Toem developer how to#
Toem developer full#

We liked the art and the island based scenes, whenever we showed the game we always got positive comments about the look of the game. School and jobs took over our time, we did some other things in-between as well, but TOEM was still lurking in the background. We had now made three versions of TOEM and decided to give up. We went on meet-ups, we met cool people and each and every talk just made us realize that we don't know what we are doing. Neither one of us wanted to make puzzles, they are hard to make, we just wanted to make a world to explore. We couldn't really openly explain what the game was or where we wanted to take it. We started to feel rather comfortable with what we had, there was now more content and puzzles to solve and it just so happened that GDC (2019) was just around the corner. This happened to be one of the most critical points in TOEM's development as we quickly learned that we don't have enough “core” for the game. We added in more characters to the game as well and some 'puzzles' required you to give advice or words of encouragement to NPC's. Clicking on the world environment now had an effect on it, meaning that the player needed to interact with a lot of things in order to progress. This version had the player draw 'electricity' lines between two points to activate certain things. The third version was the one we experimented with more puzzle solving stuff.

Toem developer how to#

We got questions about how the game was going to progress since the puzzles are rather easy to solve, we didn't know how to answer the question and this made us rethink yet again. This version had the player rotate bridges to make paths and rotate walls to block off other paths. Neither one of us are puzzle makers, so making a puzzle game was a rather risky decision. This is where we started our second version of the game, the one with puzzles in it.

We liked what we had going but it was always hard figuring out WHAT to do in it. We started our company shortly after, joined an incubator and iterated on the game that we rushed out to meet the deadline of the challenge. We made a concept trailer for it, sent it in to a local Game Challenge and ended up winning 50,000 SEK. We both liked the doodles and thought: 'Maybe there is something here?'.Īfter a couple of weeks we had the first version (there are three more to come) of TOEM. I drew a couple of characters, some islands and a beak looking fellow. We had recently had a rather 'dark' talk session about whether or not game development is a thing to strive for or not, and during this talk I started doodling. Lucas Gullbo: TOEM began as a small experiment between myself and (Something We Made CEO) Niklas Mikkelsen back in 2018. Gamasutra: How did TOEM spark into being? What were some of the design inspirations and concepts that spurred you on early in development? In a bid to learn more about the design decisions and creative processes that went into bringing each fizzing vignette to life, we went and picked the brains of Something We Made artist Lucas Gullbo.

Toem developer full#

The culmination of years of refinement and sometimes drastic iteration, TOEM is an upcoming wholesome hand-drawn adventure game from Swedish studio Something We Made about taking photos and helping others.Įach of the title's black-and-white landscapes are chock full of quirky characters and artistic flourishes that make it easy to see why the world of TOEM would be a photographer's dream.