I wanted to make this game for quite a while now. Well, technically my original desire was to make a Harvest Moon clone, which I actually made while I was in training. It was just a point and click game made in Visual Basic with images and buttons and no animations or characters whatsoever. But it worked! And it was fun for a really short time. After that I wanted to make a "real" game about rebuilding a farm, but I lost that desire along the way. And when the survival craft game hype started I got the idea to make a game about a stranded little dude that had to survive on an island.

I made the first attempt at building this game in 2014. Then I had little knowledge of web development and absolutely no knowledge of game development and just winged a project with Phaser 2. I created a scrollable beach with an ocean and stole the sprite from the Phaser tutorial which could walk around the beach. Not much, but great for a Dev with so little knowledge. But it was just a .html file without state management or anything permanent. Every time the game was started, it was reset to square one. Which wasn't satisfying at all, but I felt as if there was no way I could develop a backend and a host server for my little game, so I slowly abandoned it.

When I made the second attempt in 2020, I still hadn't learned anything about game development. Meanwhile I switched to working in web development, so I built Survivo anew, using Phaser 3 integrated in a Vue.js web app with a Ruby on Rails backend. It was even online on my own domain. But I abandoned this attempt before the (again) stolen sprite could even walk, mainly due to my aversion to Rails.

Fast forward to April 2022 and guess what: I still know nothing about game development. A friend recently told me that he wanted to make a game, we have been talking about that for years now. He said didn't yet know what game he wanted to make or even which framework he wanted to use. And I think he is still searching for the right framework. But in our conversations he told me about libGDX, a game development framework, which uses Java or Kotlin, languages I always wanted to learn. So I gave it a shot, and there it was: my third attempt at creating Survivo.

I hope the third time's the charm, because I feel more motivated this time. My three main motivations at sticking to coding the game this year:

1. This time I have a friend to exchange ideas and progress with
2. I'm learning Kotlin along the way
3. Currently I would love to play a game from that genre with certain features that is hassle-free. Most games I tried have stressful resource management, nightly terrors, stamina (oh how much I hate it) or messy building mechanics. I just want to dive into a game where I can relax and have some quality of life.

I really hope I will make good progress to update this dev log regularly.

Since I stole most of my assets up to this point (license-free, but still not the way I want to go), I have nothing to show yet, except my first attempt at a logo. I admit it's pretty shitty (and it scored a 6/10 on the "how shitty is it"-scale of a UX designer friend) but it's still good enough to use as a placeholder. Next to developing the game I am working on creating sprites and a good logo (I'm going for 2/10 on the scale) and hope to be able to post some of them here soon.

Sincerely yours, Unkrass