Summary
Last year I quit my job as a software developer and devoted myself full-time to pursuing a lifelong fantasy: making video games! I was SO stoked — I had a long, successful track record behind me building business applications and was positive this would translate well into the game space.
I’ve been a gamer my whole life and have grown very opinionated about what makes a great game. I pictured a retro/dungeon crawler type of game for casual gamers that I could complete within the year.
Here is the story of Dungeon Avenger and recommendations on how to rack up an epic fail on video game development.
Drink Your Own Kool-Aid
Everything I had read and seen indicated that I should expect to fail on my first attempt — 50% of all games in development never even see the light of day. It’s perfectly normal — and maybe even required — to experience failures on your way to your first successful video game.
These sobering statistics and stories did not dissuade me from imagining the extraordinary success (and income!) my game would result in.
Engage Selective Memory
I bought and read lots of books written by professionals espousing the secrets to successful game design. Having gamed my whole life I recognized a lot of what was discussed in the games I had enjoyed. Reading these books was like looking behind the curtain on some of my most immersive experiences — it was fascinating, exhilarating, and extremely insightful.
I felt like I had amassed a library of cookbooks that held the secrets to succeeding at my video game. If I just followed the recipes I couldn’t see how the final product wouldn’t astonish gamers from around the world!
This is about the time my selective memory kicked in and started parsing each of the cookbooks — only retaining the bits & pieces that fit in nicely with my plans for the game, and laughing off the rest as irrelevant. Looking back this was equivalent to flipping through cookbooks and cherry-picking only the ingredients I liked the taste of: ending up with a recipe for disaster.
Never Give Up; Never Surrender.
The graphics in the early versions of my video game were really something to behold— every now & then I found myself mesmerized by the scenes. I took painstaking care in incorporating graphical assets resulting in some of the most incredible vistas I’ve ever seen in a game. I was so proud!
Then I hooked up a frame rate monitor. Uh-oh. For a smoothly running game you need at least 60 fps (frames per second); my game was in the single digits. Not even close. It was heartbreaking but I stripped out a bunch of the eye candy to get the frame rate to an acceptable level.
At this point in the project, I seriously considered hanging up my hat. Had I stopped then I would have walked away with many lessons learned and saved myself from lots of hard work & heartache. My original vision for the game had been stripped down to something I hardly recognized — but instead of being alarmed, I doubled-down that the game would enjoy extraordinary success. Maybe I had watched Rocky one too many times.
It’s STILL too big!
I started out with such grand designs for my video game: stunning visuals, sophisticated AI, advanced scoring metrics, and competitive leaderboards. I had developed quite the laundry list of elements I thought an awesome game should have and was eager to incorporate every single one of them into mine.
Due to the aforementioned hurdles I now took a step back to reassess what I could realistically accomplish before the end of the year. I’m not sure when & where that self-imposed deadline appeared, but I took it very seriously and began hacking the scope of my project until I was reasonably sure I could finish “on time.”
A whole host of enemies (goblins, trolls, orcs, elves, dragons, dwarves, skeletons, and more!) suddenly boiled down to just goblins & trolls. Varying levels, set pieces, and lighting somehow shrank down to a single, repetitive environment. While I was still living the dream, at this point concern had started to set in.
How Hard Can AI Be?
A central part of my video game concept revolved around the ground-breaking AI (Artificial Intelligence) that would be powering my computer-controlled enemies (mobs) so every time you played the game it would be different. The game was all about melee combat (no bows or guns) so it was imperative that the combat mechanics were visceral and remained interesting throughout the game.
I’ve been a programmer my whole professional life so I approached this particular challenge with an abundance of confidence.
Getting a dungeon full of mobs to behave intelligently turned out to be a lot harder than I thought. Sometimes goblins were wandering aimlessly, not attacking, and running into walls. Something had to be done.
I took a shortcut and cobbled together 3rd party frameworks to get things up & running quickly. It took me down a rabbit hole filled with parameters and code that were overly complicated and barely functional, but it kept the ball rolling. In hindsight, I would have been better off taking the time and developing the logic myself.
Who Needs a Screenwriter When I Have a Wife?
Storytelling has come a long way in the last forty years. Try going back and watching a TV show from the ’80s and you’ll see what I mean.
That said, I somehow ended up channeling the plot from an old Batman TV series where the villain throws the hero into a dungeon and he has to escape…in retrospect not very original or sophisticated!
How hard could writing a script be? I enlisted the help of my business executive wife. Lacking experience did not discourage us. Why wouldn’t writing business plans & emails translate into scripts? We had a blast writing it and believed we had a hit on our hands.
To do our script justice we hired an accomplished, professional voice actor to bring it to life. I don’t know what the Emmy equivalent is in games but I’m pretty sure we felt we had a lock on it at that point.
Today’s entertainment has ascended to dizzying heights and overtime games have mimicked that complexity and shed the binary hero/villain plots of the past. Apparently, my wife & I didn’t get the memo.
Do Influencers Matter?
TL;DR: yes.
The seasoned veterans in gaming development all agree on one thing: get your game in front of as many influencers as possible! It’s paramount to any successful launch. After some marketing research, I subscribed to a couple of prominent (and expensive) game marketing platforms that facilitated getting my game in front of influencers.
Wow — I was not ready for the response! These influencers weren’t just critical of my game, they were downright mean. Here’s just one example of what I endured:
I’d rather gouge my eyes out with a spoon than keep playing this game!
At first, I took it in stride and told myself maybe it wasn’t their cup of tea — but the growing negative feedback was becoming impossible to ignore and hard not to take personally.
It Takes a Village.
Once my bubble was bursting it seemed everywhere I looked talked about building a community — over months & years — to participate in the development of a game. Various crowdfunding sites are very popular amongst game developers and are an effective way to steer the development toward success.
It makes sense: the very audience that might buy your game can help to guide it upfront in a direction that is of interest to them. I was so focused on building a game I wanted to play that I totally missed this piece of the puzzle.
I also learned that behind many of the smaller, indie titles that I’ve enjoyed sits a team of talented individuals — not one person. I’ve always enjoyed the collaborative aspects of software development and have been grateful for the outstanding teams I’ve been on in the past — I don’t know why I didn’t apply these lessons to my game.
Conclusion
I’m happy to buy the games I play and no longer aspire to design & develop them. There are plenty of things I’d do differently now, but I’ve fulfilled my lifelong fantasy to be a game developer. It’s taken me 9 months for the sting to wear off and to see the humor in the situation and write about it.
Developing a video game is way harder than I ever imagined! I have an elevated respect for those talented individuals & teams that create the games I so enjoy. I see a complexity and level of creativity that I stand in awe of — having realized just how hard it is to pull off. Hats off to those great folk, and keep the games coming! Otherwise, I might get fidgety and start building my own again ;)
