This is the story of how Simpler Times came to be—a story about passion, synchronicities and hard work. But above all, it is a story about friendship.
Simpler Times, like many other great things, started out as a mere daydream, seemingly unimportant and evanescent, that grew and grew into something bigger than we have ever hoped or even imagined until just a few weeks ago when it was officially announced at Summer Game Fest 2023.
To stay true to the very core of the game, we—Laara, the Creative Director and Dragos, the Game Director—sat down at a sunny cafe table and started digging up our pasts, reconnecting with our past selves and trying to connect the dots of the happenings that led to Simpler Times being a full-on experience based game.
What we found is a story that actually starts way, way back in time.
So come along with us on a journey of reminiscing, on a tale about us and on a short guide to our recipe for creating a game.
Simpler Times logo sketches by Laara - April, 2021
Step 1: Go to Berlin
Imagine yourself in Berlin, eating your little ice cream in front of a corner ice cream shop called Hockey-Pockey, the place is filled with people doing the same thing around you. It’s a sunny afternoon. Everything seems calm and there’s this relaxed, static quality surrounding you that makes you exhale and simply feel the joy of being, a moment in time without the need to connect to the internet and all the social media.
That’s exactly what Dragos was going through in the summer of 2019. “This place reminds me of simpler times”, he sighed to himself and later created a note in his Google Keep:
“This place reminds me of simpler times. The ice cream is great but what makes the location special is the social gathering that takes place in that little corner of Pankow. Everyone sitting, enjoying their ice cream as if Facebook and Instagram do not exist yet.”
Little did he know that this little seed he unknowingly planted inside his own mind would root and grow in the following years.
Also in Berlin, Dragos would have tried bouldering for the first time (this will be important later on in the story, promise).
Step 2: Go Bouldering
After falling in love with the places he lived in while staying in Berlin, the time has come for Dragos to move back home to Brașov. Nothing is random and nothing happens by chance. So, the universe coordinated everything in a way that in the Fall of 2020, the two of us (Dragos and Laara) would meet at the local bouldering gym, start hanging out and ultimately become friends and partners in crime play.
What started out as a friendship based on bouldering and cheering each other on routes, morphed into philosophizing about life and music and such, and finally transformed into a full-on collaboration towards building a common goal: creating a soothing, calming and reflective experience.
Step 3: Have Passion Projects
I think we can all agree that the pandemic and the lockdown were, one way or another, a significant inflection in our lives. For Dragos it was no different. Lucky to have found yet another cozy place to live in, and basically being forced to stay inside, look at the same room every day, all day, over and over again, he did what any creative would do best: look not only with the eyes but with the heart as well, and draw inspiration from whatever it was that he was seeing.
And in this case, that was the window of his living room overlooking the old city of Brașov framed by lush trees.
Fair enough. So he modeled that view as a little 3D experiment, which he then posted on Twitter in November of 2020. With no undertone whatsoever to this being transformed into a game, people left comments saying things like: “can I live here?” and asking if this is part of a bigger project. And there it was, yet another seed was planted: the idea of making a game.
"calm." - Nov 4, 2020
Step 4: Connect The Dots
Ok, so. There is that “simpler times” feeling from Berlin, the room Dragos was modeling based on the very place he was sitting in each and every day, and the idea of making the room into a game. In February of 2021, these seemed enough reasons for Dragos to start learning some visual scripting and start introducing some interactions into this little cozy room he had created.
Meanwhile, as the two passionate designers that we are, our bouldering sessions started to get more and more infused with stories about our projects and new findings in that area. It was only a matter of time until the idea of a collaboration occurred to us, and from there, it all started to snowball really fast.
"I am adding basic camera and object interactivity in this scene with the help of Bolt visual scripting. It's unbelievably rewarding to make things function, myself, at last." - Feb 25, 2021
Step 5: Pay Attention to Synchronicities
The fact that Dragos came up with the idea of making the game about moving out of a room in an era where he wasn’t really allowed to do that isn’t a coincidence.
The fact that Laara was moving in a new apartment just weeks after agreeing to collaborate on a project about moving isn’t a coincidence either.
And the fact that Jon Gibson of iam8bit happened to come across one of Dragos’ posts about the project among a sea of thousands of other posts certainly isn’t a coincidence either.
As it usually happens, all synchronicities happen one right after the other. Safe to say that the period from March to June 2021 was full-on packed with ideas, opportunities, and action steps that formed the bedrock of our game.
Step 6: Believe in Your Passions
Initially, we were so passionate about the idea of creating this experience that we decided to create the game on our own time as a passion project and, if all else fails, we would turn to self-publishing to get it into the world.
But the universe (and iam8bit, for that matter) had different plans, as they made contact with us in early March 2021. By June, we already had a contract signed! Another sign that if you truly believe in something and are utterly passionate about it, putting out the energy of that intention, sooner or later things will happen exactly as you had planned.
Or even better, because boy oh boy: We found much more in the iam8bit team than a trusty publisher. As cheesy as it may sound, we had found the friends we didn’t know we needed.
When we met Jon Gibson and Amanda White of iam8bit, we knew we were in good company.
Step 7: Trust Yourself, the People, and the Flow
As you can imagine, having the validation for our idea from such a great team hyped us up in the most amazing way. In a matter of days upon starting to chat with Jon, we already had a Slack room (you know things are getting serious when there is a Slack room with multiple channels), we were looking to expand the team with more devs and musicians and story writers, we were creating playlists for the game vibe, we were writing, drawing, modeling, with lots of drafting, reinventing and redoing.
This hype was infectious and caught on to our new teammates, too. And oh goodie, the team that we had created! Andra Perju, a long lasting friend and collaborator of Dragos, works on all the intricate details of the game’s environment. Cosmin Margarit and Leonard Maxim, the kindest developers to work with. Cristiana Stanciu and Andrei Alexandru, our beloved writers. Vera Drmanovski, Laara’s letterer friend, helping with the title card animations.And of course, George Pandrea, who gave soul to the project with his beautiful songs and brought in a handful of local musical artists, including Maeve Kroeger who became the voice of Taina.
Suddenly, we found ourselves in the most creative environment, with all these one-person departments where each would do the thing they do best, trusting that the others would do the same.
And it worked! By the end of 2021, we were in full production, working on the official Simpler Times experience.
Working intensely on the game and we love every part of it, especially this window nook! - Oct 22, 2021
Step 8: Your Vibe Attracts Your Tribe
Three-ish years, many revisions, countless emails and lots of in-person and virtual meeting, hugs and laughs later, we are nearing the end of our Simpler Times journey, putting on the finishing touches and prepping it all for the grand release in early 2024.
It very much seems to us that the power of community is what makes the world go round.
Passion plays an important role, sure. Hard work is essential, indeed. But that driving force of a friendship, the motivation of a like-minded community is irreplaceable and the source of everything that is beautiful and meaningful.
