Hi! This is Loren and Simon, the developers.
First off, we just wanted to thank you for wishlisting the game! The launch of the Steam page, and premiering in the PC Gaming Show has been super exciting, and we've both been loving the reception we're getting from everyone. Seriously - wishlisting helps us so much and motivates us to make the best game we can for you all.
Loren always skips Steam announcement videos and reads the text notes instead, so we summarized the video for those readers among you. But if you would rather watch/listen you can check out our first Devlog here:
[tbd link]
Now - lets begin!
WHO ARE WE?
We're Daruma Games which is based in San Francisco. We have been long time friends and colleagues where we worked at WB Games together. After years in the industry and working on AAA titles we've decided to make our own game - and so Daruma Games was born!
Simon is the main engineer and technical director on Sol Mates who sorts the ones and zeros.
Loren started in the industry as an engineer but throughout the course of this project has slowly slid into wearing a bunch of different hats that he never had to wear before. He's doing everything from marketing stuff, business stuff, art, tons of things that aren't engineering that is required for a game to actually function.
But enough about us (for now) - we want to tell you about what Sol Mates actually is!
WHAT IS SOL MATES?
Sol Mates is an up to 4-player cooperative chaotic spaceship management game where you and all your friends just gotta keep your spaceship flying. You have to charge the batteries, man the guns, load your weapons, and sort of keep all your systems up and running while you're dodging enemy blasts and dealing with asteroids.
We are trying to replicate all the chaotic moments that you see in these space dramas. You know, like "The shields are down!” Instead of it just being a narrative moment that happens for you, it's a literal moment that we're trying to actualize for you. Like someone's going to need to literally pluck a battery from the charger, plunk it into the shields to make sure that it continues recharging. Someone else is going to need to put out the fires that this system failure has caused and is slowly spreading. Someone else needs to go wake up the guy that's just chilling in their corner because they've forgotten what's going on and don't know what the hell is happening. And then, the last person needs to make sure that whoever caused their shields to go down in the first place is dealt with, maybe with cannons, maybe with missiles, maybe with whatever it may be.
We’re HUGE sci-fi and space things fans. And we are both huge co-op gaming fans. And so this idea of working together to run a spaceship was really appealing when Loren came up with it. This idea that we can layer on replayability and a little bit of narrative and storytelling to give you a setting, choices, things to coordinate with your friends, things to argue about with your friends, and decisions to make. It just sounded like an experience we wanted to have while playing a game. There wasn’t anything quite out there that nailed that.
Originally when we dreamt up this game like 8 years ago, we only started making this thing a couple years ago. So why such a long gap? One of the things is obviously everyone has their own kind of things going on in life but we also had a very large, life-altering event for all humanity happening on the planet. Coming out of the pandemic, there was a particular need for us and we think for many gamers in the world to reconnect with their fellow human beings. It’s just like everyone’s been stuck at home for way too long. And so we’re making this game not just for us but for people who also miss their friends.
FIGURING OUT OUR DESIGN
Going to the early concept art phase of this game and how we ended up deciding what we wanted the eventual game to look like, we definitely started by figuring out how to talk to artists.
We love our artists but we're not artists ourselves. And so at a certain point, we're like, we need to understand how we communicate a feeling to someone that can actually draw and create that thing on paper and then make it into something that exists. And so there's definitely a big learning process where you make mood boards and find references and all that stuff that we had to learn how to do to convey our vision.
It's supposed to be a funny game. So going with a cute sci-fi design definitely felt the best. There were definitely multiple documents that were made that just had, like, the word "cute” written on them.
The visual for the game started with the player. It was the first thing where we needed to figure out what your basic astronaut was going to look like? We had our concept artists we’re working with do a whole bunch of concepts, and we came up with our astronaut bean. And sort of once we had him, it was like, all right, this is the game. This sort of round, a little bit scruffy, a little bit unpolished type of character because that’s the world we live in. Once we had that everything else grew from there, but just establishing that one little astronaut was a big step.
GAME DEVELOPMENT
So, in terms of how we built the game, it all started with what we call "gray box." It was all gray cubes and spheres and simple stuff for a very long time, about the first six months or so. It was quite a while before we even had a character that walked. And that first character was a very, very low-poly, simple astronaut that we didn’t replace with our cute little bean-shaped astronaut for quite a while.
It was a lot of just blocking things out, trying things, moving them around, building tools that let us customize the layouts of spaceships, trying different enemy mechanics, different layouts of weapons, and then the nitty-gritty of how things interact with each other. Like, what does it actually mean to put a piece of ammo into a weapon? Can you fire it immediately? Does it need time to load? Can you load it when it has power? How does power even work in transferring between things?
Then you start building out systems. And then usually there’s a point where the first time where you sort of forget you’re making the game, and you’re just like, "No, let’s try that again. We almost beat that guy. Let’s do it again."
It was around the time when we had shields, ammo, power, enemies, and steering where we then started adding other stuff you would have to deal with because we added solar flares that would light parts of your ship on fire and energy storms that would discharge your batteries. Sort of once a lot of that stuff started coming together was when it started getting actually pretty exciting to play.
OVERCOMING DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGES
Technically, making a multiplayer and specifically an online multiplayer game, is not easy. Getting everything to connect and sync between the server is quite difficult. We weren’t going to give up or anything, but we had to start from that point which meant there was a very early prototype of the game that we built with just the basic picking-things-up-and-putting-them-down mechanics, and we had to completely scrap that because it wasn’t going to work with multiplayer.
So, that was a challenge, and it continues to be a challenge. We are currently facing other challenges right now like there’s a thing in the lobby where if one player switches characters while holding something, then the thing they’re holding disappears, but just for them, and everybody else can still see it. So there’s weird network sync issues that are always going to be a challenge.
Gameplay wise - what we've had to rework the most is how ammunition works. We know there needs to be ammo and we know there needs to be special kinds of ammo so that you can upgrade your systems. For a while, what a piece of ammo was and what its special effect was were two different things that you both had to load into a weapon. But that doesn't make sense and is hard to explain. For a while, we had different-colored ammo and different-colored enemies. You needed to shoot the right enemy with the right color. That was interesting, yet felt too much like a puzzle game.
Then for a long time, ammo was one bullet, but then we added a ray gun which shoots a continuous beam. So now that connection had to be broken. The system that has given us the most challenge has been that core, because it is very core to the game. It's just picking up a piece of ammo, loading it into a gun, and firing it. But the specifics of what that does have been rewritten, majorly rewritten two or three times now, and it gets tweaked every time we do an update.
OUR FIRST BIG ANNOUNCEMENT
We just announced at the PC Gaming Show, which has been super exciting. Up until now, we've been working on this for a while, but only recently have we started to get the look of the game and some finalized art. It’s really neat to have something to point to and say, "Look, this is the thing we're making." It's cool, it's fun, it's so full of explosions and fire and lasers. It’s just really neat to finally show it to our friends, colleagues, fans, and the public, and say, "Look at this thing we're making." We cannot wait for people to play it.
It's definitely the most exciting announcement we’ve ever been part of. We all got online wherever we happened to be and watched the same moment together when they played our trailer that we worked very hard on. It's definitely a surreal experience.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Now that we've announced the game, there's still a lot more to do. I think one of the toughest challenges for indies and this is definitely not something we were prepared for, is that game development is not just making the game. We’re getting to the point where there’s enough of the game to show that we also need to make sure people know the game exists. People need channels to talk to us, give feedback, and say, "I like this thing" or "I don’t like this thing."
Our next big step for the game is working on a demo. One of the big challenges is making sure the whole user experience is clear. Recently we started demoing the game at the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment in Oakland. Seeing new people play the game for the first time has shown us the learning curve is tough.
We need tutorials, an amazing main menu (right now, it's just a black screen with text), and so much more work to make the game presentable. Above that, there are many gameplay things to finalize, things that have been temporary for months, over a year even. At some point, "maybe someday" has to become "now." When it's time to add more sound effects and music, it’s going to be interesting technically.
There’s this mysterious unknown step of going from being just two people working on this thing to having a community. We’re curious what questions you have about Sol Mates. Are you curious about the game development side of things? About what it’s like being two indie devs in San Francisco? We’re happy to answer them!
If you’ve made it this far and haven’t wishlisted us yet - please hit that wishlist button! It means everything to small indie developers. It’s how more people find our game on Steam, which means hopefully you’ll have more friends to go on space adventures with.
Find us where you build your online communities, we’ll be there, and we’re excited to share more of the game with you.