INMOST Dev Blog #1: Once upon a time…

The story begins like many others: I always liked drawing and I liked games — so much I wanted to create them. I never dreamed you could actually earn a living doing things you really like doing. Everyone I knew worked where they could, not where they wanted.

So I followed their example and went to college, studied a major I didn’t much care for, graduated and took whatever job was available. I ended up as an IT technician in a government institution running cables, purging viruses, updating the website… that kind of stuff.

I hated getting out of bed before sunrise, waiting at the station in the blizzard (I’m from Russia, where blizzards are a permanent feature), taking the bus rammed with grizzlies and other dumb animals.

There is one upside of a well-regulated life — as long as everything runs smoothly, you get extra time for yourself. Remembering how I used to love to draw at school, I decided to give it another shot and sneaked Photoshop onto one of the PCs at work.

Back then social media games were taking off. Browsing them one day, I came across a remake of an old DOS game called “Alchemy”, a game about combining basic elements to create new stuff, and then trying new combinations to discover more. Earth + water gave swampland, air + fire gave lightning, lightning + swampland finally created life.

The game was just text on tiles, so I wrote a message to the developer, suggesting I draw some icons to replace the text.

To be honest, my drawing skills weren’t up to it, and the icons looked awful.

But the most important thing was that… the players liked them. And so I realized: there was something else to do in life, something that I enjoyed.

I decided to try to create something of my own. I went to the message boards and posted that I was looking for a programmer to make a flash game — they were all the rage back then. I had no idea, however, how they got distributed or how people made money off them, or whether you could even make money off them at all! Anyway, “who cares?” I thought, I just wanted to create a game.

I got a swift response from a programmer, Andriy Vinchkovskiy. We’ve been working together for 8 years now. I got lucky from the get-go because Andriy really understood the flash game market and had already developed a few projects with pretty good sales and feedback, even getting offers for new projects.

The business strategy was simple: you created a game to order and put it up for grabs. Guys from various flash game websites assessed the projects and offered you flat fee to put your game on their site. It was like an auction, really.

After a couple of projects I realized that even a poor excuse for a game (we were beginners — what do you expect?) was bringing in more moolah than my day job. I was living with my parents in a small flat, making roughly $300 a month, so I quit my job and devoted myself entirely to games.

The market was booming; whatever game we came up with proved viable. After a while we even managed to create a couple of pretty decent games that I still like. One of them was “Back to Zombieland” (our first and only pixel art game until INMOST) and another was “Disease Warrior” (the one I had initially hunted a programmer for; we were too busy with contract work, so it took us three years to finish it). You can probably still find them and play them, if your browser supports Flash Player.

Sadly, though, very few teams manage to strike it rich with their first (or second, or, well, ANY) project and get set for life. Probably no more than a dozen. One in a million chance.

And when you move out from your parents, you’ve got bills to pay, you’ve got a wife, you’ve got kids… you need a steady income. Gamedev is no hobby and you can’t just put in a dozen hours a week on it.

It’s not some magical dream job, you really have to work at it to get any results. I mean, yeah, it’s great when you love what you do, when you enjoy the process, but the job can still be quite hard as well.

And even working hard doesn’t guarantee you won’t be back slaving for some mundane office, store, or factory job someday soon. I’ve seen dozens of cases like that among friends and colleagues. Every year, disenchanted with game development, another pal closes down their studio and goes back to work for a salary to feed their family.

It was a bit easier in the flash games era. Still, some genres are always more popular than the others. It’s always been the case, and a big favourite has always been the “Match 3” format. We made a lot, A LOT of Match 3 games.

They were good games. Or most of them were. At least I hope so.

I tried to do my best, even doing contract work. Putting in that extra mile to ship a game. A bit more animation than necessary; a few extra mechanics; higher quality graphics, etc. I did love my work (if not the games I worked on), and it showed! We always had contracts, with clients coming back and we were never sitting on our hands waiting for the next job.

Years went by, and the flash (and then the html5) game market took a sharp nosedive. At some point we realized we were only making a living churning out casual games for other people and we had completely forgotten about the games we really wanted to make. Outsourcing work brought in so little money we could barely get by: as soon as one project was delivered, we had to get going on a new one. It wasn’t because of our standard of living, like when last year’s yachts go out of fashion, we’d have to cough up for the latest model. Obviously, not.

By then Andriy and I had been working together for about six years, paying ourselves minimal salaries. If we just had closed up shop and started at the bottom of the ladder in other game dev companies, we could have been earning twice as much. So we wound up locked into a vicious cycle of endless Match 3 development.

There was no end in sight; I grew more depressed every day. Many nights I woke up in a cold sweat, unable to go back to sleep till morning, tormented by the fact that there were people counting on me and I had no idea what to do.

No alternative options. No new contracts. We continued to pay salaries (and taxes) for our studio until we ran out of whatever money we had saved when business was booming. Occasional contract work failed to cover even the costs of running the studio for the duration of a project. As time went by, this started to happen more often.

A couple of years before we had moved from Russia to Vilnius in Lithuania — so closing the studio not only meant losing the company I had dedicated years of my life to, to to stay in Vilnius we had to have work visas. So no work = no visas for us. That would have meant moving back to my folks’ place in the small town where everyone knew everyone else at 30 years old with a family.

When the endless stream of kitsch visuals and crazy colours got too much to bear, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine something I would like to be making instead. Like, here and now, not at some point in the future.

All of us have a secret project we’re hoping to achieve one day when we have enough time and energy. The game of our dreams. Our life’s desire. That we work through in those sleepless hours before dawn, detailing every single feature. The idea of the game itself is enough to make us feel a tiny bit happier.

I had no initial plan to get anything started; my depression and the fight to save the studio had taken it out of me. Still, I felt a responsibility, so I examined the question and drew up a pool of ideas to elaborate on later. A few key points for the visuals. A brief description of the game world. I had no plot yet, but I did have an idea of the feelings the game could convey. I picked up some game design elements from the games I enjoyed playing. It was like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle from dozens of different ideas with no box to look at the picture.

I scrolled through hundreds of references, drew dozens of sketches; dumped what I didn’t like, redrew the rest; dumped again, redrew again. Ended up with a few very rough drafts for locations, which I then combined into a small game map.

I started thinking about the puzzles and the design for the first few minutes of the game. What the first enemy would look like? The first NPC? Those early emotions the players might feel?

Over the next month I created a few dozen static environmental sprites. Created a hundred frames of animation for the main character, for no other reason than that I liked working with animation. I reworked the locations again, increasing the level of detail. Added extra animations for the backgrounds, the grass, the wind in the leaves. A multitude of small details most players won’t even notice. An utter waste of time. But this was exactly the work I wanted to do.

One full month had passed since our last contract’s completion and there were no new work offers, I had mostly given up looking for them anyway. We’d run out of money, the last salaries were paid, and the studio was on track to close by the end of the month. I accepted it. I was barely interested in anything. Wasting my time making animations for a dark pixel-art game which didn’t exist. No engine, zero lines of code. Just a bunch of sprites I’d made because I liked making them. But for the first time in years I was happy with what I was working on. So happy I stopped caring about my family’s and my own future. Total immersion, you know.

That is where INMOST began.