Please Remain Calm: Life in Bunker
Written by: Adam "ManKorn" Korenman, CC2K Video Games Editor
CC2K: What inspired the development of Life in Bunker? Where did the concept come from?
FLOX: Well, it was one of the old ideas of Anton ( the programmer of LiB). I think it was about 4-5 years ago, when he initially came up with the idea of a procedurally-generated underground world where you’d have to dig tunnels. The concept of the underground settlement came much later, I don’t know who suggested it first but we both agreed it would be cool to make a small game about building a bunker.
How many people are on your development team?
There are three full-time developers 1 – artist and 2 programmers. But LiB has been made by only two of us in our spare time, sort of like a side project.
What are some planned features for the game as you continue development?
The game hasn’t been received too well, so we’re gathering the feedback to fix the things we overlooked. From the technical point of few the game works good, but people expect a more complex game. This is our priority number one at the moment.
What got you into video game development?
I’ve always liked playing video games, since the day my father bought our first gaming console – a chinese replica of NES. In high school I often skipped classes on Saturdays to play counter strike, medal of honor and starcraft with friends in the computer club.
But my firsts thoughts about getting into making games came much later, when I was doing my bachelor degree in economics. I knew it wasn’t mine and I didn’t want to spend my life doing something I didn’t like. This is how I started learning more about gaming industry and hanging on gamedev forums. Then a friend of my introduced me to his brother who at that time was also a gamedev enthusiast and was working on some prototype with another guy, who was Anton ( the LiB programmer). At first for all of us it was just a hobby. We spent several years playing around with ideas and tinkering simple prototypes. It was fun but everyone had a full-time job, a family, little kids,so there was very little time we could dedicate to our hobby. This is when we decided to make a leap of faith and quit our jobs to pursue our dream of making video games.
What games are you playing now? Which developers do you like the most?
Personally, I really love the Dark Souls series, but I’m trying to get myself into the 4x strategies. Civ 5 and Endless Legend are on my list at the moment.
I can’t say I have a favorite dev studio, but there are so many interesting and very talented people working in the industry it’s really hard to pick one or two. However I find very inspiring the game design of Ed Mcmillen and Tom Francis, and I’m also a huge fan of a truly legendary person Chris Avellone.
Life in Bunker has a steep learning curve. Can you describe the process of balancing difficulty with playability?
Game balance is a very tricky thing, especially if you want that your game would appeal to a big audience. We were trying to balance our game in a way that it would be fun for us, but not impossible to beat by other players. Now, when quite a lot of people have played the game, we can clearly see where the bottleneck is and where we failed in terms of game design and balance.
We’ve noticed that our players can be divided into two main camps: those who like creative process of building a bunker and those who like the management part. They like completely opposite ends of the spectrum. The first really struggle with the early game which require careful planning and extensive micro management, and the latter find the late game, which mostly focuses on building and macro management, quite boring because they want that type of challenge that was in the beginning.
Now, we can re-balance the game accordingly and fix certain things that were overlooked.
Why Molemen?
Wish I had a good story for this, but it’s just a word. Maybe I watch too much of the Simpsons.
Anything you want to bring up about the game, the development cycle, the industry in general.
We live in a very interesting age, when the technology are so accessible that anyone can become a game developer and create something unique. And even though we can often hear the word indiepocalypse, in my opinion we are standing on the doorstep of a new cycle in the industry, there are millions of unexplored opportunities and hundreds cool games we’re about to discover.
Well said.
Have any of you played LiB? What are your thoughts? What would you like to see in future updates? Please leave your comments below.