HOMELESS 1999 devlog 1, a survival game that started in the browser and is heading to Steam
A third-person sim about living on the street outside Seoul Station in 1999, how it began and why it changed course
· Oreum Games
HOMELESS 1999 is a game about getting through one day at a time as a homeless man outside Seoul Station in 1999. I'm now building it as a PC game for Steam. That was never the plan.
Of course it started as a browser game for our site
Honestly, I thought releasing on Steam was pointless. A small indie game nobody has heard of would get buried, and I didn't expect it to earn back even the developer fee. So from day one I built a browser game site instead, and as I write this I still don't have a Steam developer account, haha. Every Oreum Games title is free and runs right in the browser with nothing to install.
HOMELESS 1999 started out the same way. Then I began filling the streets with convincing 3D characters made in Meshy, one at a time. A convenience store clerk, a nun, an older homeless man who has been out there longer than you, a supermarket guard, an old scrap dealer. Every new face made the street feel more real, and every new face made the game heavier.
So I cut the polygon counts. The game got lighter, but the people stopped looking like people. So I raised them again, and it got heavy again. I went back and forth like that more times than I want to admit. If it shipped as a browser game, the loading screen would take so long that nobody would wait for it.
In the end I just said forget it. Rather than shave the characters down to low quality, I decided to make it a PC game and put it on Steam. Pushed onto the very platform I had written off, all because of file size. This devlog is my record of how it got here, starting from the first plan on October 6.
It started with seven scenes
On October 6 I wrote the scenes before anything else. The first was sneaking a half-eaten cup of instant noodles someone left outside a convenience store. Then hunting every night for a place to sleep under a church awning or down a dark back alley, walking with your eyes on the ground to spot dropped coins, getting thrown out of a burger joint, washing up in secret in a public restroom, and working the free samples at the supermarket. There was also a scene about going to the hospital for your aching feet, but I cut the whole foot system along the way. With the scenes written down, I added rules so they would flow naturally into a single day.
The first rule was hunger. If you don't eat, your health runs out and you collapse where you stand. When you collapse it's simply the next morning, and a night on the pavement only gives you a little health back. So the first thing you do when you open your eyes is look for food. That one rule shapes the whole day.
I rebuilt the old Seoul Station
The game takes place on Seoul Station plaza in 1999. Not the glass station of today, but the old one with red brick and a green dome. My first version was just a box, but I really wanted that round dome people remember. I set a green copper dome on a round drum ringed with twelve windows, and pulled it toward the front so you can see it from anywhere on the plaza.
The streets around it went back to the nineties too. Wires sag from every utility pole, the shops are covered in signs, and city bus 23 and white taxis roll down the main road. In the evening a street food tent lights up by the curb. I put photo textures of worn concrete and brick on the walls and pavement, so it feels like a street people have lived on for a long time, not a clean toy town.
The title changed four times in three days
The first title was just Homeless. The next day it became Flower Beggar. The day after that it went through 1999 and Beggar 1999 before coming back to Homeless with 1999 on the end. That's how it became HOMELESS 1999.
On the title screen the name is a flyer taped to a utility pole. I drew torn edges, a missing corner, pin holes, a coffee ring and fold lines, so it looks like a sheet of paper you peeled off a street pole. That felt like enough.
A story that keeps growing
At first the whole story was picking up cardboard, becoming family with a stray dog, and finding a rented room.
Then the hero falls for the girl working the convenience store counter at first sight. To stand on his own, he goes out for day labor, sells roasted sweet potatoes, runs a street food tent, and dreams of a life with her. That story is in the game now.
I'm still adding all kinds of events to give the game more to it.