Certainly if I do expansions or another game, and Banished does well for me, I might get some more people to work with me – just because all the artwork, sound, and programming is a lot of work. I’m at the end part of game development where you’re fixing bugs and balancing and adding the front-end menus, and all the little stuff that makes the game better, so I think I’m almost there. I certainly want to keep it that way.Īfter two years I’m almost there. I was going to do music by myself, but I let a friend alpha test the game and he’s a musician as well, so before I could get to it he started writing music! So the music is by someone else, but other than that it’s all me. I’ve done most of the game by myself, so I see no reason not to continue that way ’til I get it out. Do you envisage always doing this on your own, right up to release? Is that something you really want to achieve? IG: A lot of the community has chipped in and said “Hey, man, do you need some help with this?” and you’ve said that it’s really a personal goal for you to see this through. So that’s how it started, and I’ve been at it for far longer than I expected – as games development tends to be! So I switched gears, thought about games I liked and what I really wanted to play, and started making Banished. About eight or nine months into development, I was building kind of a zombie action-RPG type game, but there were too many zombie games out there and what I was making wasn’t fun. I had some money saved up to do this, so I left and started making… actually not Banished, but a different game. The last one, which you may or may not have heard of, was Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon, and I was a graphic programmer on that.Īfter 10 years of doing that, I decided I wanted to do more than graphics and tools, and struck out on my own.
I worked in the games industry for about 10 years at a company called Vicious Cycle Software and I shipped 15 or 17 games, over the course of the 10 years with them. But could you tell us a little bit more about yourself? IncGamers: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us! I want to know a little bit more about you and the project you’ve been working on, which is called Banished, and which is effectively a city builder. To learn more about this promising title, IncGamers had a lengthy chat with the one man (and a music guy) development team behind Banished, Luke Hodorowicz. It’s looking a little bit Settlers and a little bit SimCity but with more forests and the chance of horrible plague.
That means self-sufficient farming, resource gathering and a keen knowledge of how to survive in the hostile wilderness. The inhabitants of your settlement-in-waiting have been chucked out of their home city and must now make their living in the woods. Banished is a forthcoming city-building strategy title in which people are your main resource.