Posted April 23, 2019 by mort-art
Hi!
First of all i want to thank you for all the warm words about Esothe, it’s made much more noise than I had imagined, the articles on Alpha Beta Gamer, next PC Gamer and then Rock Paper Shotgun. I merely counted on being mentioned in the “Unknown Pleasures” section, but instead Esothe was given its own article, which had me shocked. As for the moment the project’s website has been visited 7,779 times with 2,182 downloads, only 18 days after publishing the first build.
How Esothe was created.
The project has started in a strange way. For the last 8 years I’ve been professionally working as a level artist. In my spare time I create various small projects. In december 2015 I started working on the game I called Venineth.
The project started to grow dangerously, yet I worked on it hoping that I would finish and publish it as my first fully designed game. Two people joined me on the way, Harit (programmer) and EchoRay (music composer). Two years ago I had some health problems and so I wasn’t able to fully work on the project. From that time our enthusiasm lowered, and Venineth’s release was delayed (Steam release date isn’t set to year 4019 without a reason). In addition, small interest in the project didn’t encourage us to do much needed work.
Here’s a little picture I’ve found on the internet so the post isn’t made of walls of text only:
For the past 2 years I’ve been stuck on the point 4.
By creating Esothe I wanted to prove myself that I am able to finish anything, in a reasonable time, in a month. I could no longer look at Venineth and anything related to the space/aliens etc., so I decided that Esothe would be an idyllic fantasy land with a forest full of singing birds and romantic Elvish ruins. And I’ve done it. Would I put it in my portfolio and forget? Not necessarily.
In only 18 days Esothe managed to get more attention than Venineth in 3 years and 4 months.
Lesson no# 1. Put the build on the web, let the people play. Colorful pictures and gifs are not enough.
And so I do: https://venineth-team.itch.io/venineth-beta
Rolling ball is a specific genre, I can not objectively evaluate but it is certainly more difficult. I'm sorry I keep spamming about Venineth, you want to know what's next with Esothe.
Future of Esothe.
I do not know (I know but I will not tell you ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)). I want to finish Venineth. After the warm welcome of Esothe, I want to develop it further. I am not the only one working on it anymore, I sent the link to my friends, two talented colleagues designers Maciek and Grzesiek immediately spoke up and said: "We want to create this game with you"
And so we do (work in progress, this is NOT a final version):
I want to thank my friends who I make games with and I want to thank all of you who’ve read this wall of text. Maybe thanks to you I will be able to slowly get to the 5th point in the creative process.
I hope to upload future updates and more gifs here: https://twitter.com/mort_art_dev