Every game starts with an idea, and once the idea has begun to blossom, the next step is often getting a publisher to help with funding and marketing. Fortunately for supernatural strategy-shooter Children of the Sun developer René Rother, major publisher Devolver Digital liked his game, even if it didn’t like his “shit” pitch.
“I didn’t plan any of this at all,” Rother told NME. “When I realised, ‘Oh, I maybe have a game,’ I just sent an email to Devolver. They were like, ‘your pitch was shit but the game looks cool, let’s talk.’”
Rother, who believes luck is when preparation meets opportunity, thinks it’s a “a very big privilege” that he can now make games full-time now. He spent two years working on Children of the Sun alongside numerous day jobs, from stage hand to 3D artist, before sending his pitch to Devolver, the publisher behind the likes of Hotline Miami and Cult Of The Lamb.
Unlike Rother’s other projects, which he described as “atmospheric” walking simulators, Children of the Sun was “the first time [he] had a gameplay mechanic first.”
Children of the Sun is a supernatural puzzle shooter where players take control of the Girl and hunt down the cult that ruined her life. With just one bullet per level, careful planning is necessary to tag enemies and plot out a route for the magical bullet to travel. Once the bullet embeds itself in someone’s head or a car’s petrol tank, it can be reoriented and fired again, chaining together a series of kills to clear the entire level with one shot. Ironically, Rother’s approach to game design is a lot less premeditated.
Once Rother came up with the idea of the controlled bullet, the rest of the game “developed naturally”. He explained, “my whole process has just been like, ‘let’s start with something and then just continue moving.’” Even “the [art]style was not something I thought about too much, it just kind of happened.”
This had to change once Devolver got involved. While Rother praises the publisher for its hands-off approach and the creative freedom it let him have, once a producer was assigned, “we started doing Excel sheets,” he explained. “I didn’t have any game design documents or any of these kinds of things. There was no pre-production, it was just making stuff.”
Fortunately, Rother said the structure “was incredibly helpful to actually finish” Children of the Sun. With the end in sight, and launch just a few weeks away, April 9, we asked about his plans for the future. While he has no new games on the horizon, and Rother is “fairly confident” he won’t make a sequel, there’s “a list of things” he’d still like to do with Children of the Sun, so he can “totally see” a post-launch update happening. Unfortunately for console players, “nothing has really been discussed” regarding porting the game from PC.
Rother seems calm and down-to-Earth about the future and his current position. “Whatever happens with the game, people will play it, they will have an opinion, and then they will forget about it,” he said. “I had two years of my life which I could spend the way I wanted. So, to me, personally, this game is a success already.”
Children of the Sun has a free demo available now that you can download on Steam if you want to try it out before it comes to PC on April 9.