Can you tell us about your game and how did you come up with the premise?
"My Whole Family's Dead" is a retro style pixel adventure game where you play as a little boy stuck in a time loop, frantically trying to get his family out of the house before a meteor hits. This was a submission for a game jam competition hosted by SoloDevelopment on itch.io. I mostly used this game jam as an excuse to have some fun with my creative friends and highlight their strengths. We had Joey on art and Jacob on writing.
What role did you have while making this game?
I lead the project, mostly focused on programming and building in the engine but found myself working on a little bit of everything. Things like editing story/dialogue, making art, animating and level design.
Can you tell us about your process in creating a game “The End is Near” in one weekend?
With every game jam competition, you're typically given a theme you have to build your game around. At 2pm on Friday, the theme was announced "End is Near" and we had until Monday 2pm to submit a game. I usually struggle for a few hours on the idea part but this time it came to us almost immediately. We're actually starting work on a larger game that has a very similar concept. It can be a real challenge to see if your game ideas are any fun until you actually have something in front of you to play, so this game jam was the perfect opportunity to make a quick prototype and get some great feedback. It was stressful at times trying to get the game completed in under 72 hours but we had a blast working on it and all the feedback we got is going to help us in our next project.
What was the most challenging task you had in the developing process?
For me it was probably just making sure everything was locked down, as in the player can't do anything they're not supposed to. Each room in the game has a lot of different moving parts to keep track of and with heavy time constraints as well as all the other tasks I was working on, it can be very easy to miss something. Luckily for me I spent a lot of time breaking AAA games for fun when I was a kid so I got pretty good at sniffing out exploits or holes in the logic.
What game made you want to start creating games?
I wouldn't say there's a single game that made me want to start game development. There definitely have been a few that inspired me. Games from the Fallout or The Elder Scrolls series, Dark Souls, Bioshock. I'm very drawn to games with interesting open worlds and I tend to dwell longer in them if they're RPGs that let me craft my own character and play as whoever I want to be. I would very much like to make games like that someday.
If you were talking to someone who is wanting to start creating games but doesn’t know where to begin, what is the best piece of advice you could give?
I cannot stress this enough. Start simple. You might have a lot of awesome ideas but games take a long time to make and if you're just starting out, your first game should be basic and short. Think like Pac-Man or Flappy Bird. It will always be more work than you anticipated and I think that's what kills motivation and causes a lot of new devs to give up.
What are your top 3 video game soundtracks?
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
BioShock
Fallout 3
Where can we find your game and you at? (This is where you can post any and all links! Promote yourself)
https://sabenstudios.com
https://sabenstudios.itch.io
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