Dec 25 2015

Interview with Isaac Vejvoda, Developer of The Adventures of Tree

Back with an interview, this time with The Adventures of Tree developer Isaac Vejvoda. This game is in its Early Access stage, so you can see whats its like to develop a first game, and the process it took to get on Steam and find people to play the game. This is the first interview with a non-mobile developer, so maybe they will have some different insight, or something different to share than a mobile developer, read the interview to find out!

Check out their website to learn more about the game!

Tell me a bit about yourself, and how you started developing games?

I’m just an indie developer trying to compete with all the other content out there and make fun interesting games that people actually enjoy. I started making the Adventures of Tree back in January [of 2015]. One day I was just playing games and doing nothing particularly interesting, when I got to thinking: Why do these games claim to have multiple endings and story branching? None of them, as far as I could tell, even had choices, let alone multiple endings. So I thought, why not make a multiple choice game? I’m always playing them, but none seem to actually live up to their stories. And thus began the journey of making a game. Well, learning to make a game. I started doing research trying to figure out how to actually get an idea into a game. It wasn’t pretty… But then, my older brother saw me fooling around in Unity and said: “Wow, that’s bad…” He was referring to the art I had made myself. And it was bad. So from that day on, he started making the art and the work on The Adventures of Tree began.

Can you quickly walk me through the process you have taken with The Adventures of Tree so far?

Like how we got on Steam?

First we had to buy a Steam Greenlight account to post our game into Steam’s Greenlight pages, then we had to post announcements regularly to keep people interested. We also had to work really hard to get our game prepared for our Early Access release date so that the community would be able to play the game without having to wait for tons of time. We’ve also had to do a fair bit of PR to get our game even slightly visible on the internet.

How about before that? What did you do after you first got the idea? And where did you take it from there, all the way until it was on Steam?

Ahh, I see, good question.

Well, the first thing we did was start experimenting around with graphics and story-line. We actually ended up with something that looked a lot like a hand-drawn wolverine at first, but then scrapped it after we experimented a little further and got Tree. Next we had to actually implement all this into our game, and I, having no experience with programming before this, had to do a lot of researching/learning so I could actually add the things my brother was drawing. Fortunately though, Unity is well-documented, so I was able to learn a lot through their tutorials/forums.

Can you give me an overview of what the game is about?

The game is about Tree. He is an ordinary guy who the player can help define. They could make him helpful, kind, mean, etc…

We also made many choices for the player so they can pick what they would like to do. The main goal though, is to save your island from the Evil invaders: Florps. You can already do this multiple ways, and we are making more as the game developers.

Description:

When evil creatures known as “Florps” burst forth from the island’s core, a lone Adventurer Named “Tree” must put an end to their destruction.

Explore the large Open World in this RPG, survival, exploration/adventure game.

Throughout the game you will have to make decisions that will affect what ending you get when completing the game.

The game is open world and there are many secrets to be found on the island of Formagetus.

This game also has a survival aspect and players will have to buy or find food for their character or face starvation.

If you enjoy 2d platform games, or just are up for exploring the hand drawn scenery, then this game is for you!

What has been the most challenging part about this whole game development process?

Figuring out a way to code for hours on end and keep my hands warm… Just kidding although that was pretty challenging. The hardest part was probably the save game feature. At first the game did not save. If you died, you had to restart from the beginning, which could take quite a bit of time depending on how far into the game you were. Another huge challenge was making the branching story-line. When you have tons of different options, it gets hard to make sure it all works together properly without breaking anything.

And on the other side, what has been the most fun part about this?

I really enjoy polishing the game. Getting base content there is one thing, but then going and making it better-than-average is actually really enjoyable for me. Another thing I really love is interacting with the community and doing PR (public relations) work, adding content the users want and reading reviews/watching videos about the game. It always motivates me when I see a review or a new post in the Steam forums.

What are you future plans with your game? Where do you see it going?

We plan on developing the game until we have something amazing and driven by the community. We try to include the community as much as possible and work on things they want. So we will be working on the game until it has quite a few more endings, the entire world is complete and all features requested by the community are added. We have also been discussing adding multiplayer, but nothing is final yet.

Is there anything about yourself or the game you still want to share? What would you tell players on the edge about buying your game that would push them over that edge?

I would tell any players that are apprehensive to buy the game, to go for it. Not just because they would be helping support indie developers, but because they would be able to help shape the game. We’ve already implemented many features suggested by the community and are constantly doing it more and more. You will also get a real RPG experience: There are multiple endings, tons of quests and piles of weapons for the player to fight enemies with. The soundtrack is also quite awesome. 🙂

Thanks for doing this interview with me, it has been a pleasure!

😀