So I made a game. Here is how it went.
I spent around 33 hours on making a game. Around a weeks of full time work. And I think it went quite well, I felt very happy with the game as it came out, and for me it was a massive success. But also, there are a lot of things I want to improve on, and I’ve gathered the most important ones here. Mostly for my own documentation, but I think you can learn a lot from others experiences. Also it’s marketing.
“There is a lot of crap here”
This is the first gamejam I did with a proper playtest. After around 22 hours of working on the game (actually working on the game hours, not real hours. All times going forward are work on the game hours) I sat down with my dad and silently watched him play the game. So first off he is very new to games, so he doesn’t how games “usually” work. He is not the average game jam player. But so he played the game, and I was sitting in large amounts of pain watching him struggle through it for 30 minutes. Afterwards I had a list of things that just didn’t work in the game. That list was genuinly a gold mine, and even though it was painful to watch him play, it was so incredibly helpful. You learn a lot about your game (and how players work in general) by watching others play. Having watched him play, there was one major flaw in the game; there was too much shit in it.
Remove the garbage.
When I come up with games I always think about how complex the game is. I want things to be deep enough so they don’t get boring for the player. So even before I write the first line of code, I’m thinking about how the game will fulfill this arbitrary complexity goal. The initial idea of the game was “your are on a farm, trying to feed a hungry demon. If you don’t, it’ll eat your kids”. It actually took until around 8 hours in before the idea to make your body the farm even popped up. Anyways, when my dad played the game it contained: planting and farming (some plants could only be planted on specific ones, and each plant created their own type of resource when harvested), sacrificing body parts to gain blood, and more story with the demon. It was just too much for him to understand. And it was too much for me to polish. It was just not gonna work, things had to be cut and simplified.
First off was the sacrifices, that was just a matter of removing it. It hurt to remove it, and I was scared the game would be less fun without it. I was afraid it just wouldn’t be interesting to play the game without it. In the end, removing that made the game more focused, and made it possible for me to improve the most important part in the game; the farming. I removed the different resources and made it into only one (I don’t count the blood as a resource), and redid what could be planted on what. It doesn’t sound like such a big deal when it’s just written out here, but I felt a bit sad cutting those things from the game. I had spent time and emotional effort on that, and changing things both undid some work but also felt scary. I hadn’t really done that before. As development went on, it was clear that it was a decision that made the game better, so it was totally worth it. So here is a lil bite sized takeaway:
For my next game I will try not to add new systems just because I think it will add complexity to the game (for FTK that was the sacrificing). Instead I will try to a tart simple, focus on one core system (the farming) and make that as interesting as possible. I will try allowing myself to add more to that core system, but will try to not be afraid to remove or drastically change things that don’t work.
Now that was a nice and coherent few paragraphs, now I’m going to talk about something completely different.
Prioritization and using the brain.
I personally have a tendency to start “just doing things” when I get stressed. Then I get more stressed because time is ticking and I’m not actually getting anywhere. Because I’m spending time on things that are not the most important. During the games development I spent 2 hours working on the eyes in the game. Most of that was trying (and failing) to write a perlin noise function for the jitter of the pupils. They are literally just jittering back and fourth. I also spent an hour making a tiktok of those eyes. Those eyes really wasn’t important right then. The game could not be played from start to finish, and that’s what I was spending my time doing. That is a perfect example of poor prioritization. What I was doing was polish, which is super important! I was just doing it when it would have been more valuable to work on the gameplay of the game. So the golden brain nugget is something like:
For my next game I will try to work on the most important thing for the game first.
However, it is really hard to prioritize when your brain is going monkey mode because it’s stressed and tired. Feeling fresh as you are developing really helps when looking for bugs and errors, but also makes it easier to prioritize and think through your game design. Getting up and moving for a few minutes every half an hour really helps me. I usually just slap on an EDM song and agressively jump around for the duration of it. It looks super silly to furiously headbanging and do some sort of jumping squat, but it gets the blood flowing. Blood flowing into brain make brain fresher. Fresher brain make better decisions. I also get away from the computer to do something different (often taking a walk outside) every two hours. That makes it easier for me to focus, since I can separate things into “now I’m very focused” and “not I’m just being silly goofy”. I did slip on that sometimes, continuing for more that two hours or not moving every half. I’m also aware that when I start working, I will be very deep into the little thing I’m working on, and I will lose the broader perspective. So before I start working, I always think “what is the most important thing right now?”. I often do a list at the top of my file, writing out the first, second and third most important things. When that’s done, then I allow myself to dig into writing code. Here’s that collected into two golden nuggies:
For my next game, I will try to make 2 hour blocks that I then stick to. During those blocks I will take a break to move every half an hour.
For my next game, I will try to take a few deep breaths, try to get an overview of how things really are, and then decide what to do.
Now, since I’m close to starting a commercial games studio, a thing that has gotten higher prioritization lately is the question “how do I make a game that people want to buy and play?”. Let me talk a bit about marketing.
Does anyone actually care about what I’m making?
This is for me, a very very scary topic. The short story is that I’ve always struggled with my self image, and creating things have been a way to feel fulfillment and to distract myself from my view of myself (that’s a work in progress, its improving, don’t worry about it). But with that background, having used the positivity around the stuff I create to feel better about myself, it’s terrifying to start thinking “what are my games really worth?”. “Are people willing to pay for this?”, “will it be shared on social media?”, “does anyone actually care?”. All my previous games have been smol things put up for free with up to a few hundred players. I’m not a large creator by any means. I don’t have an audience. I want to make games for a living. A developer I’ve followed since they made crummy games three or something years ago has been getting plays in the tens of thousands. I’m comparing myself to that. I don’t know if I’m good enough. I’m scared. Hell, some days I wonder if I’m good enough for anything.
With “feed the kind” I’ve been testing the waters of “marketing”. I’m putting marketing in quotation marks, because marketing is often understood as “how do I make an instagram post that goes viral?”. Most of my knowledge is from a book about value propositions, and reading on the howtomarketagame website. So let’s get that out of the way, I barely have a clue of what I am doing. I know enough to start. This segment will not really contain any takeaways, but be more do a summary of my experiences. Anyways let’s talk about tiktok.
First off: fuck social media. I have a strong dislike for software designed to get users / players addicted. But yea most of players are on tiktok, and I try to work with reality instead of what I wish reality was. Yes that is me defending using tiktok to you and to myself. Anyways, my first instinct was just to make a short clip of the game, and then publish that. However, after reading up a bit on what other developers have done that works, seeing that shitposts do very well and remembering the story about the pottery school, I tried to come up with as many ideas for tiktoks as possible. I ended up making 5 tiktoks (will probably make a few more, more chances to learn) that ended up doing 200-1000 views. Not horrible, not enough to make a living, but it’s a start. Feed the kind is not a very visually attractive game, that will be something for me to work on. How to make games that people instantly can get that “I want to play it” feeling from. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride I’m sure. But I kinda like putting together silly and short videos, so it’s not that bad. Now let me talk about streamers.
I actually managed to have 3 streamers playing the game within 24 hours and one who is planning on doing it within a week. I was really not expecting that, I was expecting radio silence from all of them. The way I did it was:
1 - go on twitch and find streamers who recently had played inscryption (my guess was that players who enjoyed enscryption also would enjoy feed the kind)
2 - find ways to contact them (I did it via discord and email)
3 - write slightly personalized messages (adding something that showed I’d actually read their bios to each message) to each of them telling them that I had made a game, it was available, and that I’d like to be told if they were to stream it (both because watching someone play your game is awesome, but also to make them feel like I didn’t just stomp in and advertise, but that I actually care about them)
4 - patiently wait
5 - answer responses and watch those that play, being active as they do
I found ~30 streamers to reach out to, managed to contact maybe 15 and got some sort of response from ~7 and 3 have played it so far. These were small streamers with 5-30 viewers, but it did prove to me someone might actually want to play it on stream.
The first streamer who played the game is called moths and I watched her stream the game. She was super sweet and really funny, here is the link:
https://twitch.tv/dumbmoths
I think that with marketing my approach will be something like read up on marketing -> try a lot of different things -> think about how to improve -> repeat. That has been my most succesful way of improving so far, so I'm hoping it will work on this too. But I'll see.
The stuff you are supposed to say at the end.
First off, thank you for making it this far! There are a bunch more things that I could have talked about, but I had to pick a few things (prioritization!!!) because one: I only have energy to be coherent for so many paragraphs and two: if I make it too long it will be too much to digest for the person reading. Below are some estimates of how much time I spent doing what, might be interesting to see. Also, I’d love to hear what you thought about this postmortem (two stars and two wishes are a great feedback format, just saying) and I’d love to hear what went well and not so well with your game! Also, if I were to make a post-jam update, what would you like to see in that? That’s it for me, Issie out.
Roughly how much time I spent doing what:
Initial idea: ~3 hours
First draft: ~5 hours
From first draft to playtest: ~14 hours
Other person playtesting: ~0.5 hours
Post playtest fixes: ~4 hours
Visual polish and audio: ~4 hours
Playing and rating: ~9 hours
TikTok: ~2 hours
Connecting with streamers: ~6 hours
Writing this: ~3 hours
Total time: ~55 hours