If you like robots or indie games then this interview is for you.
1: Hi, I’m:
Max with Welcome to Monday
2: Twitter Handle / Other Social Media
My twitter handle is @Welcome2Monday, and my website is welcometomonday.com
3: One interesting fact about you that people would not necessarily guess
When I was young, I won several regional awards for piano performances, but I never actually learned how to properly read piano sheet music. I just improvised to what I thought the music said and it all seemed to work out. It drove my piano teacher nuts.
4: What country you live/work in
I live in America — more specifically in Northern California
5: The video game company producing the project
I am producing this project myself under Welcome to Monday, which so far comprises of just me and my wife, who, in addition to helping design our games, helps with all my social media and community management
6: The name of the project
This project is called Beacon
7: Estimated Release Date
I am going to be pushing out my first preview build on the 9th of September, but the game is far from done. I am hoping to have a working version of the full game done before the Spring of 2020 — and hopefully that’s a conservative estimate. Once the game is fully released, I have a lot of ideas for additional polish and under-the-hood improvements.
8: How did you get into making video games
Growing up, my dad actually owned hundreds of arcade games that he would lease out to businesses. Video games were quite literally my livelihood all the way back to the beginning, and I always thought they would be really fun to make.
My first actual foray into making games myself came about when I discovered RPG Maker VX Ace back around 2012. I loved the planning and logic puzzles involved in creating a simple RPG, and as soon as I created my first complex dialog tree I was hooked on game design.
Once I played around with everything the visual scripting had to offer, I looked into writing my own scripts in Ruby, and the feeling I got when I realized I would write a script to do anything I could imagine was incredible. From there I experimented with Gamemaker Studio, Unity, and eventually MonoGame, which is my current fix.
9: What is your background in
By trade, I’m a Software Developer — specifically a full-stack web developer focused on UX and UI. As I mentioned earlier, video games have always been a cornerstone in my life — once my family’s livelihood, then to a beloved hobby, and maybe someday it can become my livelihood once again.
10: What is the game about?
Beacon is about a small maintenance/survey bot who awakes to an apparent disaster in the space outpost in which he’s stationed. In Beacon, you will delve through the base to find out the fate of its inhabitants, and hopefully, gain enough information to relay the inhabitants’ last moments back to Earth via the eponymous Beacon atop the base.
11: What inspired this game?
This game was initially inspired by a prompt from a Weekly Game Jam on itch.io. The prompt given was simply “a sad ending”, which I pretty much immediately converted to “a bittersweet ending”. From there, I latched onto the feeling of “bittersweet”, and let that guide the rest of the design.
12: What makes it unique?
As a metroidvania, Beacon is unique in that its obstacles are comprised primarily of platforming and puzzle solving, rather than navigating around enemies and hazards. In fact, there will be no damage or death mechanic in Beacon at all. Tension instead lies in the mystery of the circumstances around you and the desire to know more.
13 What will make it a success?
Having a complete, satisfying game with a play time more than a handful of minutes will be enough for me to consider this game a success.
14: Who do you think it will appeal to?
I think Beacon will appeal to a wide variety of people. Since its gameplay loop is made up of exploration, platforming, and puzzle-solving, the game will be approachable by gamers of all skill levels and ages.
15: Number of people working on this project and skillsets
There are only two people working on this project: me and my wife. I am doing the programming, lead design, music, and most of the artwork. Some supplemental artwork has been purchased from other creators on itch.io.
My wife is doing much of the writing and assisting in overall design, in addition to handling all the social media.
16: How are you handling art?
Most of the art I am creating myself as it is needed, while the basic tileset for the background of the starting area I purchased from another creator in itch.io by the name of “gtibo”. My art tool of choice for this game has been Aseprite, but I also make heavy use of GIMP and Inkscape as well.
17: What tech/stack do you use?
Over the years, as I’ve been working on games, I’ve been taking the most programmatically useful and portable parts of my games and sticking them into a single code library I’ve used in subsequent games. This library, which I now call Ladybug, has grown into a full-blown framework that sits atop Monogame, and is what does most of the heavy lifting in Beacon.
Aside from Ladybug, for Beacon I have to give a lot of credit to Tiled, a tilemap editor created by Thorbjorn, also available on itch.
Tiled has made making the rooms in Beacon a breeze, and I was able to easily write a tilemap importer for Ladybug that could handle Tiled maps.
As for specific development tools I use, I use Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code as my primary editor, and I use git to share and back up my project.
18: Are you full-time? If so, how did you make the switch to working full-time in game development?
Unfortunately I am not full time. I have a very supportive and rewarding day job where I learn skills every day that help me become a better developer. I like the idea of someday becoming a full-time game developer — I would love to be able to give the community more games in a shorter amount of time — but in the meantime I’m in a good place.
19: Is this your first game? If not how many and what other sort of projects have you worked on?
While Beacon not technically my first game, I would definitely call it my first “full-sized” game. The first game I published was also a product of a game jam from itch.io — a game called “Ouroboros” where you control a snake, much like the original “Snake” game we all know and love. Except in Ouroboros, instead of picking up an apple that lays still on the ground, you have to take a Lantern from the tail of another snake which moves around the screen. Snatching a moving object is hard enough, but that’s not the real catch of Ouroboros. The catch is, once you’ve caught the lantern the first time from the randomly-controlled AI snake, the next snake you have to snatch the lantern from is a recording of your previous round — so you are essentially taking it from your past self!
20: What’s been the hardest thing about making this game?
So far, Beacon has been cooperative in its development, thanks in large to the maturity of Ladybug and the help of excellent community tools like Tiled. That being said, it has not been immune to the challenges that all indie game devs face, like discipline, motivation, and time dedication. Discipline is a huge requirement to steadily and effectively create games, but continues to be a challenge for me, and I think many indie devs feel the same. We all have so much going on in our lives, it’s easy to misprioritize game development as just another hobby or free-time activity, when I would like to treat it as a second job — something I do every day, so that I can have fresh new games for everybody to enjoy.
21: Anything else you would like people to know about you or the game?
If anybody is curious to learn more about me and Welcome to Monday, don’t hesitate to tweet me or get in contact through itch.io or my website. My wife and I are friendly folks who don’t mind chatting with you about anything at all.
And for Beacon, the original Game Jam build is available right now on itch.io for free, and eventually will be replaced with a whole demo/prologue to the events of Beacon, which will also be available for free. I’ll be posting in-progress builds every other week, and while the game is in development you can get it for a very low price. If you like my games, also consider becoming a patron through my Patreon, which can get you free access to all games I release, both in-dev versions and the full, complete versions upon release!
You can find Max at:
Website: http://welcometomonday.com/
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/welcometomonday
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Welcome2Monday
itch.io: https://citrus-thunder.itch.io/beacon
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