Ukrainian developer Kyrylo Balandin, who is working on the cozy game «Chumaky, spoke about the successful announcement of the project. The idea for the game appeared under the influence of another Ukrainian indie Titan Chaser.
Ukrainian developer Kyrylo Balandin, who is working on the cozy game «Chumaky, spoke about the successful announcement of the project. The idea for the game appeared under the influence of another Ukrainian indie Titan Chaser.
The announcement of «Chumaky» took place as part of the Ukrainian Games Festival 2025. This is a game about travel, trade, farming, and building your own farm.
«From the very beginning, I was looking for a certain balance between undemanding mechanics in development and the potential interest of the audience in the idea. I cannot deny that my idea was generated under the influence of Stas Shostak’s game „Titan Chaser“, it is quite often heard in the Ukrainian game dev community. I often thought about the success and involvement of the audience, potential difficulties in development», — Balandin said on the Gamedev DOU forum.
He decided that a travel simulator, along with basic game mechanics like trading and farming, would allow for easy expansion and addition of content without breaking the basic principles of the intended game cycle.
«It took about 2-3 months to decide on the style of the graphics and create a foundation for optimizing the use of video card resources. Another 2 months to think (in parallel with the development of another project) about how I want the project to look, brainstorm and create documentation. For 2 weeks, I actively developed the map and locations, it was quite fun and not mega-complicated», — said Kyrylo Balandin.
He added that Vyacheslav Shulga, Mykyta Kamenetsky, and the author of the game Tailgate, Dmytro Yarynych, helped him with the announcement.
«The number of wishlists is somewhat abnormal for me. I expected about 1,000 in a week, and now it’s almost 2,400 in 48 hours, since the beginning of the festival (this is also taking into account the lack of a trailer),» — the author of «Chumaky» noted.
According to him, the previous project Slime Clicker collected only 250 likes during the entire festival period, although it already had a demo version at that time.
Balandin plans to release " Chumaky " into Steam early access in 9-12 months, and until then he will be actively involved in development and marketing.
