Three-man Korean team develops a fully-fledged sandbox MMORPG

We wrote about the Korean indie MMORPG Tree of Life last year when it concluded a successful crowdfunding campaign in its native country. Back then there was no word on whether the game would eventually reach the rest of the world. This month, however, dev team OddOne Games announced the game would be released in English as well, and put Tree of Life up on Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight. Oh, and it’s already been greenlit, too.

Tree of Life is a sandbox survival MMORPG. Players will need to do all they can to survive in uncharted territory, ranging from chopping down trees to building a shelter and fighting off bandits. Activities in Tree of Life run the usual gamut you see in life sims: fishing, farming; you name it and you can probably do it in game. It’s very thorough and you’d be forgiven for thinking a big team put it together.

OddOne Games actually only has three people on its team. CEO YoungChae Kim, WonSoon Choi, and JungWon Lee have been working on their MMORPG full time since 2012. But their histories together go further than that.

It starts from a seed

Kim and Choi previously worked together in the development team Rack Our Brains, which was formed in 2004 and developed the game ReAL: Return from Afterlife, a roleplaying adventure that bridged life and death. It won the 2005 Korea Game Awards Indie Prize, the Indie Game Korea 2005 Grand Prize, and first place at the sixth SKKU Game Dev Competition.

“ReAL began as a graduation assignment, and making it into a business and getting sales were not even considered,” Kim says. He first met Choi as a freshman in college, and helped the latter with programming his graduation project. Choi, then his senior at school, eventually graduated, while Kim was still a freshman who later had to serve his military conscription. Rack Our Brains disbanded after that. “It was difficult for us to maintain our team,” Kim says.

Following his mandatory military conscription of two years, Kim entered the workforce and helped developed MapleStory and DarkEden at Nexon and SoftOne, respectively. But he missed “freely developing,” he says, and so he turned back to indie games. This was after six years of work. Choi was coincidentally also job-hunting, and the timing seemed right to Kim. When Lee heard that Choi was embarking on MMORPG development with Kim, he offered to help them for free.

Kim, Choi, and Lee’s representations of themselves.

“We realized he was on the same page as us and [asked him to] join our team,” Kim says, calling Lee an important person whom the team cannot go on without. “If even one person on our team was missing this project would not have made it this far, or would have been completely different,” Kim says. And so OddOne Games was born.

Tree of Life was initially inspired by the many fiction novels Kim read and games that he played as a high schooler.

I wanted to develop a game where people do not just accept the story mapped out by developers, but create their own story while playing it themselves.