As other articles have mentioned before, game development has become so accessible and such a huge market, that everyone and their dog are doing it these days. Most of those people are young, eager, and have completely unrealistic expectations of what it takes and how rich it will make you. Spoiler alert: More of one of those and less of the other than you think, but I’m not yet telling which is which.
As always in a good article, there is a personal story going along with this. My own game Schwarzwald, which I’ve been working on for around half a year, is now on Steam Greenlight and the feedback has been both over- and underwhelming, as you can see right here:
The first two days, I got more exposure on Steam than I had managed to get by myself on, for example, my Facebook page for the game. The stats for that are, to be completely honest, depressing:
So now that I’ve driven away half of the audience with statistics, let’s look into what makes game development so unlike the expectation of the game enthusiast.
Note that I am not talking about the game itself that you are writing, or your passion in doing so. Because passion and drive are important ingredients of a successful indie game, but they are neither surprising nor unexpected. I am talking about the parts that many of us indie developers forget or underestimate.
These less-obvious ingredients basically boil down to:
- Marketing
- Polishing
- Marketing
- Bug-Fixing
- Marketing
Marketing
The first thing that your game needs is some initial exposure, and when you start you think that your friends will come and play — and they will. Then they will stop, because unless most of your friends are gamers with the exact same taste as you, it simply isn’t the right game for them.
You absolutely need an audience that you can talk to, and it’s best to build it before you even start game development. If you have a lot of followers on Facebook or Twitter, that is wonderful. If not, you need to get them. Post interesting content, join groups, whatever it takes. You will need as many people as possible who will get your initial postings.
Polishing
As the saying goes, first you do 80% of your game, and then you sit down and do the other 80%.
Polishing is the act of turning the playable, almost-finished game into something that actually works as a game not just for you and some die-hard fans. It includes smoothing out the interface and flow of interactions, testing the game with different people to understand how they interact with it, what they expect, what confuses them. It includes making things visually more appealing, adding subtle effects, background music, improving the graphical user interface, adding icons, settling on a proper font and one hundred other small details.
This part is always bigger than you thought it would be. Always. Because you can always polish one more thing, make this more beautiful or that more attractive or work on this part a little more. There is always one more animation that could be improved, one more sound effect that could be added, one more user interface feedback that can be made better.
Polishing is what makes or breaks a game. Anyone can write an endless runner, or a platformer these days. Actually, I just wrote an endless runner involving cats for my girlfriend, and it took me one day. Now we’ve decided to polish it and release it as a mobile game, and I’m under no illusion that it will be ready in one more day. For simple games, the ratio is not 80% + 80%, it is more like 80% + 180 %.
To understand what polishing is, look at AAA titles and compare them to the crappy indie shit that you find in the lower ranks of, Greenlight, for example. The cringeworthy stuff. Let’s all be honest with each other and admit that it exists. Now stand the pain for a few minutes and understand what exactly makes you cringe. I don’t want to show an example here, so follow in theory. The bad game is most likely unpolished. The balance is off, the gameplay boring — yes, maybe. But what makes us cringe is bad sound effects, horrible graphical user interfaces, bad tiling textures, choppy animations, badly responsive input, overly flat surfaces, too much re-use of the same three models, bad lighting, all those small and not so small details that are actually not about the game itself, but its presentation.
Marketing
What you need these days to speak to your audience, to be “present” in the digital world, is just mind-boggling and it will eat up a massive amount of your development time. Here is just what most guides on marketing for indies recommend you have to have:
- Facebook page
- Twitter feed
- Dev Blog
- YouTube videos
- Screenshots
- Press Kit
Each of those can take hours or days to set up and populate. And bear in mind that this is the bare minimum. To be really successful, you also want:
- your own / “company” webpage
- the games own webpage
- a page on IndieDB, itch.io or half a dozen other indie game sites
- join various groups and forums to spread the word
- go to local gaming conventions and events
- attend gaming conventions, game jams, exhibitions and fairs
How one person is supposed to do all of that while also developing a game and having a job to pay for the hobby is anyones guess. So better get started today.
Because while it sounds overwhelming, there is also a lot of content shared between all of those channels. You will use the same videos and screenshots for all those sites. You will post the same description and updates to all of them. Gaming conventions are a few times a year and probably you are going anyway.
Most importantly, you should monitor which of these channels actually work for you and which don’t. You will find out that they work differently, too. For example, here is Schwarzwald on IndieDB (left) itch.io (right) and :
Which of these is the better channel? In total, IndieDB brings almost twice as many visitors (920 compared to 548 on itch.io) but on IndieDB they come in boosts and always when I have written and published an article about the game there, which takes considerable time and effort. Itch.io on the other hand, has a fairly steady influx of people showing up, and most of the referers show that people are actually coming from inside the site.
That is the main reason for having multiple channels. Different audiences, different ways of reaching them.
Bug-Fixing
Once your game is 95% done, it goes back to 90% and then to 80% and if you are unlike, some more. If your marketing has been successful so far, you will now curse the fact that you have many players, because many players find many bugs. And many players will report many bugs. And many bugs will be reported many times. For a time, you will feel like shutting down the bugtracker because anyway people are just posting duplicates. Or if you don’t use a bugtracker: Your e-mail.
There will be easy bugs. Bugs you already marked as #FIXME in the code. Bugs that surprise you, and bugs that make you angry. The worst are the bugs that evade you. That you can’t figure out or that only happen on player machines, never on your own. Then there will be bugs that you swear you fixed last week, why in the name of all the gods is it back, and how?
Bugfixing is decidely not fun and can be outright frustrating. And it feels like it is never ending. But of course it needs to be done, nobody wants to play a buggy game. So you will go and do it, and lose your motivation. This phase is a careful balance between keeping your spirits up and sitting down and doing the shitty work. And at the end you want to shout to the world about the fifty crazy bugs that you fixed, but truth be told, nobody gives a damn. People are fast to add to the noise when a bug is present, and slow to post even a thumbs up or like when a bug is fixed. That is just how it is.
Marketing
And then you are almost done and now you need to roll it out. You have already exhausted your existing channels to get testers and early access players or whatever. But you want to raise your player count from a hundred or so to a few thousand.
Press Kit. You prepared it a long time ago, now is the time to use it. So you write to the press. To YouTubers, to everyone, and get largely ignored. Because they get mails like yours a dozen times every day. But you have no other choice. One or two of them pick up the story and run it. Maybe you will get an award at one of the game jams that you go to, that gives you a reason to mail everyone again and maybe another few stories get posted.
If your game is any good, word-of-mouth will expand your audience as well, but slowly. One of my old games went from about one dozen players to over one thousand with just word-of-mouth. Good games still work — but they will not make you rich. Speaking of rich…
Forget about getting rich. If you joined a bunch of indie game developer groups, you have noticed the absence of millionaires. Most everyone is doing ok more or less, some have a successful small company, very few became rich. The gaming industry is just like any other industry: You can be successful and you can become rich, it’s just not very likely.
Look at the guys from Introversion, for example. Incredible guys, made really wonderful games. They had some modest success, hired a few people and planned to grow bigger. Then they had to fire those people again and while they are still around with Prison Architect, I’m quite sure that none of them is driving around in a Bentley.
But these are the heroes of indie game development. They have made a living from it for many years, they are still creating wonderfully unique games, and I can’t wait to see what their next title will be.
That is the other part that goes into game development: A healthy expectation of what is to come. Sweat and blood and sometimes tears. And many times the realization that you thought you are almost done, but you were wrong. But also, the incredible feeling of having created something, of sharing your creation with the world. The feedback from happy players (ignore the unhappy ones!) and how your creation comes alive in their hands. This is what makes it worthwhile.
And if you are a gamer, not a developer, and just reading this out of interest: Give feedback to your indie developer. Putting something out there and not hearing anything is the worst. 1000 players mean nothing if they don’t tell us that they like the game. If I have a choice between 10,000 distant players or 100 passionate fans, I would always pick the 100. The community. The people who care and remember your name.