Hello everyone.
We have already posted here before, but for those who don’t remember us, we are a small team of a few people who, without knowing anything about video games, started this ambitious project, and now we finally have a steam page. I would like to share here a few thoughts about what we learnt, what we should have done better, and how far in the process we are now.
You can read more about the game on our itch.io page or on Steam.
PREMISE
System Under Surveillance (S.U.S. or SUS for short, either work for us) is a singleplayer stealth game with no combat system and no health bar. In SUS, you control two characters: a young ordinary boy named Adam, and his old companion robot, TURBO. After a mysterious car chase involving his adoptive mother, Adam finds himself stranded in a desolate dystopian city, on the run from an army of robots who are trying to capture him.
GAMEPLAY
Because Adam is just an ordinary boy, and TURBO is an old robot assistant, you stand no chance against the enemies physically. Instead, you need to use the unique abilities of each characters to trick the enemies, hide from them and evade difficult situation, solving clever puzzles, etc. You can switch between the two characters at any time, unless they have been captured.
With TURBO, you can:
- hover above holes and reach new areas;
- transform into a metallic ball, and travel through tight spaces and pipes to to trick enemies
- create a powerful electric current by spinning in place, temporarily disabling nearby terminals
With Adam, you can:
- take control of enemies, open doors, disable security systems;
- use ordinary items to distract enemies;
- gain power ups and use gadgets to solve minigames and puzzles ;
NO COMBAT OR HEALTH SYSTEM
System Under Surveillance replaces the ordinary health system with a threat level. This system will immerse you in the story, making you feel just like an ordinary boy who can succeed only outsmarting the enemies. Stay undetected to keep the threat level low, or get detected to make enemies follow you, and trick them to reach restricted areas. The threat level will decrease if you hide and escape. If one of the characters gets caught, you’ll be able to use the other one to free them.
STORYTELLING
In SUS we want to present the story through a carefully curated pixel art comic book. Exploring the game will allow you to find secrets, and uncover the missing pages of the comic book, revealing who caused the accident and why deadly robots are after you.
WHAT WE LEARNT DURING THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
Here, I would like to share with you a few things we learnt, often the hard way, during the development process.
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keep the game small. Chances are you are overestimating already your capabilities, especially if you’re working on your first project. It is always easier to scale up, than to scale it down. We had no idea what we were doing at the beginning. We had the game idea in mind, but did not know how to develop it. So when we started the project, the game we wanted to create was much bigger and ambitious than now. Throughout development, we had to scale the project down several times, which was not easy and set us back months. The most important thing we learnt is our own limitations as a team. You need to find your own limitations too, and accept them.
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time. There is never going to be enough enough time, that’s why you have to keep the project small. It’s not enough to work on programming, there is also level design, game design, animations, storytelling, and a billion other things. But the most important thing is marketing, you need to spend time showing your game around. And we are not marketing experts, and chances are neither are you.
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money. We started the project as a hobby, and we did not take it seriously until we started receiving positive feedback. Once that happened, we made some tough decisions. It was difficult to balance the university, part time jobs, game development, and free time as well. Again, had we kept the project small, this would have been easier.
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you will face technical limitations, either due to the game engine you’ll use, or because your skills are not good enough yet. Put your pride aside, don’t waste weeks or months trying to find a solution for that specific problem. Instead, work around it. Find an alternative that will take you days instead. Maybe it won’t be as cool and good as you want it, but at least you’ll be able to finish the game. We spent three months trying to build our own pathfinding algorithm. It was a mistake.
I hope these tips will be useful to someone here, because I see a lot of new and inexperience developers having great ideas, yes, but also way too ambitions for a beginner. And, if you’d like to follow us here on itch.io or add the game to your wishlist on Steam, that would mean a lot to us!
Feel free to ask any question!
