blog
8 years of making games
I just stopped work another project. A roguelike autobattler that struggled to find the fun and balance. I may complete it eventually, just not for steam next fest in a few weeks. It was a fun project to work on, stimuling the technical side of my brain, but the balance was way off. Whoever gained an early advantage won.
METABLOOD: maybe coming out one day
I've canceled around 100 projects in these 8 years. I've also finished about 25. I've learned a lot about myself and the craft of game development.
Why you shouldn't read this:
- I have only made enough money from selling my games to cover one months' rent (average 1br rent in medium-size american city) over my entire 8 years of game development. I am nowhere close to being a professional game dev.
Why you should read this:
- I've been doing this for 8 years and I still want to do it forever.
The last game I finished was a technical and deep autobattler with simple graphics where more people said they wanted to play it than actually played it. It was the first time I completed a 7drl, my published version on my itch has an extra day or two of polish and tuning. It seems I have made my games less approachable over my time in development; people seemed to latch on to my earlier games, but they were simpler and shallower. Even with the poor reception of my last project, I haven't lost the drive to keep making stuff.
gif of "sons"; my 7drl game
1 - making
I knew some javascript from my day job and I had been making electronic music for about ten years. I just needed the art part of the trifecta, how hard could that be? (Turns out it's quite hard!) In 2018 I tried a few times to start making games but what really clicked was forking a NES Mario-type project in phaser.js and updating the code so mario could shoot stars and double jump. I was hooked.
I think this code still exists somewhere. I would love to see it for historical purposes.
I was going through a depressed period and making games was something where both sides of my brain could be swept away in. What helped me improve in my skills was making a lot of things, and finishing some of them. When I started it seemed like everyone was making platformers. Most tutorials were centered around them. Now a lot of first games are clickers, incremental games and/or gambling-likes. Lots of roguelite elements! I moved from engines like phaser.js and HaxeFlixel to frameworks like Kha to sometimes writing my games in vanilla JS. Maybe eventually it will be raw C.
Gamedev in itself led to improvements in my career in software/web development. Having 16 milliseconds to complete your tasks to get ready for rendering changes how you think about performance. I needed to learn more static typing, especially since javascript was my first language. I did not know numerical data types! Longs, ints and floats still confused me, I just knew Number. Even though I don't write a ton of C, the little bit I have done with raylib has helped me think about how memory in a computer works.
In 2020 I was lucky enough to have a small and friendly bubble and still have remote work. I made a short narrative game. It was not a great game at all, but some people liked it. It was way too short, but a narrative game with minigames and multiple paths took quite a long time to make. It made me think about how I could add stories to my games that went beyond rudimentary video game conversation and prompting for fetch quests.
My first narrative game. I will not share the link lol
Friday Night Funkin blew up later that year. It was built using Haxeflixel, a game engine that I had used for my own games. I watched some very patient people on the haxe discord teach new coders about game development and point them toward simple solutions. I hope the new coders appreciated those who helped them in their early artistic explorations. I am grateful to those who helped me out early on.
I made a few rhythm games, I tried to do things differently than the rhythm games I had been seeing around. I remember giving up on a prototype of a one-button rhythm game when I saw jefvels teaser for Pack Your Bags. (I could have definitely still made a cool one button rhythm game; I would have just needed to be a bit more creative)
Panic: a rhythm game about panic attacks.
I learned to make real-time multiplayer games. I built my own in-browser rollback netcode solution. I did some collaboration.
Eventually forthcoming game "offseason"; art by Bleak Creep. Wishlist her game School Night Seance!
Obligatory tips for new devs:
- Just start!
- Your first game won't go on steam!
- There's no rules!
- If you're doing this for yourself, don't worry about money
- If you're getting into this for the money, don't.
godot, pygame, phaser.js, anything open source. if you don't know programming you could try scratch. The best time to start gamedev is when you're 12, the second best time is right now. The best way to start is by modding or forking an open source project and trying to add or change something.
Don't worry about it that much
This is one I need to pay attention to more. I'll tattoo it on myself any time I try designing another fucking roguelike autobattler. You can literally make anything you want!
Any art made to make money will be worse.
Do web development or project management or literally anything else.
2 - good
In 2023 I made a baseball minigame that people seemed to like. A kid pitches a ball to his friend (you) and his friend tries to hit it. People were obsessed. It took me a few days to make and people were spending more time than that to try and get a high score.
My narrative game from 2020 was always in the back of my head, I wanted to build it out further. I originally had the idea for "good" before "good: baseball", but baseball could be the first minigame. I slowly added to and rebuilt the main game over the years. I realized it needed to be my first commercial project. It was a game I had to make, and if I made it after a more "traditional" game I thought it would look weird. It goes beyond want, I needed to make it. (Foreshadowing: making a traditional game after good would also look weird!)
Making good put me in uncharted territory. In most games there's a final boss or a final level. Good had some weird design issues. There's no game loop! (There may be from an academic level, but I spent no time investigating that) It being a weirder game meant I had no reference for pricing. For a minute I wanted to make it free, but I also know people don't always play free games or even expect much of them. There's no pay-what-you-want on steam (get that bag mr newell) so I made it $8 while putting it in charity bundles and also just being okay with people pirating it if they could figure out how.
I made the game in chronological order which led to some interesting design decisions and philosophies.
- I thought there would be more rooms and way less cutscenes
- Trust gut
- Too hard, don't do
- Draw fast
- Fuck juice
- Delayed dialog
- If it doesn't feel good, get rid of it.
The first cutscene started with a system, and as I added cutscenes I needed to add exceptions to this system until the cutscenes were too varied and I had to scrap the system entirely. Each cutscene is just a combination of handcoded timers, animation triggers and waits for user input to advance text.
I've made enough small games and sifted through enough feedback to know what people like and what is fun.
Don't waste time. There's an obvious minigame in here where I settled for a joke (that's not really even that funny) because I didn't want to implement the idea.
Self-explanitory if you've seen the game.
I used limited particle effects and tweening. There's a quote from my good notes: "Is your game good or does it just have juice?" Games with too much juice and no substance feel like jangling keys. Same with music production and "loudness".
Delayed dialog is built into the game in an attempt to feel more realistic, but I didn't realize that it won't work as well when read slowly. Too late now!
If it doesn't serve a purpose, keep it.
I was lucky enough to take some time off work from my software engineering job during the development of good. But as release grew closer, I fell into a little bit of a crisis. I didn't want to release the game. I knew it sucked, the art was awful, I was getting no traction on socials. I was wasting my life. And then a few weeks before release my partner's dog was diagnosed with kidney disease. He had heart troubles half his life, but it was going to be his kidneys that ultimately failed him.
This put game creation into a different perspective. On one hand; my game doesn't really matter, it's just a game, less important than a life, I can put it out in whatever state, who really cares? On the other; we can only do the best we can until we die and so I should give this thing my all, put it out there, and then move on.
Not many people bought it, it did about as poorly as I thought it could have in terms of copies sold. But friends bought it, internet and IRL, and so did a bunch of random people from around the world, which was really cool, especially since I did virtually no marketing.
I thought about larger games than mine during this time. How did larger solo dev efforts do it? I took so many shortcuts. Most of the music is one or two tracks instead of a full composition. Even then I don't use more than like 10 tracks on a single song. But then again, I know what I want, so how do big teams do it? How do they contribute to a singular vision? I didn't run into too many bugs, but I also knew my code very well.
I made the game that I knew needed to exist. If people like it, maybe I can make more games about nothing. If not I can try my 2d platformer shooter roguelike with all the juice. If people do like it, maybe I make the more complicated narrative in the future? Playing Consume Me (GOTY 2025) gave me some great ideas for a sequel. It may not look like it, but this is the hardest I've worked on almost anything.
Radio started requiring subcutaneous fluids which my partner and I administered at home. He needed to be hand-medicated and hand-fed, with a rapidly changing diet because he would get tired of a new food every 1-2 days. good was released in August, he passed at home in December. I am so happy I got to help give him a happy and healthy last 4 months of his life.
3 - now
When I started my latest cancelled project I thought roguelike deckbuilders/autobattlers were old hat, but it turns out everyone is still making them. I love to gamble, but making a disguised gambling-like incremental game choose-one-of-three-upgrades-likes with lots of juice has felt off to me. I also feel lucky that I feel that way. In 2024 made a game called "100%"; an incremental gambling game for a game jam. This was one of the most positive responses I've gotten to a game of mine. It did require some programming and design skills, but the "success" of the game is at the very least partially in response to using two proven paradigms: games of chance, and clickers/incremental games.
I hear lots of talk about AI. Too much, people never shut the fuck up about it. All I will say is that, to me, AI taking away processes of making games is taking away all the good stuff. I am grateful that I fell in love with the process, otherwise I may think differently.
In these last 8 years I've started to mentor those struggling with drugs and alcohol. It has been extremely rewarding. I highly recommend anyone facing any sort of millennial-style existential crisis to try helping others. No sarcasm. It will change your life. I wanted to finish one more commercial game during my current career hiatus, but I don't think it will happen.
I may never become a professional solo game dev and that is fine. I desired that much more in the beginning of my game development journey before realizing the process itself was meditative and one of the things I look forward to every day. Maybe becoming a professional would ruin it for me. A common refrain I hear amongst devs is "making games is hard". Is it? Starting conversations with strangers is hard. Breaking terrible news is hard. Letting down friends and loved ones is extremely difficult. I don't experience too much difficulty in game dev, but that may be because of how I have defined my process. I don't have a publisher or a boss when I make games. I don't use game engines, I know my own code, I take notes, I have creative control of the output. Whenever I face an issue too difficult I take a walk and hopefully some time in the next day or two a solution will come to me. Sitting in front of my space heater with a coffee and plugging away on my text editor is how I like to spend my time. I have found my "thing", I can only hope others will find theirs.
<3