PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:

Hi, I'm Brian and I'm a game engineer and designer from Southern California. I've worked on games such as Natural Selection 2, Monster Train, Inkbound, and the completely forgotten The Da Vinci Code: The Quest Begins for pre-smartphone devices. I now work on a kids' game called Dojo Islands and develop my dice roguelike indie game, Slumber Realm, on the side. I'm also a public speaker. I've spoken at GDC a couple of times, as well as events such as Roguelike Celebration and PIGCON.

TELL US ABOUT SLUMBER REALM.

Slumber Realm is a dreamy dice roguelike about a 90s teen who enters a dream world to face their fears, anxieties, and nightmares. The core of the game is a drafting mechanic where you add cards to your play area, roll a single 6-sided die, and try to trigger as many cards as possible to create ridiculous combos.

Then you wake up in your bedroom, buy new decorations, and earn COOL POINTS which you can use to unlock more stuff for the dream world. There is also a unique "dot" art style where the characters and background in the battle are made out of thousands of little dots which I animate via code in real time.

HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN

I started almost 4 years ago. I work on this project part time alongside a fulltime game job and raising 2 young kids. My goal is to work at least 1 hour a day so that I make slow but steady progress. It has worked so far!

I have a demo up on Steam, I've been marketing to get wishlists, and I'm on track to release later this year. I do all the programming, design, and marketing.

I work with a fantastic artist from Brazil who handles the UI, characters, and backgrounds. Playtesting is the central pillar of our development process. Over 100 people have playtested the game synchronously over a Discord call (in addition to lots of async playtesting as well).

WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?

We use Unity. I have extensive experience with custom C++ engines, dating back to Natural Selection 2 and my first indie game, Zero Gear (which used C++, Ogre3D, Lua, and various open-source libraries). Since then, I've spent a good amount of time with Unity (Monster Train and Inkbound were both built in Unity). So I knew the engine well and I knew it would be well suited for my needs on Slumber Realm. I use it in a pretty simple way without many third party plugins. I like simple, straightforward, concrete code.

WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?

Time. It's a big challenge to make the time to work on the project between my fulltime work and taking care of kids. My solution has been to wake up at 5am to work! That way, I can consistently get at least an hour a day (often more, especially on weekends).

The tech has been relatively easy for me. The scope of the project was way too large in hindsight but this is a lesson I learn with every project. Also, the design has been a big challenge! But a good, fun one :) Playtesting has been critical to the design.

ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?

Making games has never been easier! The hard part is getting any attention at all. There are so many games coming out every day. The slow part of creating a commercial game is everything that comes with commercialization. Trailers, store pages, key art, translations, social media, influencer outreach, etc, etc, etc.

I would recommend newer devs focus on their learning for a few years before jumping into anything commercial. And for more seasoned devs, I would recommend people put a lot of effort into validating game concepts before commercializing them.

ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?

Special thanks to Rob from GameDev Journey for reaching out to me.

Brian 🌞

Slumber Realm on Steam