Slider
Slider is an award-winning exploration-puzzle game based on 8-puzzle. It won the "Best Student Game" award at IGF, a global competition with over 500 entries. It finished 16th in GMTK, so we ran with it and developed it to completion over the course of a bit over a year. You can now play our demo on Steam, or check out the game jam version here.
Slider was my first major game project and it's truly been such a journey making Slider! I'm glad for all of the support from friends and fans, they have genuinely blown me away with how much I've been supported. All of the positive reviews and kindness everyone has been so kind as to shower me with has truly been so heartwarming and has made all the hard work worth it. Let me take you through some of the journey of this game...
It's crazy that it all started as just a game jam project. I managed to drag some high school friends to try making a game together and it ended up being a pretty good entry for something a bunch of low-experience guys made. After the jam, I pitched it to my college club and with VGDev, we built it to a full game. I hope everyone can forgive me because I think I got the release date wrong like 7 times over 3 years LOL
During development, I got to experience tabling Slider at Dreamhack and eventually bringing it to GDC just for fun. Printing posters, bringing all my gear, and setting up is such a cool experience. Watching others play in front of you was so exciting, especially the large groups that got super hyped over the silly jokes we wrote into our game. Watching people play the Village 1 million times helped me understand how to really make the first area the best area possible, and made me realize how difficult it is to get good playtesting on other areas of the game D:
Eventually the climax came -- we won an award at IGF! This was genuinely so unexpected, I remember one of my friends asked me if I prepared a speech and I said "nahhh there's no way we're winning". We won?? I also got to meet so many cool people. I got to talk to Kevin Regamey, the audio guy for Celeste (and a ton of other games too). He gave me a ton of awesome advice on how to improve the sound design and taught me a bunch of things I didn't know! I also got to chat with one of the recruiters at Hypergryph, except at the time I didn't realize who Hypergryph was ohhhh I'm sorry take me back.
After that, it was time to grind out the rest of the game. I took a hearty but kinda sad attempt at marketing, submit to a ton of events, and eventually released on Steam! The launch was pretty good, and I got to check off a ton of my game dev bucket list items:
- We made it on Popular Upcoming (before the free game split too)
- We got a ton of positive reviews
- I got to watch so many people playing my game -- people on the internet who I have never met before
- We got fan art!
- We got multiple guides and a full YouTube walkthrough
- We inspired someone to pick up speedrunning, and they optimized the game like crazy
- Some fans were so inspired by the game, that they even wanted to translate the entire game to Korean?? They were so quick that we couldn't even keep pace with implementing the technical localization support.
Finally, we managed to get some really positive responses from the Thinky Games community, who gave us the Best Free game award for 2024!
I think I have spent enough time on this game though. I can't thank the people who poured their time into Slider enough, and I hope that they can be just as satisfied by all of the results from this game as I am. I'm excited to see what comes next!
“Manipulate the world in order to solve puzzles and help others. You will manage an ever-growing set of tiles and mechanics as you explore unique areas and unravel the mysteries of the universe.”
- Lead of 38 devs
- 3 years
- July 24, 2024
