In Conversation With: Slobodan Stević

Slobodan Stević [photo: Ivan Notaroš]

At some point during the Global Game Jam 2014 I walked around to see what other people were doing. Two places from me two guys were sitting next to each other, looking at their computers and looking friendly enough for me to chat with them. I asked what they were doing and they showed me the game screen and explained the gameplay. It looked fun but wasn’t playable yet, so I asked them if they made any games before this game jam. One of them said that he has a game that he was working on and showed it to me. “Nice, pixel art.” I thought and maybe even said it. The game was Switchcars.

GGJ 2014: Slobodan Stević (left), Nenad Ognjanović (right) [photo: Ivan Notaroš]

Slobodan Stević does everything in Switchcars on his own, but before he started working on it he didn’t have any experience in programming. “I was only experienced with sound design, music and art. When I told this idea of mine to a programmer friend, he just said ‘you can do it yourself’. I asked him how and he simply pointed me to a Python course. I looked through it, and 2 weeks later I started working on Switchcars.” “So it took you only two weeks to learn to program in Python?” “Something like that. I was a terrible programmer, I still am, but it was enough to get me going. When we talked about it, this friend and I, he said it may take six months to a year till I get used to it, and he was right. If I did things the way I was supposed to, it would have taken me that much. But, you know, I didn’t care about learning to program, I just wanted to make the game. Also, my willingness to take it on myself was because of my previous experience with making games. I tried to work on some games with other people where they would do the code and I would do the art and the other content stuff, and it never worked out, so it occurred to me at one point that I would have to start programming myself.”

“You work alone on Switchcars, so do you have to have some kind of schedule?” “The schedule is ‘wake up, Switchcars, Switchcars, go to bed.’ I rarely do anything else because I cannot afford it, timewise or moneywise. At this point, it’s all about finishing it. I’ve been doing it for months, probably about 12 to 14 hours a day.” “When you first started, did you spend less time working on it?” Yes, in the beginning I was also learning to program. During the first two weeks or so, I would spend 4 hours watching the Python course, and only a few more hours trying things out on my own. I had some savings and this mindset that I’m going to spend a year working on something so I was pretty relaxed. As soon as I felt that I can do exactly what I want, I knew how and this gave me a lot of motivation so I began working like crazy. Sometimes I would spend whole day working on Switchcars even in the beginning but not so frequently. I had other projects, music or freelance and I was going out and stuff.”

The schedule is ‘wake up, Switchcars, Switchcars, go to bed.’

“How much time did it take you to make the first version that you actually showed to people?” “About a year. And it was actually the second version because I never really finished the first one. I was working on that second version full time for 4 or 5 months, I think.” When he posted the first trailer online (Youtube, Reddit, TIGsource) he was pleased with the comments he got. “It means a lot. After this point I was really motivated to continue. That’s one of the reasons I posted it so late. I was looking forward to impressing people and didn’t want the quality of the game to affect my motivation right from the beginning. If I posted the very early prototype I don’t think it would have worked the same for me. It was also pretty good when I showed the game on my laptop at the meetup because, for the first time, I saw people other than myself playing it. I was focused on that and not on their reaction, and what I felt was ‘holy shit, they can play it. It’s not just me – they get it, they know what to do’ and that, for me, was the best part.“

“Why vehicles?” “It’s the same kind of appreciation as one might have with flowers, or insects, or anything that has many different kinds and they are all different in their own way but kinda similar. I like that. They all have different colors, different shapes, different purposes. I like to play around with the background of each vehicle, like this one is made in Romania, and this one in Sweden, and then this one is made in the ‘70s and this one in the ‘90s. And somehow you have this story you build up like one vehicle model succeeds another and this started, you know, some kind of history. There are a lot of systems in this, and they are what made it interesting to me when I was young. And I liked drawing stuff, so I was drawing a lot of vehicles. I liked making animations of them crashing. I was making comic books with car chases, and, you know, when the first GTA came out, it was like the best game that could ever exist. So I’ve always wanted to make a game with a lot of vehicles.”

Although he was spending most of his time in Serbia he didn’t expect anything related to Switchcars to happen here. “I never thought I was going to showcase it anywhere or possibly go to any events in Europe or elsewhere. All I was counting on was the internet. I’ll just post it online, share it with other people and eventually journalists, and so on. I never expected that I would meet somebody here and that I could do something about it offline. But I did, and there were these events where I showed the game and saw other people play it. And then we also organized the trips, such as the one to A Maze in Berlin, where we went collectively, ten of us or so. And this was a great experience, we’ve all become really close friends since, and I feel much richer, now that I’m not completely on my own anymore. I feel like we are one big family.”

Switchcars at Mikser festival 2014. in Belgrade [photo: Slobodan Stević]

“When you went to A Maze, you didn’t officially submit your game for the showcase, but did you expect anything to happen there?” “I thought of A Maze as a big event in a big white space full of people in suits, I don’t know why, but it turned out totally different. I had this idea that I would bring my laptop and show the game outside of the event. I really wanted to show it but it was not my primary reason for going there. But, as it happened, they had this ‘open table’ or something like that, where you could just put your computer and showcase whatever you want. Pretty much everyday I was there, for two or three days I carried my 5 kg laptop on my back all the time. I was inside this room for 5 to 8 hours, and I had it on my back the whole time. I had this idea, I had to have it with me, because you never know. And it happened, I showed it, and the people really loved it. I think that, in total, I showed it for 7 or 8 hours during two days. I think about 70 people tried it. I got great feedback. It was the first time I had international people play it, and most of them were actual game developers. Some of them are known for their games, so they have a great sense of what game design is all about.”

A Maze 2014. in Berlin [photo: Ivan Notaroš]

He submitted the game for Indiecade last year but didn’t win. “I was completely ready to accept that I won’t win, and I didn’t. However, I got a lot of good feedback from the jurors and this submission to Indiecade resulted in some really cool people playing my game, people that almost invented the genre. I haven’t met them but they spent hours playing my game. I took their feedback into consideration and I hope I’ll get more.”

Being the kind of person who cannot stick to an idea long enough to actually make something out of it, it’s fascinating for me to see the level of focus and persistence Slobodan has for developing Switchcars. Sticking to a single idea for years seems impossible to me, but by talking with him, listening to all the things that were adding up over the years, I got a glimpse of what that might feel like, and I understood why this game is so important to him.

[photo: Ivan Notaroš]