Hi guys! I want to show you my game, which I worked on.

As you can see from the header this is comedy indie strategy game about the drug business. It started on Ludum dare. The theme of the contest was "under the surface", we thought that cooking drugs in the basement was witty and funny for this topic and made a prototype in 2 days. People played 20,000 times in this prototype, which is not bad. We took 11th place on the ludum dare jam and decided to continue development.

Initially, I chose pixel art, because this is the least time consuming for a 2-day project.

In the game you need to manage the staff. Expand your drug empire. To beat buildings from other bandits and fight with cops or simply bribe them. It is necessary to find the best and safest balance of sales, expansion and protection. Staff can only be in buildings, and most buildings have their basements, or they can be dig out.

In the game there are different types of drugs that are conventionally called green, purple, brown and white. We specifically avoided real names. They have their own properties and price. You can invest in research to find new variants of drugs with other characteristics.

Characters also have their stats, each has their own pros and cons, for example, the scientist will easily die in a fight, and the fighter will try to grow a green package for a long time. Stats of characters can be pumped by doing certain activities, or by assigning them to practice in special rooms. Sometimes it's a pity when there was not enough money and your pumped workman fires.

To generate streets, we wrote our own generator, which randomly arranges the necessary buildings, adds weather effects, land types, uses different colors for the sky and day / night transitions.

On the street are buildings, the design for them is collected from small pieces,​​​​​​​ accordingly, they can look different too.

In turn, the buildings consist of rooms that have their properties, functions or are simply made for scenery
For example, to build a production room, you must first install an electricity generator. It is necessary to put a warehouse near the laboratory so that the worker can produce the goods. Workers get tired and they need rest rooms, etc.

Rooms can be improved. The improved room will consume more electricity and it costs money.

The game has a lot of characters and they have a lot of animations. Since I'm the only artist on the team, I had to figure out how to do them faster. In the end, I chose pyxel edit to draw the sprites. Characters are animated by 4 frames per animation, this is the minimum, in order for the game to look good.

Each character has its own avatar. For ordinary staff, we also wrote a generator that inserts different eyes, noses, mouths and hairstyles + gives a random name.

I made animated avatars of quest characters that are used in dialogs.

The game has some things that you can either buff your mercenary or put it on. The weapon allows you to attack at a distance, the skipping rope increases endurance, gloves increase productivity, etc.

It's not difficult to guess that the color of the game is yellow. With this palette, the interface looks very recognizable, no frills. Here are some windows from the game:

After a year of development, we realized that without the editor it is impossible to make or at least some interesting levels (not to mention a full game)! Our programmers have written a level editor, and there is a nodal editor in it that allows you to make events. It was possible to make script dialogs, and random events. So this editor looks now (not an ideal, but a very useful tool):

As a small indie team we started making the game listening to the community's opinion. We have trello board in open access, where you can see the relevant information that is currently being done on the game.

Now several levels have been made and an endless sandbox with random events that somehow affect the course of the game. A full story campaign is still in development and will be ready soon.

The game is conveniently played with a gamepad.

The players positively assessed our game, although the criticism has always been, is and will be.
82% of more than 1000 reviews are positive.

After 3 years of development, I left the team. During this time, we have reworked the original concept many times. Drew all the graphics in the game and set the graphic style. I'm satisfied with the result. Currently, Ivan Khaletsky is making a level design. Minsky, Dmitry and Alexander Degtyarev engaged in polishing and bug fixes.

Time to move on.