Hey people!
It's the first time I'm posting here, and a long time since I've posted something. I've been developing and working on Moroi for some time now, and we've finally almost reached the launch date.
The feeling is complex, and it's of both excitement and wonder. Exactly what I've always felt since I entered the world of video games. There are also many battle scars beneath the surface, because making games is not hard, it's very hard.
While I'm here, a little about me. I am Alex, a Romanian currently living in Switzerland. I began my career as an artist, and I've been around within a couple of gaming companies, learning the craft and getting to understand that there's a whole machine behind a game, many people who turn passion into wonderful games for us to enjoy. I always wanted to make my own game, and with it, to escape the boundaries of not expressing myself.
A couple of years ago, I just went for it. I went for it without knowing how to program anything. Without knowing how to work with the Unreal Engine. Scary, I know. But tutorial after tutorial, I started understanding the concepts and I kept pushing forward. Indie games and news from within the industry kept me focused and learning about the inner workings of how to get to this point. Little by little, Moroi started taking shape, and I started to feel more confident that this crazy decision had started to materialize into a wonderful thing.
Since the beginning, Moroi was a very personal project. It was a place where I could freely express myself. So I took things that I liked, and stitched them together, making them work little by little, until what I had in front of me was something with a life of its own. From that point on, I started "listening" to the game, and began shaping it into what it wanted to be.
Violet Saint was soon established as a one-man company, working on this one-man project. Logistics and reality soon hit me like a ton of bricks, as I quickly understood that as beautiful as this was, it was not paying the bills…
Slowly, I brought another two contractors on the team: Cristi (prop artist) and Mihai (character artist). While I kept on being the sole developer and main artist, these two did a great job of building the bulk of the game and providing a sense of unity to this endeavour. As years went by, Mihai ended his contract, and Cristi shifted to learning Unreal, showing a real love for blueprints and logical thinking. In time, he switched to development, and about half of the game was developed as a team of two developers. A very important contractor and Unreal wizard, Jonny, was with us for a couple of months and helped with combat and other deep logic problems. The music was composed by Flavio, a very talented musician, and the sounds and voices were made and - many of them directly implemented - by Davor and Damjan, wizards of sound.
A large part of the successful completion of Moroi were the teams at Good Shepherd and Devolver. I have to thank Mark, Jack and Luke, for being great producers and close to us when things looked gloomy, and for showing us the trust and support that we as indie devs need many times.
There are also many others who were close and made this possible, and I'd like to thank them all through this, and last but not least, I'd like to thank you all for following the project, and for the great support you've shown.
I chose to do this for love of games and for gaming, for this fleeting art that won my heart since I was seven and opened my Eastern European Famiclone (Ending Man) for the first time and fired up Circus Charlie.
Again, thank you all.
- Alex (VioletSaint)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2518410/Moroi/