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From throwaway side project to Switch in 2 years: my indie gamedev story

kellsgame.com

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Re: From throwaway side project to Switch in 2 years: my indie gamedev story

#51

Post by Helikentio »

babuskov wrote: post #37
habibur wrote: post #8

This article doesn't touch it as it's a new game they are developing, but I used to wonder a lot how much are indie game devs making? Is it worth it? Can one expect to earn like a full time job working on it?

> Can one expect to earn like a full time job working on it? It really depends on where you live. A full time job in California earns much more that many other parts of the World. That being said, most indie games fail financially. There are hits, of course. But there's also a a middle ground if you can live on low funds. I have been full time indie since 2013. I have released about a dozen games and 4-5 of those hav…

It sounds like a big advantage to make a game in a cheap country.

Good for you :-)

But I'm curious about your 'net' because for me my net also pays health insurance and pention and insurance.

How do you handle those topics?

Re: From throwaway side project to Switch in 2 years: my indie gamedev story

#52

Post by bluescrn »

202206241203 wrote: post #38
bluescrn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like asking 'how much are musicians/artists making'. Most are making near-zero. A few get lucky and are making many millions. And while success requires a certain level of talent/skill, becoming a mega-hit seems very much about luck and being in the right place at the right time.

I hear this "luck" thing a lot but not sure that's the case. It's probably more originality + quality. So few undiscovered gems out there, thousands of average things though.

The quality of that 'average' has absolutely skyrocketed in the last decade or so, as ever-more-powerful tools have become available for ever-lower prices. But at the same time, we're also seeing 'indie' games with larger budgets than ever, either funded by publishers and or previous successes.

But games have been massively devalued over the last decade or so, when you've got AAA games practically given away (Game Pass, PS Plus, Steam sales), and indie games bundled up and sold for pennies, alongside the rise of F2P.

So now starting an indie game team is like starting an indie band. If you've got a bit of talent and put the effort in, you now have access to inexpensive high-end tools to unleash your creativity. But if you want to actually make money from your endeavours, it's getting ever-harder. And with the relative easy of porting games build with Unity/Unreal, even brand new platforms have completely oversaturated stores more or less by launch day, too.

Re: From throwaway side project to Switch in 2 years: my indie gamedev story

#53

Post by trgfdffd »

hbn wrote: post #50
trgfdffd wrote: post #35

Great article! Just a thought: if it was that hard for OP to write the logic for the gravity manipulation, he should've taken this as an indication that it'd be hard for players to understand and learn this functionality too. Perhaps one small lesson missed?

Is difficulty of implementation really a reliable indicator for the complexity in players understanding the mechanic? Jonathan Blow did a talk[1] at GDC a few years ago about implementing the time rewind mechanic in his game, Braid. It ended up being a pretty complex system that required a lot of ingenuity to come up with a design and implement it, but the end result is pretty straightforward and easy to understand f…

I propose that it depends on why it's difficult to implement. If the behaviour is easy to explain in English but requires a complex technical solution to enable it then that's one matter.

However, if you struggle to even describe the behaviour in English then it is a good indicator that users may struggle to understand it too.

I am assuming this is the case here. It may be that the OP had a very clear idea of how the gravity and all its edge cases would hang together but just struggled to code it. I interpreted the article's wording differently.

I do think not being able to simply describe a key game mechanic in natural language is indicative that it may be hard for users to deduce too.

Re: From throwaway side project to Switch in 2 years: my indie gamedev story

#54

Post by pdrummond »

lwilli wrote: post #16

Congrats on completing your game Paul! It was fun reading about your adventure building it, especially how you involved your son. I missed something though: how did it go when you first showed Ben the game? What was his reaction? I think it’d be nice to hear more about that. :)

Thank you :-) It's difficult to remember to be honest because he was involved from very early on, when the game was barely playable. I remember showing him early prototypes and he used to give me "sympathy nods" because he didn't want to upset me, haha! It took (what felt like) months before the game was playable enough for him to enjoy it and by then he had already come up with many of the ideas and level designs himself.

Re: From throwaway side project to Switch in 2 years: my indie gamedev story

#55

Post by pdrummond »

trgfdffd wrote: post #35

Great article! Just a thought: if it was that hard for OP to write the logic for the gravity manipulation, he should've taken this as an indication that it'd be hard for players to understand and learn this functionality too. Perhaps one small lesson missed?

OP here. I seriously thought about giving up on the gravity implementation many times, but not because the coding logic was difficult. I was more concerned that the player wouldn't find it compelling as I had early feedback it was way too confusing from player's perspective and I was too close to the game to notice it.

In the end, as it turned out, it wasn't the gravity mechanic that was too confusing, it was how haphazardly I initially implemented it. After months of playtesting and tweaking the difficulty curve in the early levels, I finally hit the sweet spot (which was measured based on feedback from play testers - mainly family, friends and a few colleagues).

Re: From throwaway side project to Switch in 2 years: my indie gamedev story

#56

Post by pdrummond »

rezic wrote: post #29

Thank you for the blog post! This has inspired me boot up GameMaker Studio 2 again. I usually come back to it now and then just to mess around, not really with the goal of making anything complete. It's been a while since I touched it last, but I made this back in 2018. Never worked on it past what's in the video but it was still fun to work on! https://youtu.be/fMbm2ZVL7zs

Thank you for reading it and I'm so happy to here it inspired you to fire up GMS2 again. Your game looks awesome! That's exactly how I worked on Kells - I just chipped away at it now and then for no other reason than because it was fun! Good times!

Re: From throwaway side project to Switch in 2 years: my indie gamedev story

#57

Post by pdrummond »

habibur wrote: post #8

This article doesn't touch it as it's a new game they are developing, but I used to wonder a lot how much are indie game devs making? Is it worth it? Can one expect to earn like a full time job working on it?

OP here. It's not new as in "under development" new. It's newly released on Switch, but I've been working on it for over 2 years now on and off and it was released on Steam last year for PC/Windows.

This project was never intended to be a full time job (or even lead to one) and it was never about making money, either. If that were the goal I would have probably ended up with a very different game in order to appeal to the mainstream and give me more chance of (monetary) success.

For me this game was more about the process of creating something that is 100% an expression of me (and my son). I created it for the sake of creating it, nothing more. And I enjoyed every second of the process to the point where it's kind of sad it's over now. That's not to say it was always easy mind - it was painfully difficult sometimes and I almost give up in frustration and disillusionment many times.

Re: From throwaway side project to Switch in 2 years: my indie gamedev story

#59

Post by pdrummond »

soegaard wrote: post #58

Hi Paul. Thanks for taking the time to write about your game. Since gravity plays such an important role in the game, it would be great to see a gif/video of how it works. It's a bit difficult to grasp from the screenshots.

Thanks :-) It's always been a challenge to explain how the gravity works so in the end I kind of played on that fact in the game. Most players initially think of the "gravity tiles" as essentially directional arrows. So if you want to make the Kells go up, you place an "UP" tile. But what that really does is make the Kells essentially "fall upwards". I hope this realisation gradually builds up over the first 10 or so levels (which are designed to be tutorial levels), until a brilliant "AHA" moment! But I've seen friends reach level 50 still using the "directional arrow" tactic :-)

I'll put all of this into another blog post but in the mean time there is a guide on Steam that explains this (and a whole lot more) in more detail here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=27358...

Re: From throwaway side project to Switch in 2 years: my indie gamedev story

#60

Post by pdrummond »

japhib wrote: post #12

Congrats on the release OP! For anyone reading, if you’re a programmer by training, I’d recommend literally any game engine other than Game Maker Studio for creating your game. Unity is a great choice for beginners that lets you program in C#. Game Maker Studio is specifically designed for people who are NOT programmers.

Thanks :-)

I don't agree that GML is designed for people who are not programmers though. I actually grew rather fond of GML (The language in Game Maker Studio) over the 2 years I learned to work with it (and that's coming from an experienced Software Engineer (TypeScript, Go, Clojure, Java, C/C++)). It's not perfect by any means, but it's very easy to get started with, has lots of features designed specifically for 2d gamedev, is actively improved by YoYo Games and getting better all the time. And it allows for rapid experimentation which was a huge benefit during development on Kells, given how many ideas where repeatedly thrown away.

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