PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:

Im Kyle, a solo game studio working on Cosmic Coop which is my first title that I started after watching some Udemy tutorials by a guy called Rob Ager. Great teacher! I currently live in South Africa but started working on this game when I was living in Japan. My dream is to have a proper game studio that I can work full time on as I have had to develop this game while working 2, and sometimes every 3 jobs to self fund it.

TELL US ABOUT COSMIC COOP.

Cosmic Coop started after I watched some Udemy tutorial’s about gamedev. It was always my dream to make games and I really wanted to play an old game I loved called Viva Piñata by Rare. Unfortunately they stopped making the series so I took matters into my own hands. I want to make games that I genuinely enjoy and I hole Cosmic Coop can get a fun little community going so I can expand the game with future updates.

HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN

Ive been working on this game for about 2,5 years now (part time). I had very limited coding knowledge, no knowledge of pixel art, and I just kind of winged it.

Over time I realised that there were things I couldnt do myself and I started working with paid freelancers to fill in the gaps. Everything is self funded so I had to work multiple jobs to keep the development going. Its been a super tough journey so far and Ive been working on the game daily after my normal jobs but things are finally ready for a v1.0 launch and I couldnt be more excited!

WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?

I was somewhat comfortable with Unity by this point and I started making some basic art while following the Stardew Valley tutorial by Rob Ager. I was contemplating Godot as well but at the time there were very limited tutorials for it so I opted for Unity.

WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?

The biggest hurdles have been art, which took a tremendous amount of money to finalize it. I had severely underestimated the cost this would be. Localizations has been another hurdle I did not imagine would be that hard and time consuming.

During development I faced many hurdles, I sometimes even got lost and couldn’t connect everything together anymore. I had to make mind maps to make things clearer but even then it was very easy to get lost!

I never felt a burnout and I never had any regrets of making this game, its been my dream and I enjoyed every moment of it. I truly appreciate all the things I learned during the development.

ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?

Keep your games short and avoid over scoping your games. For my next titles I will aim for a dev period of 9 months of less. There are many great games out there that have one core concept and excel at it. I would also avoid text heavy games because localization is a very painful task!

ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?

The Cosmic Coop demo is out now and it will also be featured in the upcoming Steam Next Fest on Monday! Please give it a try and let me know what you think! :)

Kyle ❤️

Cosmic Coop on Steam