Latest news with #BuckshotRoulette
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
He made a viral horror game in 2 months – it sold 6 million copies, and now he can make whatever he wants for the rest of his life: "My final theory is that gambling is very fun"
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. There's a clear before and after moment in the career of (mostly) solo game dev Mike Klubnika. He's been making short, grungy games for years, but it wasn't until the 2024 release of Buckshot Roulette, a Russian roulette-style gambling sim where you let a shotgun decide your fate in a wager with a monstrous underground casino dealer, that he saw massive commercial success. And it was massive. With a game made in two months, first launched on and then on Steam, and later expanded with a hotly demanded multiplayer update, Klubnika sold over 6 million copies, putting him in the coveted position of essentially never again needing to worry about what he creates or how it performs. On top of that, Buckshot Roulette has put millions of eyes on his next game, Split (or s.p.l.i.t), a short psychological horror game where you navigate hacker terminals, which is out on Steam today, July 24. Klubnika tells me this success hasn't changed his life all that "dramatically" apart from the obvious thing: "I can do game development full-time and not really worry that much about the commercial side of games. I feel like I can come up with an idea for a game and I can make it in a more peaceful way, knowing that if it doesn't sell well, or if it doesn't reach enough players, then it's not as big of a deal as it could be. So in a way, it's quite freeing. But it's also not really that different to what it was before, because I was never really worried about, oh, what if I put this game out and it doesn't sell enough copies? I wasn't even selling games that much. It was like, what if it doesn't get any downloads? I'm very grateful for it." The Buckshot Roulette launch was "pretty crazy," he recalls. "I remember I was at a friend's place, we had a movie night, and I had just released Buckshot like a week ago. We were looking at Twitch on the big screen. We're looking at people playing the game, and there were so many people streaming, and there were so many viewers. You could also see that the chat in the streams was going crazy, because everyone was like, oh no, that one's a blank, shoot yourself instead of shooting the dealer. It was just chaos. It was very insane. I was not expecting it at all." I asked Klubnika how he might explain Buckshot Roulette's meteoric launch. "I've been thinking about it for quite a bit," he begins. "I think, generally, obviously, it's just luck. Right game, right time." It's simple to pick up and play, he reasons, and it's fun to watch over a friend's shoulder or, indeed, on Twitch. He reckons the indie horror scene, the perfect home for the "dirty, grungy, sort of hostile" games and worlds he creates, was pretty quiet at the time, leaving the door open for a hit to dominate conversations. He tips his hat to Inscryption, a superb card game roguelike and a big inspiration for Buckshot Roulette, for its style of presentation, which people have clearly latched onto. "My final theory is that gambling is very fun," he adds. I think he might be onto something. With Split, Klubnika doesn't want or need a repeat of Buckshout Roulette. The joy of making short games, he says, and working on games like these two as a solo dev – though overall, he "wouldn't necessarily call myself a solo dev" between minor collaborations or outsourcing – is acting on ideas quickly and getting them out into the wild fast. He's "thought about" making a bigger game, but something like Split is perfect right now. Split is a bit more video game-y than most of Klubnika's games, he says, and has more narrative to it as well. You can beat it in under two hours, he reckons. It's $2.99 on Steam, like Buckshot before it, or $2.54 with the launch discount. This is just how he likes to create – the inverse of the enormous games that dominate the industry through update after update after time-devouring update. (The reason Split took a bit longer to make is Klubnika couldn't help himself from embellishing a separate game jam project called Fused 240, co-developed with Wriks). Increasingly, short games are punching far above their weight, and Klubnika, like me, hopes that trend continues. "Especially recently, I've kind of noticed that [trend] with Balatro and Peak," he says. "It's pretty crazy. I feel like, in terms of industry, it might have more of a focus. Shorter timelines. But I'm not really sure." Separately, he adds: "When we're talking about dev timelines of four months to five months, it just keeps it fresh. I'm already really looking forward to next projects, and it's always very interesting finishing something and starting from scratch all over again. You get to just explore new ideas, rather than just making the same type of content for the same project. So I just find it very refreshing and also very, I guess, scopable as a solo dev." "My savings had run out": In a few months, a Sonic 3 animator made an N64-style game based on an iconic Animal Crossing mechanic and chucked it onto Steam because "I needed to pay rent," and it worked
Engadget
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Engadget
If you have 90 minutes to spare, play the cyberpunk horror game s.p.l.i.t
s.p.l.i.t is the most badass typing game I've ever played. It's actually more of a hacking simulator, cyberpunk thriller and puzzle experience than a typing game, but its core loop is bookended by sequences of high-intensity letter pecking with gruesome consequences — think Mavis Beacon as designed by Ted Kaczynski — and the final scenes have a way of searing themselves into your psyche. Not to mention, the whole thing takes place on a keyboard, no mouse or gamepad. So I guess it's technically only a typing game, but it's also not a traditional typing game at all. Trust me, it makes perfect sense in practice. s.p.l.i.t comes from Unsorted Horror and Buckshot Roulette developer Mike Klubnika, and it features his signature layers of grit, retro hardware and purely concentrated nightmares. In s.p.l.i.t , you're seated at a '90s-style computer terminal in a cramped, gray-washed shack. The world appears in PS2-era 3D graphics, and you're surrounded by distended black screens crawling with orange monospaced text. To your left, a window looks onto a dense forest. To your right, there's an electronic device in a lockbox. By pressing Alt and A or D, you're able to twist your torso to interact with two separate screens: One displays an active IRC channel with your co-conspirators, and the other is where the hacking takes place. The narrative unfurls in strings of data logs, file directories, command prompts and instant messages, while a bed of ambient industrial music pulses in hypnotic waves. You're attempting to gain root access to a facility where mysterious but clearly unethical things are taking place, and you're working with two colleagues, Sarah and Viktor, to infiltrate the systems. Sarah and Vikor's messages automatically appear in the chat box, each one accompanied by a satisfying bloop sound, and when it's your time to respond the SEND button flashes once, prompting you to type. It doesn't matter which keys you press while chatting, as lines of pre-written dialogue will appear to push the narrative along smoothly. Sarah, Viktor and the player character, Axel, have distinct personalities and they clash in believable ways. The game does a fantastic job of building robust characters in such a short time, through dialogue alone. On the hacking side, it very much matters which keys you press. You are in full control of the typing while digging through the facility's files, so spacing, capitalization, punctuation and spelling are all taken into account, alongside use of the proper commands. This portion of the game is a maze of directories and data, operating as one big logic puzzle. Your colleagues outline the goals but once you're in the system, you're on your own, relying on context clues to figure out what information you need and how to gain access. The hacking riddles in s.p.l.i.t are perfectly complex, requiring failure and tenacity to work out, and this balance makes each victory feel like a real accomplishment. Typing 'help' at any time pulls up a list of all possible commands, and I found this screen useful whenever I hit a dead end in my investigations — it's a natural way to mentally reset and visualize any unexplored paths. The 'print' command functions as a notepad, allowing you to save relevant numbers and other information on a strip of paper attached to the PC screen, and it's a useful tool especially in the game's later stages. I'm no coder, but I got used to the keyboard style of navigation really quickly. There's a strong sense of internal logic in s.p.l.i.t and it's satisfying to play in this sandbox, learning the game's language and steadily building skills as the narrative tension grows. The first-person interface, rhythmic electronic soundtrack and consistent characters combine to make s.p.l.i.t an incredibly immersive experience. It all pays off in a massive way by the end, when the typing game returns and things really get gruesome. s.p.l.i.t tests critical-thinking skills and keyboard proficiency in a dystopian near-future setting, and it's a uniquely unnerving, heart-pounding slice of interactive psychological horror. It's no more than a few hours long, but it's something you'll think about for days after the credits roll, guaranteed. s.p.l.i.t is available now on Steam for just $2.50 through July 31, and $3 after that.
