As you may have guessed, this started when I took an aptitude test for [REDACTED] (a large tech company). I felt like that test was halfway to being a horror game already. I felt dehumanized by the immensity of the process, and the not-knowing what I was being tested on exactly. You would be surprised how many of the questions in APTITUDE are extremely similar to actual questions that a large tech company asks of their applicants.
I'm also fascinated by the amount of information that gets transmitted to test takers by tests which are meant to be "neutral." You can start to guess about what you're being tested on (which means you can guess about what the test maker is interested in). The slightest change in tone can be detected and you start to modulate your answers based on what you think they want to hear.
I'm finding that horror might be the niche for me. There's an oft-repeated bit of advice I've heard for internet creators: "find the intersection of what people want, what you want to make and what you CAN make." Thus far I've focused on the last two, which is fine because I'm still in school and haven't had monetary pressure to sell my work. Now that I'm about to graduate I want to make a serious attempt to support myself by making games. I'm becoming more interested in persuing all three. What do people want? What do YOU want? If it's not too egotistical to ask, what does my Audience want?
Out of CTRL and APTITUDE have been by far my most "successful" work on itch (by views, plays, comments, etc). This is partially because the itch community loves horror, and it is also because they're in that overlap between the kind of work I can make well in a reasonable amount of time that is interesting to enough people.
I'm going to try releasing a couple of slightly larger and more fully-featured horror games and sell them, to see if I could make a living doing that. I'm excited about building a body of work that someone can stumble on and enjoy. My next game is [probably] going to be a "spiritual successor" (can it be a spiritual successor if I made both of them? idk) to APTITUDE, reimagined as a personality quiz, with secrets and multiple endings and all that good stuff. You can expect that to drop around March, for something like 3 bucks.
By moving in a commercial direction, I'm worried that I'm going to corporatize so much that it's not worth being indie in the first place. Here are my oaths to prevent that:
1) Make games that have something to say. Horror has the ability to "weird" something familiar and to make us think about the world more deeply. If I'm going to make a horror game, do it to say something.
2) Make games for someone. Instead of considering a nebulous Audience, pick a specific person and make something that they'll enjoy. My housemate loves horror (and got me into it originally) so right now I'm making my games "for" her. If she likes them, I'm happy.
3) Give back. Lift others up, both with knowledge and material support (like bundling similar games, linking to good games that are lesser known, etc.)
4) Release some things for free. Make small experimental work, maybe shareware, and distribute them freely for anyone to enjoy.
Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who has uploaded lets plays of my games so far! It is by far the best thing that can happen to a game's discoverability on itch for someone to link to their lets plays. Besides that, it's really fun for me to watch people play my games, and especially for APTITUDE streamers have gotten creative about adding jump scares and effects. Here are some that especially went ham with the effects
And here are a couple who played APTITUDE before it was cool
Thanks for reading!
-Ezra
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