“My goal is 30,000+ likes by release.” How a 19-year-old Ukrainian developer is creating Twilight Tails, a cooperative game about raccoons

Hello. Tell us a little about yourself. How long have you been interested in game development? Do you have any previous development experience?

My name is Pavlo, I’m 19 years old. I’ve been working as a game developer for the last 5 years. It all started when I took a programming course at the age of 14. That’s when I got into game development. After learning the basics of Unity and C#, I started worked freelance, where he gained a lot of experience. He developed various projects range from 2D platformers to VR projects and multiplayer games.

After two years of freelancing, I started working for a small outsourcing company. My freelancing experience helped me a lot in this, and in the process
I felt quite comfortable in the development, although working in a large team was a new experience for me. Later, I changed two more companies due to the desire to develop and work on projects that attracted me.

In parallel, I tried to create my own projects, but due to a lack of experience and a certain level of self-control, they were not brought to the release stage. However, I always understood that my entire journey in game development would sooner or later lead me to creating my own games. Even those games that never reached release are part of this journey. After a year of working at the last company, I decided that I was finally ready to create my own project for Steam. In February 2024, I started working on Twilight Tails.

Tell us about the Twilight Tails project. How did the idea of ​​making a game specifically about raccoons come about? Were there other ideas for the debut game, or a similar one but about other animals?

The idea for creating «Twilight Tails» arose very spontaneously. In a free from
During my free time, I decided to create a small project where I wanted to work on creating shaders for HDRP and try out new mechanics for me.

I just found a low-poly raccoon asset from previous projects and started working on it. A week later, I had a small map with a low-poly raccoon that could be controlled from third person and some interesting shaders. This one
I neglected the project for a few weeks, but when I reopened it, I realized that I wanted to create an atmospheric survival game with a raccoon.

I didn’t have any other serious ideas for the game, or at least I don’t have any right now I remember. The idea of ​​Twilight Tails immediately struck me.

Are you working on the game yourself, or is there a team? How long has development been going on?

I work alone. In total, 5 years of experience before developing Twilight Tails
I learned a lot of things besides writing code. But of course, for I use it to speed up development and create a better product assets. The game has been in development for 9 months.

Will Twilight Tails have a plot? What is the gameloop and the players' ultimate goal?

First, Twilight Tails is a survivor, so there is no direct storyline in it won’t be. But I plan to add a little plot that the player will discover for yourself by discovering new locations and finding clues. Despite this, the main goal of the player is to survive.

I could be wrong, but cooperative play is not often found in indie projects with a small budget, and Twilight Tails just announced cooperative. How difficult does this make development? How will the cooperative mode work?

Creating a cooperative regime definitely takes some time, which pushes back the release date, but I see this game with co-op, and I’m sure it’s worth it. Co-op will work so that one of the players will be act as the host, and others will join.

Recently, there have been many projects where the main character is not a person, but an animal. The most famous is probably Stray, but Little Kitty, Big City, Squirrel With A Gun also come to mind, as well as Ukrainian games Tailgate, Copycat and others. What games inspire you in the development of Twilight Tails?

I was very inspired by the game The First Tree. It touched my heart with its
atmosphere and development history long before the creation of Twilight Tails.

You wrote on Reddit that Twilight Tails has already received 12,000 whishlists on Steam. It seems like you’ve worked hard for this — you created a demo for Steam Next Fest, you have a TikTok account where you’ve posted over 100 videos, you’re in touch with content creators. How do you manage to combine this work with development, and are you happy with the result?

At the time of writing, Twilight Tails has over 19 000 whishlists on Steam, which is a very good result for me. After all, on at the beginning of this journey, I set myself a goal of 10 000 whishlists.

My current goal is 30 000+ wishlists by the time of release. The first few months I spent a lot of time promoting the project, as I had never worked in marketing, and it was a new experience for me. But now that I have a certain level of understanding of how best to promote, what exactly to do, is no longer takes a lot of time.

Also, the project already has some visibility in the community, and many public with large audiences are showing my game there. So for now I can say that I am satisfied with my result of 19 000 whishlists, and I am more than confident that I will be able to reach 30 000+ by the time of release.

The Twilight Tails page lists Ukrainian and Russian text localizations. However, you previously stated that the game will not be available in Russia, and this localization is intended for other users who understand this language. Have you changed your mind about this, given how skeptical Ukrainian players are about such decisions from Ukrainian developers?

Regarding the issue of localization and sales of the game in Russia, my opinion is not changed. If I could afford to localize to more languages ​​and
was able to cover those countries whose population understands Russian in this way, I would certainly do it without using the Russian language. But, unfortunately, with it’s impossible with my resources. As I said before, the game will not be sold in Russia.

When can we expect the game to be released? Will it be in early access, or will it be a full release?

I can’t give an exact release date right now, because at the beginning of development I was hoping to release it in the winter. But now the dates have shifted, and the release is expected to take place in early spring. A full-fledged
release.

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