INMOST Dev Blog #3: Putting Food on the Table

The huge hangar at Birmingham Airport is filled with empty game stands. One more day before EGX. Our stand is also here. On it hangs a two-meter poster of the game, which I drew in the last hours before the deadline. The computer is turned off, there is no build. The build just doesn’t work.

How many people will there be at the event? Eighty thousand?

You have probably heard many times that game dev is about luck, and it really is! And also about the failure, which is really very likely in this climate.

Even if you were absolutely sure. Even if, say, your game won $30,000 and the publishers come to your door wanting to work with you.

What could go wrong? Well, for example, absolutely everything.

Andriy and I were on such a high after DevGAMM — everything is so beautiful and positive, we never imagined getting to this place. There was still a lot of work ahead and we needed to properly begin the search for a publisher, but this was all once upon a time, but now everything is just great. Right now is November, 2017 and our game, INMOST has just won the Best Indie Game.

Andriy took the huge ugly-looking cheque to his home and photographed next to his cat for scale.

The cat is very small and the cheque is very large, but every time I look at this photo I feel a little calmer.

It’s one thing to develop the game on the side after studying or coming home after your day job, but it’s completely different to do it full time.

Pay taxes.

Provide for your family.

Otherwise, just nothing.

The game, to our horror, informs our budget, and this budget is pretty scary.

Even before the conference began, several publishers wrote to us with a proposal to talk. A couple of them are as interesting to us as we are to them, and we kick off conversations. Gently and concisely discussing the budget. It turns out this is normal and nobody expected us to make INMOST in return for a bag of potatoes. Finally we can exhale.

Abstract discussions start to phase into specific numbers and sentences, and suddenly everything becomes much slower.

We don’t inflate the budget, we don’t set long deadlines. We simply spent a lot of time on development planning, keeping our budget minimal and ensuring we can survive. Our planning tells us that we must work more than ever and that we just physically cannot complete the project for less. And this is not that “I can’t buy the iPhone my wife wanted.” This is “I can’t pay for food.”

One of the publishers periodically forgets to answer and, in the end, says that it takes some time to discuss the project within the team. We have been talking for two months. Probably the right amount of time. Another publisher says that they revised the plot of the game and it’s too expansive. Maybe we can reduce it a little? A little bit. Let’s say double. The timing of development as well, which is already there. And then everything will be fine again.

We completely abandoned third-party projects and our personal money ran out before the conference. This is when we started to devote all our time to developing and communicating with publishers. The prize money we’d won previously decreases at an alarming rate.The proposal of cutting the plot in half starts to become an option that I need to think about seriously.

Development is an iterative process. I myself do not believe that the project can survive unchanged until the release. Change is normal. I myself do not really like the plot, even though I spent a lot of time writing it. It could have been better and I understand that it can be recycled, renewed, rewritten.

The first publisher stops responding altogether and suddenly it’s necessary to decide on something so that the project can live. So I open the Google Doc and start writing.

Hangar at Birmingham Airport. Our booth is right at the entrance. Behind me is a ten-meter gate, and behind them thousands of people. I just uploaded the fourth build for today to our stand and it still freezes. I’m shaking. EGX opens in 1 hour.

I finished writing and got up from the computer. On the screen is a list of four dozen indie publishers. I chose a dozen of the main ones and set them priorities from 0 to 10. One even has 11. I am a big fan of them, but I feel like they are too cool for us. We will write to everyone; after all, it’s free and we need to find someone ASAP.

Oh, and the plot? I really rewrote it. I made it twice as long and much more complex. In fact, I like it better now. This is not quite what the last publisher expected from us, but I just couldn’t force myself to do make creative choices that harmed the game. For years what I’ve been doing things I don’t like and I’m over it.

We wasted those first two months because we were so sure those conversations were going to bear fruit. Eventually both publishers we spoke to initially completely disappear.

And then we send the game to absolutely everyone.

Finding email addresses can be quite difficult. Some go through and a lot bounce back. One publisher, when copying the address from their site, it copies backwards. This is the first time I’ve seen this. Very funny…

For some publishers, communication is possible only through a submission form on the site. Does anyone check them at all? I didn’t think so. My email to the publisher with the 11/10 goes into the dark bowels of the submission form from their website. Eek!

First responses from publishers begin to arrive on the very same day and for the first time since DevGAMM, we feel a little better. But in vain.

The second day of EGX. They point out a woman who is playing our game on the stand. “Do you know who this is? She’s a journalist who writes for all these big outlets. She really wanted to play INMOST and came over yesterday, but the build froze up when she started playing” AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Two months have passed since we wrote to the publishers, more than half answered. Even those with the funny backwards email address, but the situation has not moved by an inch. The vast majority start the conversation incredibly enthusiastically, but trail off eventually. So, we continue to communicate with several simultaneously.

For months. We have been talking for months, going nowhere. I couldn’t even imagine in my worst dreams that this was even possible. Remember, I talked about the critical impact of luck in game dev? Our stock of luck is clearly at zero at this point.

In fact, the project was already accompanied by a series of simply unbelievable coincidences, but several months had passed and we’re not high on people’s priority list. The prize money was now so depleted that there was no question that it wasn’t enough to complete development, even if we cut the costs to zero. Still, we didn’t stop the development, not even for a minute.

After 5 minutes of play, the journalist takes off her headphones, picks up her bag and quickly walks off the stand without saying a word to anybody. Did we do something wrong?

In any industry and in any occupation, people who have experience say that everything is more complicated than it seems at first glance. That from the outside, a lot may look elementary, but in fact, requires hundreds of hours of hard work. That success is one in a hundred. One in a thousand. One in a million. I didn’t want to believe it.

It seems that you have the wrong end of the stick. Everything will be just fantastic for you, because what can go wrong? Absolutely the whole world just screams to you that everything will be perfect. Why not believe them? After all, you are not like everyone else and this is all self-deception.

Such people do exist. Those who have accomplished a lot, immediately and effortlessly. Those for whom the stars aligned in an absolutely incredible way, and who surprised everyone around them with their success. This is just a fluke, a quirk of Fortune. Thousands of invisible threads come together in a random place. But it helps not to give up, to try again and again. Luck is unpredictable. It can end absolutely suddenly.

However, we bounced back. The 11 out of 10 I mentioned earlier? That’s Chucklefish, and they answered. Two weeks later we signed a contract.

The journalist returns to the booth, bag in hand and now with a friend.

- Listen! It sounds fantastic.

She grabs the gamepad, hands the headset to her friend and falls back on the chair in front of the screen.

It’s the third day at EGX Birmingham and Andriy has already created the tenth demo build. The latest builds are just cosmetic changes, but we continuously record feedback and make changes, more and more changes.

Never before have I been more nervous than now. A week before the conference we almost completely recreated the mechanics for moving the character. The day before the conference, the preservation system was completely rewritten. Absolutely idiotic act, but it was necessary.

Every 15 minutes of the first day, I reset the character’s position with the secret button when it gets stuck. For the next build, I do it once an hour. By the next — every three hours. On the second day of the conference, the build is finally stable.

Our booth is constantly busy. About 80% of players complete the half-hour demo. Some leave to return with a bunch of friends within the hour. Someone new takes a photo of the screen every five minutes. Someone is frantically scribbling into a notebook. Every day at EGX I stand incognito nearby our booth, I hear: “Oooh, INMOST! I’ve heard about this game”.

Of the hundreds of games present at EGX, the organizers chose six, posters for which were sold at the official stand. One of them is INMOST. The same poster that I finished drawing a couple of hours before the deadline.

We are sitting in some cafe, having dinner after the conference with the folks from Chucklefish. They were with us throughout the conference, joking, worrying, helping. The support is simply incredible and we can only thank them so much. I pull out my phone.

- Yes seriously. Watch it! Here is the Google Doc with all the publishers, which I made seven months ago, and here are the estimates. You are the only ones with 11 out of 10.

- Ahaha. You just changed the grade!

- It’s true! I can prove it! There is a history of edits!

I laugh with everyone, but I think to myself, what was the chance?