TLDR: don't make a game nobody wants to play

I am an indie game developer.

Four years ago I released my first PC game called Dorky Fork. I tried to do some marketing. Posted gifs on twitter and reddit. The best post garnered 25k upvotes on reddit, which led to about 200 wishlists on Steam.

The game sold fewer than 100 copies. It was pretty obscure and hard puzzle game, nobody really cared for it. But one of the prominent game critics and journalists John Walker wrote about it on his site Buried Treasure, where he reviewed indie games. I am really greatful for his review. Also, one Twitch streamer Sabadass streamed the whole walkthrough for 5 hours right after the release. This was highlight of my whole indie career. Seeing someone playing my whole game in one sitting was really special to me.

Anyway, two years after the release, I started creating concept for ISLANDS MIGHT FLY. A game set inside a cylinder space station, where very rich people of the future reacreate different historical periods. I created a PowerPoint presentation and pitched the game to few publishers. Most of them rejected, because clearly I didn't have any build. Very few were interested in seeing the build.

I thought that the idea for a game was unique enough to pursue it, so I started developing a playable build. It took me about 6 months, doing it all solo. I sent the build to a lot of publishers. All of them rejected it.

Well, you might think, that clearly it means that game sucks and nobody wants it, so you should come up with another game and stop wasting time. This is where a reasonable person stops the project. I was dead set on developing the game at least to early access.

I started developing the game. It took me a year of hard as mf solo development. The game features only 15% of what I wanted my game to be. But it has the framework of main mechanics and gives an impression of where thing will be headed and had relatively few bugs if any. I was running out of funds and the development was really really taxing on me. I thought it's a good place to release it early access, I physically couldn't develop it any further.

While I was developing I uploaded TikToks and twitter to gain at least some wishlists. But all my posts got 0-5 views. It was really depressing. Clearly the game wasn't appealing in any way possible, but I was too optimistic, thinking that that's algo isn't working properly and that a unique enough game will always find it's players. (This is the part where we laught at past me)

I also was participating in Steam Next fest. Unfortunately, it only garnered about 100 wishlists.

I posted a gif on gaming reddit, but moderators didn't like it and removed it. I deleted the post. And wrote them, they said that since I deleted the post they can't approve it. Which kinda confused me, because I didn't really break any rules. But after the release, I decided what the hell, and posted the game again and got banned. Please learn from my mistake. If a mod removes your post don't delete it.

Before the release I wrote about 30 youtubers who play this kinda of genre. All of them ignored it.

I released my game in March. It sold one copy in the first week. It was the streamer who played my first game(Sabadass). And a month later I ran discount and another person bought it.

And that's about it. What can we learn from it?

Don't make a game nobody wants to play.

EDIT. I really don't understand why this post is getting downvoted like crazy. It's postmortem, I am sharing something very vulnerable, ie creative failure. I think it's valuable for people embarking on developing their games. Why downvote this?

EDIT2. Thanks everybody for your input. I am really taking your advice about UI and presentation and will try to cook up something good after taking a break. I really need to put effort in those areas. Sorry for not responding to every comment! But appreciate them all.

Joined a new job recently. Wasn't excited to join since I took it coming off a layoff. From what I've seen:

• this company is really only using lambas in the backend layer (apparently coming from a larger monolith, but everything is just being broken down into just lambdas).

  • There's over 1000 of these, from what I can see, and it's hard to know how each of these interact with each other.

  • Also using nano-frontends as well, but our team doesn't really touch those

• Local dev environments are extremely hard to set up (with said lambdas), and sometimes the only way to test things are to push to a shared staging environment (before pushing to pre-prod)

• Everything is in javascript (even the backend). No TS, no frameworks or DI, just pure javascript.

And some other things I've noticed:

• Jira tickets are not well defined. I don't know where the PMs are but tickets have no AC, just "do this thing" without any context

  • Also don't really see any test plans written out for these tickets

• "Teams" are not well defined, but there's lots of them. Seems like our team is taking on tickets that are for other teams (or other teams just kinda dump them on us, which is a legacy team from what I'm gathering)

  • And it seems the engineers are the ones who have to really push back. Again I don't know where the EMs or PMs are with this (I suspect they're just super stretched thin)

• Thank god there are some unit tests, but I don't know how strong our E2E suite is on pre-prod.

There's a bunch of other things I'm learning about the ecosystem (such as SDK management and manual upgrading of packages) and I'm sure more gems that I haven't seen yet.

I'm just wondering if this is more of a new normal for medium sized companies or if there's more red flags than yellow here.

Hi everyone! I'm a refugee from Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ukraine. Currently, I live in a village in Vinnytsia Oblast and have completed the development of my second big game. My apartment and native town were destroyed during the shelling back in March 2022.

Background

After the release of my first game, I got the money to buy my own place.

It's a small apartment in an old building, with nothing at all. It hasn't been renovated since the last century. I had the feeling that time had stopped here.

After watching a bunch of videos about repairs, I think I'll try to do it myself, and it will give me a break from my computer.

I ask my father for backup and we set off. First of all, we take care of the bathroom.

The next thing I needed was a study. While plastering, I came up with the idea to make a brick pattern. 

I cut out a template from a piece of ceiling foam and simply applied plaster on it. It looked a little messy, but not bad at all.

I wanted to make a DIY table, so I bought some planks, glued them together, and then spent a long time leveling the wooden board under the weight because the planks were raw and warped.

The study looked like this. It was the first time I had a really comfortable workplace, and I was more than happy with the result.

What came next was the bedroom and living room.

Interestingly, I used iron fruit plates to make chandeliers and decorative plaster.

The renovation was completed on February 22, 2022, and on February 24, at 5 a.m., we woke up to an explosion. The war had begun.

We didn't take any belongings except money and IDs. And now we are on our way to my parents' house, worried that a missile will hit our apartment building. Upon arrival, I find out that my father is 60 kilometers away at work, and my mother and sister are at home. The city is engulfed in panic: there is no gas, no food in the stores, and no medicines.

The beginning of the next day is marked by the shelling of the city, as we hide in the basement. My father is still in a different city. In the evening, there is no power and water, and the unheated basement gets very cold and damp. We can hear constant whistling and explosions above our heads. Out of the old door in the basement we made a bed and take turns sleeping, with priority given to my pregnant wife. That night in the basement was a sickening horror, it was winter, it was very dark outside, and there was no ambient light at all. I have never seen such darkness before.

Day 3: My wife, a doctor, is on maternity leave. She is called in to work, there are a lot of wounded people and she needs to help with blood collection. We cannot decide whether she should go there. An ambulance shows up and takes her away; I'm not allowed to go with her. I can't reach her normally until 9 p.m. I don't know what to think, I'm going to walk across the city to her hospital.

It was like that for another 3 or 4 days. A missile hits the hospital, and since my wife is pregnant, they ask her not to come anymore.

Day 8: In addition to the explosions, we can hear machine gun fire getting closer and closer. A car drives through the streets and announces through a loudspeaker that those who can leave by their own transport should go, and that evacuation buses are being prepared for the rest of us in the central square. I was already kind of delirious, I hadn't slept well, and I had eaten almost nothing but canned food.

Leaving everything behind, we get in the car and drive to Zaporizhzhya. On our way, we see destroyed houses and a road torn up by tanks. 

Upon arrival in Zaporizhzhia, I want to put my wife, mother, and sister on an evacuation train to Poland. 

When we got to the train station, we saw thousands of people in front of the entrance and on the platforms. My wife is 7 months pregnant. Then I realize that my wife, mother, and sister are unlikely to get on the train. We are heading back to the downtown. There is no gas anywhere; my car is out of gas, so I leave it in the parking lot. 

I call my friend; he has a diesel car and managed to buy 4 gas cans. My friend says he is going to leave with his wife and child, but there are 4 of us. In tears, my mother and sister stay in Zaporizhzhia, and I, my wife and my friend's family go to the place where we are now. Somehow, my mom and sister managed to get on an evacuation train to Poland.

Initially, we had to live in a sauna because all the hotels were occupied by IDPs, so we had no choice. 

Thanks to kind people, we settled in an old house. We used water from a well, firewood for heating, and a toilet outside.

New location and development

When I came to my senses and started checking my email, I saw a message in my inbox from a console publisher about a remaster of my old game Shapik: The Quest. 

The original version of Shapik: The Quest was released back in 2013, and it was my first game and my first experience in developing, drawing, programming and animation. The game runs on flash (Adobe Flash). I drew inspiration from games of the Czech studio Amanita Design (Machinarium, Samorost)

I got excited about this offer, and it seemed to me that it wasn't enough just to convert the original. I also wanted to build the game on modern technology (unity), redraw the graphics in 4K and get acquainted with the Spine 2d animation tool. 

I explained my situation, and the publisher sent me a laptop and a graphics tablet so I could finalize the game, for which I am very grateful. Acer Aspire V laptop and Wacom One Medium graphics tablet.

Team

There are only 2 people in our team, and to put it simply, I'm in charge of the graphics and he's in charge of the code, but as is usually the case in such small teams, in order for the game to be released, each of us performs a wide range of tasks.

Fun fact: we met online, never met and never made a voice call. Who knows, he might actually be a cat?

I shared with him the idea of making a remaster. He said that we should not just remaster the original game, but add new levels and puzzles. I ditched the idea of expanding the game, I wasn't sure if I could do anything at all in my situation.

Getting started with development

Since we moved into an old house, it certainly didn't have any Internet connection, and there was only one outlet in each room. I think I'll try to connect my cell phone as a modem, but the Internet connection in the house is not working at all. To receive/send any messages, I have to go out with a laptop and a phone connected to it (I tried hanging the phone out of the window, but it didn't help, and it snowed every day). So I try to use the Internet as little as possible and it's a big problem.

My typical day looked something like this:

• lighting the stove (it was winter, and if it was not heated, it became very cold in a matter of hours)

• fetching water from the well

• pouring water into the sink

• preparing something to eat

• trying to work, constantly running outside with my laptop- air raid alert

• proceeding to the shelter

• missiles are flying overhead (at the beginning of the war, missiles were constantly flying over us; they fly very low, with a very specific whistle that cannot be confused with anything else)

• sitting in a shelter for a couple of hours (contemplating on a new level of the game, what is still missing, whether something can be improved)

• trying to find a better place to live

• air raid alert in the evening and everything goes in a circle again

That vicious cycle turned out to be extremely demoralizing, with constant missile attacks, poor living conditions (especially for my pregnant wife), constant reading of the news and the news feed with the dead people and people I knew. 

I am constantly in a kind of suspended depression and cannot accept that we have become homeless for life. 

We lived in this house from March to June, and then we managed to find a new house with acceptable living conditions. And I can't forget those feelings when for the first time in 3 months the water was running from the tap. We didn't have to carry firewood because the house had gas heating. We could take a shower (before that we had to go to a hotel twice a week), and there was a normal shelter under the house. 

Things that seem to be so commonplace, such as the Internet, electricity, heat, and even water, can suddenly disappear.

Despite all the conditions, the remaster of the original game was ready.

However, the remaster turned out to be very short, with only 9 levels, and I understand that this is not enough for a full game.

I recall the programmer's idea to expand the game with new levels and puzzles. Getting to work.

New levels

The fellow programmer came up with some great new levels and puzzles, and each level was unique.The work went like this: he sent me a layout drawn in Paint, I redrew it in Photoshop, then we discussed various nuances and improvements together.

On top of that, a programmer came up with the idea of making all the puzzles random every time. Because when I think back to my feelings about such games, I want to return to the world of the game from time to time, but the games I've completed usually can't give me new challenges. And this solution works very well in the game.

Actually, I'm very grateful to the programmer for his proactivity, faith in the project and in our team. As I was busy developing the game, I was able to distract myself from the horror of what was happening. And even as an adult, it was nice to be in the magical world of the game for a while, where all the puzzles are solved and evil is not so terrible.

The new commit in GitHub is a ray of light that warms me up a bit.

Technical details

The game was painted in Photoshop with a default round brush and a custom texture brush.

I have never learned to draw and I realize that I have big problems with perspective, colors, and composition. I want to start learning, but something always gets in the way.

Animation 

I work in Spine at a very primitive level.

I break the character into separate parts: head, arms, legs, and so on.

I draw the effects frame by frame in Adobe Animate, so each frame is a separate drawing. Then, these pictures are played one by one.

I need to spread the word about the game

TikTok looks interesting, so I create my first video about game development during the war and, to my surprise, people like it and I win subscribers.

The game is almost completely finished, but the new levels and animations are without sounds. For the basic version, we were able to pay for the creation of the sounds ourselves, but after a significant expansion of the game and an additional year of development this became a serious problem. We didn't want to reduce the quality, so it was decided to try to start a Kickstarter campaign only for the most necessary.The campaign is going very hard. I work every day on content, create videos for TikTok, YouTube, write updates on Kickstarter and Twitter.On the last day of the campaign, I was 15% short, and thanks to Mrs TouchtheGeo my video was shared on Twitter and the campaign was closed, for which I am very grateful to everyone!

I know I need to spread the word about the game

TikTok looks interesting, so I create my first video about game development during the war and, to my surprise, people like it and I win subscribers.

Also through TikTok, I was able to find a great composer who wrote an amazing soundtrack and a cool sound designer who created great sound effects and atmosphere in the game.

Release

Initially, I planned to make a quick remaster, but eventually it took a year and a half. As we worked on the game, we added 12 new levels, a bunch of new animations, puzzles and easter eggs, and completely changed the music and soundtrack. Anyway, the game made it to release.

Screenshots

Thank you for reading to the end. 

I realize that for most people my apartment renovation looks lame and ridiculous, and this post is not about whining or evoking pity, but to show what I went through during the development.

**P.S.** Photo during the apartment renovation: me and Keks. Unfortunately, the apartment was completely destroyed and Keks disappeared during the shelling.

My new team goes beyond the current document-nothing fashion:

They actively resist. When I review a PR and suggest, "Let's document the intent of this non-obvious code block", responses are either, "No, comments go out of sync.", or "How about in the wiki?" 🤡

The staff coders have been heavily influenced by expensive contractors who do things their company way.

One bright point is that we're group-reading influential programming texts. They each hit on documentation, how and when. So I'm hopeful that this will change the culture.

Any other ideas? It's frustrating.

I wonder when this trend started. Where did it come from? Maybe Clean Coding? Except in that book (which I loved) code comments are to be avoided only if the code is self-documenting. I.e., not as extreme as codebases I see which have zero comments for complex, opaque code.

Today, I was working from home and on a Teams call with my VP when my phone suddenly rang and I picked it up unknowingly. It was an HR from Tech Mahindra calling about a job opportunity. I politely asked her to call back later as I was already on another call, or I would return her call when free. She agreed, and I resumed my Teams call.

After 5 minutes, my phone rang twice more. She seemed impatient, but I couldn't answer as I was still presenting on Teams. When I finished, I called her back, only to discover she had blocked me. I mean, how can an HR be so childish?

Anyways, I brushed off the incident since I wasn't interested in the role anyway. It got me thinking about professionalism in the workplace. Blocking someone just because they couldn't take a call immediately is not just unprofessional but also immature. In today's fast-paced world, patience and understanding are crucial. It's a reminder to always handle interactions with respect and professionalism, regardless of the situation.

I've never experienced anything like this before. What are your thoughts?