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about The Mims from the beginning
It started back in secondary school after watching the Shrek movie
and thinking it would be cool to do something like that.
Later I began playing around with editing short films, 3D graphics for animation
and then it somehow turned into graphics for games.
I worked with a couple of small teams where we did stuff for free,
just for fun. Later it went bigger and now I am working on The Mims.
I posted on the polish internet forum Warsztat, a place for game developers to talk
that I am looking for a programmer to make a game,
since I am just a graphic artist and have little to do with writing code.
A guy replied, well now he is my friend (Tomek PajÄ…k),
with whom I did a small project about a robot who was just going from left to right,
a simple platformer about shooting enemies.
We sent that to about 60 publishers, but none of them even replied.
After that we left that project deciding we want to do something that's ours.
From then on it just went forward.
Initially we were supposed to do this game for about 6 months, but now we're in the 20th month.
Somewhere around the 12th month we posted some screenshots on the internet
and it turned out that people like it, so it grew in popularity.
Just recently we have released a beta demo version.
The target we are going for is the whole world, because why not?
It's just the question of translation and a larger number of people can play.
Since Poland is a relatively small market
than it's a huge benefit for us to send it all around the world.
The game is about small, orange creatures or aliens.
Well, for us they are aliens, for them we are the aliens.
They have six eyes, although everybody seems to think that they have three.
In fact, they have six, placed on three tentacles.
They were traveling through the galaxy when their ship crashed,
leaving them scattered around those flying islands, a bit like Avatar.
They just live there and their ship is drifting somewhere in space
and they are trying to collect the parts for it,
in many various ways, to rebuild it.
We want this to be a strategy combined with adventure, not a typical strategy...
we want to avoid missions like go there, kill that guy.
The game was supposed to be peaceful from the very beginning,
rather focused on adventures like building a bridge,
feed a giant plant, which will grow even bigger and lift a part of your ship.
It's all based on strategy, because you are a sort of a god for the Mims,
and you can use wind or fire or other things, to be sure their life is good.
We have around 4 months of work left, so we hope that by the summer holidays it will be released.
It's hard work. Many people think that you just sit down
and do stuff on your computer and it just appears.
But it's really different, every model, every tree must be created.
First the figure is created, just as if you used plasticine,
then you paint it to get the desired look.
Or you must animate every creature - movement, walking, jumping, etc.
A game such as ours is usually done by a 20 - 30 people teams,
we are doing it just with two people.
Well three actually, because one of us is responsible for the music and SoundFX.
We put our time into it, we purchased the engine, which is about 1200 $, of course, the software.
But that's it. oh and the cost of electricity.
But it's not as much as a big studios spend, millions,
we are doing it basically for free, without any funds.
We had funds which we lived off, but when that ran out we started collecting
money on Wspieram.to and recently on indiegogo
These are crowd funding platforms, where people pay a small amount of money upfront
and get the game a bit cheaper later. A bit like pre-ordering.
If someone is making games with profit in mind,
I know that project will fail.
You must be focused on just finishing it and then hope people will appreciate it.
The interest in our game is high but we want to remain independent.
There are companies which tell us to sell them the game allowing them to do whatever they want with it.
But we don't want that. What we aim for is finishing the game on our terms and then release it.
And there are companies interested in that.
We have 4 or 5 publishers for digital versions and recently a publisher,
and recently a publisher,
contacted us about releasing a box version worldwide.