Odium: To the Core Origins!
The year is 2013…
Odium has been in development for four years. Well, not really; 2013 is the first Global Game Jam we attended as a team and Odium is the baby that came out of it. The theme that year was The Sound of a Heartbeat and when we were brainstorming ideas, I remembered I had an animation I made back in 2011 which shared a similar premise with the theme: a growing hate which ends infecting and devouring the heart. I showed the animation to my colleagues and they loved the ambience, so we decided to go with that idea. That was the first official prototype of Odium.
Odium was the reason we won the Game Jam. It was just a local competition, I know, but it felt really good. That was the first time we finished a Unity game, our first global game jam and the first (and probably the last) time I ate four hamburgers and drank four Red Bulls in just a day (I regret nothing).
After that Game Jam, we put Odium to the side in order to focus in other Game Jams, our new source of fun and a way to learn new things. We participated in online and on-site jams, such as Nordeus Hackaton, Ludum Dare and many others. Nevertheless, we decided that it wasn’t enough, we needed to take part in many more Game Jams. We went to Denmark to Exile and Nordic Game Jam and we never missed the local Macedonian Global Game Jam. We were doing great, lots of first prizes and some recognition. We even printed Dark-1 T-shirts.
In the end, we had burned out and we decided that it was time to release a game. Working on Game Jam prototypes is fun but we wanted to have our own game released, even if that wasn’t as fun as what we had been doing at the competitions. The struggle begun when we tried to develop Odium in our free time, whilst still working full time at our daily jobs. After 3 years of back and forth we finally decided to seriously focus on finishing the damn game.
Right now, after all these attempts, here we are; in our makeshift offices, having actively worked on Odium: To the Core for eight months. Our neglected baby is finally getting some love. We are closer than ever before to finishing a game, a polished game which we really like. Meanwhile, we’ll be learning about all the “scary stuff” that awaits us in the indie development hell. We also learned how tasty ramen can be. #ramenkings