I decided to try and get through Greenlight while it was still possible, and to my astonishment, Barotrauma got greenlit in less than two weeks, with an overwhelmingly positive reception.ĭespite having the intention to eventually put a price tag on the game and hopefully earn a bit of money with it, I had decided right from the beginning to share the in-development versions of Barotrauma for free. In February 2017, Valve announced that Steam Greenlight would be discontinued “in a few months”, with very few details released on how indie developers could submit their games to Steam from that point onwards. The moment I saw it I thought, this has to be the name. The name Barotrauma came up when I was browsing for diving-related articles on Wikipedia. Not only was Subsurface a pretty lame name for the game, it also turned out there’s a diving app called Subsurface and a game studio called Subsurface Games, which could’ve caused some problems further down the line. The working title stuck until fall 2015, at which point I thought I should switch it sooner rather than later.
BAROTRAUMA PRICE HISTORY FREE
I continued working on Subsurface in my (dwindling) free time, and the game progressed, slowly but surely.
Pretty soon, I decided to replace the underwater facility with a submarine – a moving vehicle just offered so much more for the gameplay than a static location!Įvolution at work: from a floating box to the modern Humpback sub.Īround the same time, I also started an internship at this young indie game studio called FakeFish, being a computer sciences student at the Turku University of Applied Sciences at the time. It took about 6 months to get from that point to a playable pre-pre-pre-alpha version, which was also still very bare bones and probably wouldn’t have gotten much attention from anyone had it not been for the SCP – Containment Breach fans keeping an eye on the project.
At this point, the project was in the very early stages: I had a couple of metal rooms with ragdoll characters inside them, some rudimentary water logic and a really simple subm… station editor. From Subsurface to BarotraumaĪt the end of 2014, I announced a game called Subsurface, intended as a procedural 2D simulation game taking place in an underwater facility. So, some time around early 2014, I started thinking about a game idea that would essentially take bits from SS13, Dwarf Fortress, a game concept called Pressure, and to some extent my previous game SCP – Containment Breach, and try and combine them into something that hadn’t been done by too many games before. Despite this, the core concept is wonderful – it takes the emergent storytelling aspect of Dwarf Fortress and turns it up to eleven by making it multiplayer and adding human interaction to the mix.Īll that is pretty much what pushed me to start developing Barotrauma: I wanted to play a game that builds on the foundation of SS13, smoothing some of the rougher edges. I love it, but it has its flaws – not just the clunky UI and technical problems, but I also feel it’s almost a little too sandboxy: with so much freedom and very loose objectives, the rounds can easily become pretty uneventful. It runs on an ancient game engine called BYOND and has an even steeper learning curve than Baro. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, SS13 is a rather obscure indie game that’s gameplay-wise very similar to Barotrauma. That’s why I find games like Space Station 13 and Dwarf Fortress so interesting: rather than dishing out a pre-designed experience, they drop you into this open simulation and let the stories and experiences arise organically.Īs mentioned multiple times in this blog, Space Station 13 is perhaps the biggest individual source of i nspiration for Barotrauma.
BAROTRAUMA PRICE HISTORY MOVIE
A book can tell a story, a movie can add a visual aspect to that, but they can’t throw you into a world and say “okay, welcome to Europa, go and do stuff, and we’ll see how your story plays out”. I’ve always loved sandboxy games that make use of procedural generation and emergent gameplay – not only are they fun to m ake, but I also feel they offer something that not many other types of media/art can.
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