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Today, one of my Mastodon mutuals boosted a blog post by software developer Evan Todd. It's a long and thoughtful piece about what we think we want, and the ways in which we deceive ourselves. For Todd, what he thought he wanted was a career in indie game development, and in a very particular, 2010s sort of way. This was after the point where people like Jonathan Blow, Ed McMillen, and others were able to get famous, quickly, by releasing small-studio games in an environment where there was (relatively) little competition. The years after "Indie Game: the Movie", after certain game developers became, in certain circles, actual celebrities, and after a whole industry spun up around The Things You Were Supposed To Do (YouTube trailer, Early Access, twitch, social media, funding via Kickstarter). I know this because I was, in a very small way, adjacent to this sort of scene. I'm a game developer in maybe the loosest sense of the term. I don't do it for a living. I never could. But I've written a little terminal-based puzzle game in C++ - that took me a couple of weeks - and I've written, and continue to write, a huge, sprawling, frustratingly incomplete game on my own time.
I've sunk thousands of hours of my life into a game that's maybe been played by a few hundred people. I feel every word that Todd writes, viscerally.
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If you're as old as me - which is to say, not _old_, but not young, either - and if you work in tech, and if you know how to write code, there's an excellent chance you've at some point wanted to write your own game. I remember wanting to write video games basically as soon as I first played one. I remember playing Bad Dudes for the NES, and wanting to write a game with ninjas. My dad humoured me. He took me to the library, and my eight year old self took out a book on BASIC programming. I remember taking it home, and being confused. How did any of this work? What's a BASIC interpreter? How do I get there from the command prompt? This was the late 80s, and resources, compared to today, were maddeningly scarce. If you couldn't figure things out with what you had and the people you knew, well, you couldn't figure things out.
We returned the book to the library. I put the dream on hold.
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Think about it: you get to be the master of your own universe! The computer only ever does exactly what you tell it to; you have ultimate control over everything. Nothing ever surprises you, it’s perfectly safe. And playing a video game lets you escape your world, but creating one does that and simultaneously lets you feel accomplished in the real world.
Todd writes about being a full-time game developer for four years, and achieving a kind of success: a few thousand Twitter followers, thousands of sales, an actual, released title. To be perfectly clear, this really is success. How many people think about making a game? How many go beyond dithering in forums and on subreddits about what language, what frameworks, minutiae of assets and soundpacks, all the things that feel in some way like work, but definitely aren't?
The truth is, very few people finish a game. And very few people make money from it when they do. The biggest crime IGTM pulled was convicing an army of teens and twenty-somethings that if they set their health and lives on fire, they too could release on XBLA, or Steam (or whatever), get tens of thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of sales in the first week, and that it would all be worth it, that they'd ascend into the same imagined pantheon of greatness. That Derek Yu or whoever else they idolized would see them as a peer.
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The first game I ever wrote was a text adventure, in QBasic. I uploaded it to a local BBS. The sysop deleted it.
She was probably right to do so, but I'm still salty.
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Four years of development lead Todd to a Kickstarter which was ultimately unsuccessful, and which Todd claims he knew would fail, "even though it was such a notable outlier" - online multiplayer, a custom 3D engine, all made by a single developer. He says that nobody took notice because nobody cares about these features independent of the actual game, the actual experience, which is partially correct. What he sort of circles around, but never actually articulates, is that all kinds of great games fail all the time, because the market is absolutely saturated: AAA, indie, you name it, people's wishlists and Steam accounts are full of all kinds of great games they'll likely never get to.
This isn't 1988, or even 1998, when you could realistically play a pretty sizable chunk of the games that were released. Somewhere in the late 00s, early 10s, the pace at which games came out took off exponentially. Do you ever look around and marvel at what everyone's playing, and see how few you've been able to get to? Yeah, you're not alone.
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When I was in grade twelve, I worked on a dumb little roguelike in Turbo Pascal and joked to a friend that I'd never release it for MacOS (this was at the time when Windows vs MacOS was Serious Business). He was a devoted and smug Mac user in that very 1990s sort of way, and I remember him snapping, "no one's going to want to play your stupid game, anyway." I was hurt, because his response felt incredibly disproportionate to what I thought was lighthearted joking. But if I step back from how I felt at the time, I can see there's an unintended truth there: most released games struggle to capture anyone's imagination; most games, even if they get a release announcement, or miraculously a little press, pass into history unnoticed.
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At my last job, the first year or so that I was there, one of my work friends was a fellow developer who was desperately trying to get into graphic design. She was unhappy doing development, or maybe just doing development in a large, proscriptive, enterprisey sort of way. Regardless, she and a couple of friends spent hundreds of hours working on a physics-based game. Like Todd, they did everything they knew they were supposed to: YouTube trailer, went to Pax, got it into the App Store, you name it. I bought a copy, played it on my iPad. It was a lot of fun! I sunk hours into it, played through at least a dozen levels. Was it perfect? No, but it was polished, and it was fun. You could see the love.
It was a flop. It sold around a hundred copies. They dissolved their studio, and never made another game.
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The thing about gold rushes is, you're better off selling shovels.
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The thing about gold rushes is, most people don't strike gold.
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Around the time my friend was working on her game, I was starting mine. Actually, that's not true: I'd started a couple years before. My first company was one of those "you need to get our permission to work on side projects" sorts of places. So, I filled in the paperwork, and when it was clear I wasn't working on anything competing, or monetizable, I got permission. The CTO, who'd actually been one of two people who'd interviewed me five years before, looked over my form. He seemed bemused, or at least halfway interested.
"How long do you think you'll be working on it?" he asked.
I thought about it. "I think the first release will take me three years."
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I started that project at the tail end of my twentites, a few months shy of my thirtieth birthday. I'm in my forties, now. I'll probably work on it for the rest of my life. This is both terrifying, and a source of immense pride. I see all kinds of articles on what I learned from this game, how it helped me make the next five, that sort of thing. I'm sort of the exact opposite. I may end up making other games (I've technically made two, including that curses-based puzzle), but in my heart I'm really only working on one.
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Todd writes about developing from a place of loneliness and need. His obsession peaked, he said, around age twelve, not coincidentally a point in time in which he lost all his friends. So much of what he did in those years was a product of his insecurities, a need to be seen, a need to be taken away from a number of unnamed bad things.
My own start in game development - much more primitive, text adventures rather than BSTs and 3D engines, BASIC instead of I assume either C or C++ - started, perhaps coincidentally, at a very similar point in my life, a point in which I would do anything, _anything_, to escape the shame and ridicule I was enduring at school, and the memories that in the decades after transformed into physical sensations. A basement, a stolen can of beer, an unmade bed. An open window. The way these reverberate.
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If my mind's occupied, it can't wander. If it's focused, it can't go back.
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Hard to express how much easier preservation is now. Github, One Drive, Google Drive, any kind of cloud storage. Hell, even USB has been remarkably stable and I can plug in a USB key from 2005 and it'll probably be fine.
When I first started making games, I wrote .BAS files to 5.25" floppies. Then 3.5", then a shifting series of accounts/web storage that rarely lasted more than a couple of years. All my early work is gone. I have a memory of what the dungeon looked like in my first roguelike; all I have left of my second is a single screenshot. I've got references to the latter in various websites in the wayback, but the source for both is gone.
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There have always been games made by small studios, by solo devs. When I was young we called it shareware, passed around disks, cracked copies. What I do, and what every dev has done since then, isn't particularly new, or groundbreaking. We say it is, and we talk about an indie explosion in the late 00s. But what we really got was, for the first time, some visibility. It used to be you had to advertise on your website, on a forum, put up shareware on a BBS, hope it spreads. Invariably, it didn't. You had your outliers, your Snoods, etc. But they were the exception.
The internet changed this by changing distribution. It made it fundamentally easier for indie games to get a bit of visibility, and with Steam and the storefronts, a whole lot more. Or, that was the promise. To Todd, to my friend, and to everyone else.
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It's easy to work on a project when you've got visibility and everyone loves you. When you've got tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, when you're feted and you win industry awards, when you're in the top 1% of the top 1%. But what about the rest of us? What do you do when it's months, or years, of radio silence? What keeps you going, typing into an IDE late into the night?
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Six months later, through a miraculous series of events that I can only attribute to God, parts of my brain started to connect that had never been connected before. I started to realize my childhood wasn’t as great as I thought it was.
Ironic that game development was something that helped me forget, because these days, I've started remembering things, too. A couple of small memories, and peripheral, but - it's something. I wish I could attribute it to God, but I don't believe in Him anymore (I say this, but I capitalize "Him" - winter, who are you trying to fool?). Something somewhere between healing and time, something I can't quite name. I've unearthed two details. I wish I could remember more. So much of that dark year is gone, hidden away. I know it's in there, in my brain's darker regions. I'd do anything to be able to remember more.
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In my game, there are autobiographical elements. Fragments of my own life, wrapped up and hidden in a line here, a line there. So much of what I do, including what I write here, is an attempt at remembering.
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Todd spent four years in pursuit of his dream; I'm not sure if it's a mistake or not, but he committed to it full time, ran out of money, had to get a regular dev job. He doesn't say what he's doing, but presumably some sort of enterprisey development. There's no shame in this, just a realization that he, like almost all of the rest of us, can't make those small numbers work.
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There are other ways to be involved in games. We can't all be indie devs financing our next game off the considerable proceeds of the previous. Me, I give away my game for free from my website, and sell it through itch as well. In the last few years, I've maybe made a couple hundred bucks. Enough to cover the domain and hosting. And while that's not a lot, that's at least something.
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Todd writes that, after years away from it, after throwing up his hands with Unreal and Unity, that he's refound the joy of game development with Godot.
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Sometimes the impact our work has goes beyond the simple metrics of dollars and sales. Ask me the best thing anyone's ever said about my game and I'll tell you about the time that someone once told me it helped them get through a tough part of their life. I remember reading their message, and just sitting there. Then crying. Remembering the worst parts of my life, and the ways I tried to cope. And at that moment I realized what I'd made transformed into something larger, something better. Not just a game. And no longer just mine.