Set in a beautiful world of colorful tiny planets, PlanetRealm takes you on a puzzle-solving treasure hunt through mysterious vines, mazes and forests.
Hop from planet to planet and keep your eyes peeled for clues unraveling the path to the legendary Hidden planet and it's lost fortune!
Immerse yourself in distinct low-poly, cartoony looking world with relaxing atmosphere and variety of interesting puzzle mechanics. Planet-rotating and vine-activating mechanisms, maze planets, perspective puzzles... Many tried but none succeeded, will you be the first to solve them all?
PlanetRealm is a first-person puzzle adventure game taking place in a planetary system where mysterious vines form tunnels between tiny nearby planets. Strange force of the planetary cores gives vine-tunnels transporting abilities and powers up mechanisms, capable of rotating entire planets!
In an age long past, infamous Planet Hunter Olygoz stashed a dozen omnicores on one of the planets and set up a series of puzzles so nobody but him could find it. Countless tried their luck, but all without exception failed, and the legend of Hidden planet and it's lost fortune was born...
With it's low-poly style, cartoony visuals and a different take on 3D gameplay, PlanetRealm offers a unique kind of first-person puzzler experience!
Nearly impossible to mine for, not all planetary cores are equally powerful. Most Planet Hunters considered themselves lucky if they located and got a hold on more than one omnicore in their lifetime.
One Planet Hunter though, Olygoz, was infamous for finding and mining a dozen omnicores and stashing them somewhere deep in unexplored parts of the planetary system. Making sure nobody stumbles on the planet holding them, he devised a series of challenges only he knew the path through.
Many tried, failing one by one over the years, then decades and centuries, until Olygoz's stash turned into a legend, The Hidden planet's lost fortune
Now almost forgotten by the world, the last person who tried to claim it was a scavenger named Solygar, your uncle.
Gone for years, he returned from his adventure empty-handed.
"Beaten by the wind" he told you.
"I almost figured it out... And then lost it all. Gust of wind ripped all my notes from my hands, I tried continuing without them but got myself lost. Those planets are tricky, I barely found my way back... But if anyone ever finds all those notes, they'd might have a real chance of getting the cores..." he said, looking at you.
It took some time, but you managed to locate the planet where Olygozes' challenges begin.
It's your turn now.
PlanetRealm is in development by three friends, Tine Grbec, Jani Fučka and Gašper Čefarin, who never made a game before and started this side project to learn various aspects of game design.
Hey there!
That's right, we are not a "real" game studio, just a few friends working on this in our spare time. All three of us met at the same time, on the first of September 2008, when we were put in the same high school freshman class. We quickly became friends and kept hanging out through the high school years.
When college started, Jani and Gašper became almost neighbours in the capital of Ljubljana, while Tine went studying to the coastal city of Koper. Oh yeah, we're from Slovenia by the way. That small chicken-shaped European country that's constantly mixed up with Slovakia.
And, also by the way and not to get confusing later on, Jani is the guy dealing with 3D modeling, Gašper likes music and sound editing and Tine recognizes himself in "99 little bugs in the code".
Anyways. Things got flipped around in the second college year when Gašper left Ljubljana, but Tine showed up and it just so happened that Jani switched his place and needed a roommate. The amount of hours that went into Portal 2 Co-op that year was astonishing. Whoa. Good times.
Then in 2015, the third college year, it finally happened. A programmer and a 3D modeller got an idea. Make a game together! How didn't we think of this before??
We threw around a lot of ideas and concepts, and quickly shelving them for later. Despite all the excitement we somehow managed to realize in time that two people who never made a game before aren't gonna produce an AAA title out of the gate. So we kept trying to figure out what to do, and of all places we got inspiration from a Facebook post.
An image of... You know what, we're not gonna spoil it, you can find it in the game if you look hard enough. What's important is, it gave us vision of game world that was different from any game world we previously found ourselves in. Now the question was what to fill it with.
Designing around the lack of skills we knew we had, and other limitations, we landed on a first-person puzzle game inspired by games like Portal (and Portal 2, obviously), Myst, Antichamber and The Witness (that wasn't even out yet at the time). Eager to start, we left the story to be figured out later and got to work. Not an eight-hour-a-day work though. Balancing between studying, gaming, Star Wars and LoTR marathons, we started working on it as a free time project, and it still is so to this day. Each of us jumps between working on it from 10 hours a day to 2 hours a week.
Jani dove into assets design and modeling, creating vegetation models that are still used today with effectively no corrections, while Tine focused on Unreal engine to start figuring out how we can pull this together. Unfortunately for us, Unreal engine 4 in 2015 didn't support one key feature. It was impossible to disable deafult gravity. How are we supposed to fill the world with planets you can walk on, each with it's own gravity, if we kept falling off them??
Tine went into frenzy about this, trying to find a solution by trial and error, reading countless forums and everything else he could find, but to no avail. After months of wasted time it was time to stop, but not ready to quit just yet, Tine gave Unity a go. What do you know, we had a working prototype with multiple walkable planets in less than a week!
In the meantime, Jani was coming up with a story and designing some other game assets that would be useful later on. With the engine ready, it was time to dive into level design. At this point we decided to first focus on the game's demo and summoned our third musketeer, Gašper, to land his expertise with PlanetRealm's sound effects and melodies. It was late 2017 and we started taking the production a bit more seriously (still working on it only in our free time though).
Through all of 2018 and a bit of 2019 we were slowly working on the demo, constantly learning about stuff in game design we never thought of. But with enough motivation and through trial and error we managed to get over all the hurdles so far, and we plan to continue in the same manner moving forward.
Two hurdles we keep facing no matter what though, are time and money. When we're busy making a living, it leaves us with little time to work on the game. And when we put more time in the game, our wallets start getting too thin for basic living expenses. With the help of Patreon, we're hoping to eventually be able to spend more time on our little project. Take a look at out page if you feel like helping out in exchange for a few bonuses!
On April 18th we quietly released an alpha demo on itch.io (thinking about it, that was technically our first game ever!) and took a short break from the project. Getting back to it with rested brain and feeling fresh, we took the valuable feedback and gameplay videos our demo got (big thank you to our early players!) and started re-working what needed to be re-worked and updating what needed to be updated. Now let's see how our attempt at official announcement in November goes!
