Hi everyone, Amy here showing off another amazing game made using Synty assets – It’s Only Money! Developed by Usual Suspects Studios and published by Firestoke, this game was released into Early Access in June 2023 and has just celebrated its full release. Usual Suspects Studios are a small, independent team of five located in Dunedin, New Zealand. The studio was formed in 2020 and has since been dedicated to developing its debut title.
It's Only Money is a third person, open world, simulation game where the player takes on the role of an Undercity resident of Rockhaven – forced to live amongst the sewers and subways by the newly elected evil Mayor. Along with other Undercity residents, you venture to the surface to steal, fight and destroy, taking down corporations owned by the Mayor’s corrupt cohorts with the goal of winning back the city for everyone, block by block. Buy houses, businesses, clothes, cars and whatever else your materialistic heart desires!
As one Steam reviewer put it, it’s like “GTA, but if everything was a meme and the ways to get money are WAYYY more creative.”
Build & Scale Quickly with Assets
From the earliest prototype stages of It's Only Money, the Usual Suspects team used a variety of POLYGON asset packs to quickly build out their city at scale. “We had experience with Synty assets from working on prior titles, including Out of Ammo at Rocketwerkz, so we were very familiar with the breadth of assets available, as well as the quality Synty offers,” says Aaron, Co-Founder of Usual Suspects Studios.
The small team of five devs quickly realised it would be an almost impossible task for them to create a city with the density people have come to expect from open world games, so they leveraged Synty’s assets to get their game built faster. “Whether it's modular pieces to create custom buildings, food models, weapons or even otherwise mundane set dressing like bins or newspapers, every object has its place to create an immersive and believable setting.
Simply put, without utilising Synty assets, our team wouldn't have been able to create such a vast, varied city in a reasonable amount of time.
Of course we still create custom assets where needed, but Synty’s assets made it incredibly easy to achieve a benchmark of quality no matter where you turn in Rockhaven,” adds Aaron.
Think Outside the Pack
It’s Only Money features assets from almost every POLYGON pack Synty have ever produced! Of course the team have leveraged packs like Shops, Street Racer, Gang Warfare, Nightclub, and Apocalypse which have an obvious and immediate application when building the city environment of their game, but packs like Farm, the Nature Biomes and even the Dungeon packs have found a home in their game world.
Aaron added, “using the more traditional city packs is great for building the foundation of a particular part of the city, but the area may call for a museum, or a graveyard. Perhaps even a military base housing some kind of alien experimentation lab - that's where we have a lot of fun with the less traditional packs. We view those as different bits of icing on the cake.” Mixing and matching POLYGON asset packs is a great way to bring a unique flavour to your game’s world and can be done with confidence knowing that Synty delivers an expansive library that is designed to be cohesive.
So what advice does the Usual Suspects team have for aspiring indie developers?
Being from New Zealand, Aaron did say he suffers from severe imposter syndrome and hesitates to offer any advice! But the team has a few lessons to share from what they’ve learned along the journey of shipping and maintaining a live product.
Be brutal and honest with your ideas.
“Naturally, not all of them will be winners, no matter how cool they sound in the earliest phases. For every good idea in It’s Only Money, we had 20 ideas that didn't pan out – and that's okay. Making effective use of time is key. It's not a reflection on you or your aspirations, some ideas are just harder to pull off, especially with a leaner team. As you get more experience as a team, you'll get a good feel purely through conversation when an idea might be too grand. Evidently, we hadn't learned that lesson when we decided we'd make an open world game with five people, but we're decent at it now!”
Play your game a lot, and play it weirdly.
“We know an idea's working when we finish testing a piece of new content and immediately want to try it out again. That's good, early validation that you're onto something worth the time and effort. Additionally, go back and play it in ways you're not accustomed to. Prod at your designs and systems in ways you feel uncomfortable about. Of course, It's Only Money has bugs. Some of it is downright broken with the right sequence of events. We'll eternally be fixing stuff up, as in an open world 5000 things can go wrong at any one time. That being said, the game is fairly darn stable for such a small team working on such a vast world. We test the heck out of the game to save ourselves nightmares in the future, and more importantly, save your audience from those headaches to begin with.”
Come up with a level design and set dressing procedure.
“These days when I build an area in the game, I follow a fairly formulaic process. Build out the initial area, perhaps it's a shop, or a garage, maybe even a mall. Once the foundations are in, I dress it up a bit. Make it interesting, unique, less boring to look at. Reference real life locations, or a memory from a film. Whatever source of inspiration is always helpful when building, especially when it's your 500,000th manually placed asset. Rotate the camera, look at your creation from various angles. Look at it from above. As you fill out these different perspectives, you'll start to have a really great and believable location. Next, imagine you're someone who works there. Where do you eat, where do you go to sit down, hell, where do you use the bathroom? I've found the process of "living" in a space a great way to flesh out an area and give it a believable and interesting feel. Do some rudimentary lighting and chances are you have a pretty sweet little area. You'll find your own flow.”
If you enjoyed this look at It’s Only Money and hearing some of the Usual Suspects team’s story and tips, you’d enjoy being part of our community of experienced and aspiring developers on Discord, Instagram, X or Facebook! Stay tuned to the blog for more ‘Made with Synty’ features.
