Park, Deponia, Zenith, Dungeon of Naheulbeuk, but it seems like only one person recorded walktrough so far. Overall i see that reviews of the game is mostly positive, but i still haven't hit the 10 to form the reviev score, mostly because reviews from key activations do not count towards total score. And i am not sure what else i can do to let the world about the game out.
But, as a solo developer, who also make a triple-niche game i never expected it to be big. The most important thing is that people enjoyed it, and it means that i was able to make them smile, i made something good even despite all the flaws in my body and mind. Now i can finally rest a bit and play few games made by other people. Or maybe go swim once more. And then i will try to move my games to the other platforms like Deck, Linux, maybe even mobile. I know nothing about those platforms, but i guess it's always worth a try to expand the audience? And then... i don't know. Most likely i will try to make something else because it's one of few things in this life that i can understand, and also one of the few things that can bring me joy.
Thanks for reading.
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