For our first interview, we got hooked up with Oro Interactive to ask a few questions to one of their developers, itamu. With their new game, Mama’s Sleeping Angels, having just been released a while ago, it was the perfect time to ask a few things about the game that we found interesting enough for our readers.
Greetings itamu! Thank you very much for doing this interview with us – you are popping our cherry for a completely new segment we are introducing on our website, called Q&As. On to the questions!
What first inspired you to create your brand-new game, Mama’s Sleeping Angels? Was there maybe a specific moment or experience that sparked the idea for this interesting game?
It is hard to pin down one specific inspiration; it is more a congealed blob of bizarre media that felt scary to me as a kid, even when it was not trying to be scary. I am really fascinated by abstract weirdness/fantasy/surrealism. Things like The Mask, Monkeybone, Pan’s Labyrinth. I like it when part of the thing feels scary, and part of it feels funny at the same time.
On a practical level, a big reason I am making games is that I have never really been able to land a traditional job and stick with it. I had to make something work… and it is honestly a little insane that this is working. I am really happy about it; it was not a given that Mama’s Sleeping Angels would find an audience. Or that I would be able to actually finish it. That is true for any game, but for me it has been a big surprise.
I have also always been a big dreamer. Lots of nightmares and therapy as a kid, and I still get them, though less often now. Infinite, strange dreams that are exhausting. I write some of them down when I can. Most of that material is too personal to share publicly.
What emotional experience do you hope gamers walk away with after playing Mama’s Sleeping Angels?
I thought a lot about what it means for this game to exist in the world. A major reason it is multiplayer is that, at this point in my life, I mostly play games to connect with friends. The game itself is almost secondary. It is a medium for spending time with people. I hope the game helps people have fun with their friends, feel a human connection, and enjoy each other. The world could use more of that right now.
How did you balance storytelling with gameplay in a project like this, and what were the biggest technical challenges you faced while developing the game?
The game is not very story-heavy. The story is more of a frame around the game. Most of the development was not about writing or building a narrative; it was about how hard it is to program a multiplayer game alone.
Beyond the technical side, there is a challenge that is hard to name that floats around being the only person writing the code and making the assets. It can feel like standing at the base of a mountain. If I get sick, nothing moves forward; on a team, someone else can keep chipping away. I was driven by a lot of fear… If I could not pull this off, I did not know what would happen next. I would be more than broke, still jobless, and I do not really want to think of what would come of it. So a huge part of the challenge was existential.
Did the project evolve significantly from your original concept, and how did you craft the tone and mood of the game?
Hahaha, yes. It started as a Fortnite tutorial project so I could apply to jobs with it as part of a portfolio. I followed the tutorial but kept changing it into my own little thing, more of a team deathmatch, short rounds, prototype-scale. Something simple to prove I could program and work in an engine to get a job.
As time went on and no job came through, I kept working on it. And so it kept changing and getting bigger into something closer to quota horror mixed with everything else the game became. As such, I did not start with a fixed design. The game grew out of a kind of formlessness, which I think feeds into how bizarre the final thing is.
Are there perhaps any artists, developers, or games that influenced your aesthetic choices for Mama’s Sleeping Angels?
Absolutely. Yume Nikki is a big one! It showed me that a game could be so simple in technical scope and still so emotional, deep, personal, and full of unknown breadth. I wanted to explore those feelings: mystery, wonder, an itty bit of fear… and see if I could evoke them in other people. It is an exploration for me, too. What I have made is very different from Yume Nikki, but it is fun to see what comes out of the process and what gets pulled from nothing as you go.
How has the community that played the game responded so far, and are you satisfied with the feedback you received from them?
I am really happy with my community, and I am honestly overjoyed by the response. I did not expect our ratings to be as strong as they are. The game is hard for a lot of people to get into. The core formula is familiar in terms of established genres, but there is a lot of strangeness that makes it a tough sell for some people. It really speaks to a specific kind of player. I was not sure enough of those players existed. But they do, and there are a lot of them. It is a huge relief.
If you could advise your past self at the start of this game’s development, what would it be?
Honestly, I am not sure what I would say. Getting from the beginning to the end involved a million mistakes and weeks of work that got thrown away… but all of that was learning, and most of it was necessary to reach the finished game.
If I thought about specifics, I might say a couple hyper specific things like: do not sink quite so much time into fine-tuning procedural generation. Lean more on prefabricated structures with smaller variations! But the big picture is that the journey had to happen the way it did. Shortcuts in hindsight probably would not have made a better game; development needed most of the struggles I went through.
Where do you see your game development go next, or is it too early to think about a new project already?
For now, I want to focus on the most-requested quality-of-life improvements for Mama’s Sleeping Angels, plus a little bit of content polish and fixes, not major new systems. I want existing players to enjoy the game as fully as it can be enjoyed.
Beyond that, I have two things in mind. In the short term, I want to build something (secret) very quickly. Not really a “game” but a tool: something for friends to interact through their computers. I have seen similar ideas, but I do not think anyone has done this exact thing. It is abstract and will ask for creativity from users, but I am excited about the potential.
After that, I have a medium-to-large project in mind. Mama’s Sleeping Angels took about three years. That is too long for a sustainable cycle if you are trying to build a career as an indie. You cannot give yourself that much time unless you have a unicorn type of success… like, you are Toby Fox or Team Cherry. If you are building realistically, you need tighter, shorter development cycles. With all of that, I don’t want to say too much about the next games yet, but yes, there is more I want to make, and I am excited to get to them.
That is it, thanks again for doing this with us! Cheers!
