From throwaway side project to Switch in 2 years: my indie gamedev story
kellsgame.com
kellsgame.com
This has inspired me boot up GameMaker Studio 2 again. I usually come back to it now and then just to mess around, not really with the goal of making anything complete.
It's been a while since I touched it last, but I made this back in 2018. Never worked on it past what's in the video but it was still fun to work on!
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...
Having said that at least the Switch version will contain technological measures (from Nintendo) to prevent the sharing and adaption of the games assets. So even if the license is not at all viral it may not grant them permission to include the covered artwork.
OP might be OK if they credit artists and publish all modifications made to the art.
Although if it was me I would be uncomfortable publishing a game using someone else's assets commercially anywhere unless I am backed by some BigCo with a legal team, licensing is too fraught.
Only if you create one that is very popular, and that depends on many factors, developing games is a metagame.
Doing it over, I think we'd probably put more time into making it a daily challenge or monetising differently or using a more neutral theme.
That doesn’t mean it’s not worth making games, though! I’ve released two mobile games, still updating the second one, and although they’re a far cry from being profitable vs. the amount of time I’ve put into them, I still find the process and result very fulfilling.
(Source: I’ve participated in one such survey.)
Looks like 50x is on the high side, 30x would be a more reasonable guess now.
I love this blog post because it highlights how difficult, yet fun and challenging it can be to create a game from scratch. I've messed around with GameMaker Studio 2 several times and this post has inspired me to do so again. Compared to the competition it's a relatively simple game engine, but it can be fun just to mess around and see what you're able to create.
Of course, if you can hit it big the numbers can be pretty good. But not many games manage to hit it big. It used to be much easier to get visibility as an indie a long time ago, but that's partly because there weren't very many indie games on storefronts like Steam, Xbox etc at the time so being there got you attention. Now hundreds of games come out every day and are competing with you.
I do know multiple indie devs who do it for a living, but they tend to have to supplement their game revenue with contract work, or they split the burden with a spouse who has a regular job.
Personally I've worked on multiple shipped indie games and have never earned enough off that to pay rent, though it was nice to get a few thousand in post-launch royalties over the span of a few years + the initial amount I earned working on it. I always had to supplement things with traditional freelancing or a day job.
And while success requires a certain level of talent/skill, becoming a mega-hit seems very much about luck and being in the right place at the right time.
I’ve always liked to think of it as a lottery, but where there are a ton of things you can do to buy yourself more tickets.
Doing the bare minimum is unlikely to bring you success, but it does happen… on the other hand sometimes a game will have a lot of things going for it and still perform poorly.
Also of all the things that are likely to bring a game success, originality is quite far down the list. That’s one of those areas where survivorship bias has a huge influence. (source: I’ve been a self-sustaining indie game dev for 12 years)
> I’ve been a self-sustaining indie game dev for 12 years.
You might know better than me, admittedly.
But games have been massively devalued over the last decade or so, when you've got AAA games practically given away (Game Pass, PS Plus, Steam sales), and indie games bundled up and sold for pennies, alongside the rise of F2P.
So now starting an indie game team is like starting an indie band. If you've got a bit of talent and put the effort in, you now have access to inexpensive high-end tools to unleash your creativity. But if you want to actually make money from your endeavours, it's getting ever-harder. And with the relative easy of porting games build with Unity/Unreal, even brand new platforms have completely oversaturated stores more or less by launch day, too.
It really depends on where you live. A full time job in California earns much more that many other parts of the World.
That being said, most indie games fail financially. There are hits, of course. But there's also a a middle ground if you can live on low funds.
I have been full time indie since 2013. I have released about a dozen games and 4-5 of those have been financially successful.
I made about $250k net (after all taxes and fees) in these 9 years, so around $2300 net / month. That's about 3-4 times the average wage in my country and is close to being on par with what I could earn outsourcing my programming skills to the western companies. I'm doing what I love and enjoy having freedom of being able to choose when I work and when I go on a vacation, etc. Sometimes I work 16-hour days for weeks. Sometimes I take 2-3 weeks off and just play games, read books, watch movies and hang with my friends and family.
You probably never heard about any of my games: Rogue Bit, Son of a Witch, Watermelon Party. I'm perfectly fine with that.
Good for you :-)
But I'm curious about your 'net' because for me my net also pays health insurance and pention and insurance.
How do you handle those topics?
I really think that at this point developing games is more of a labor of love and it's very hard to pierce right now as an indie dev. It was most likely quite a bit easier 15 years ago when the indie scene was much smaller (but then there were a lot more barriers of entry back then)
This project was never intended to be a full time job (or even lead to one) and it was never about making money, either. If that were the goal I would have probably ended up with a very different game in order to appeal to the mainstream and give me more chance of (monetary) success.
For me this game was more about the process of creating something that is 100% an expression of me (and my son). I created it for the sake of creating it, nothing more. And I enjoyed every second of the process to the point where it's kind of sad it's over now. That's not to say it was always easy mind - it was painfully difficult sometimes and I almost give up in frustration and disillusionment many times.
Perhaps one small lesson missed?
Jonathan Blow did a talk[1] at GDC a few years ago about implementing the time rewind mechanic in his game, Braid. It ended up being a pretty complex system that required a lot of ingenuity to come up with a design and implement it, but the end result is pretty straightforward and easy to understand for players.
However, if you struggle to even describe the behaviour in English then it is a good indicator that users may struggle to understand it too.
I am assuming this is the case here. It may be that the OP had a very clear idea of how the gravity and all its edge cases would hang together but just struggled to code it. I interpreted the article's wording differently.
I do think not being able to simply describe a key game mechanic in natural language is indicative that it may be hard for users to deduce too.
In the end, as it turned out, it wasn't the gravity mechanic that was too confusing, it was how haphazardly I initially implemented it. After months of playtesting and tweaking the difficulty curve in the early levels, I finally hit the sweet spot (which was measured based on feedback from play testers - mainly family, friends and a few colleagues).
Thanks for taking the time to write about your game. Since gravity plays such an important role in the game, it would be great to see a gif/video of how it works.
It's a bit difficult to grasp from the screenshots.
I'll put all of this into another blog post but in the mean time there is a guide on Steam that explains this (and a whole lot more) in more detail here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=27358...
FWIW, The Nintendo link is UK only, which is a mild trip hazard to people installing in other countries. I'm curious as to how my 8yr old enjoys this
P.S. Love seeing that you made the site with WordPress! It’s gorgeous!
For anyone reading, if you’re a programmer by training, I’d recommend literally any game engine other than Game Maker Studio for creating your game. Unity is a great choice for beginners that lets you program in C#.
Game Maker Studio is specifically designed for people who are NOT programmers.
If you're a programmer, there are a couple ways you can experience happiness:
- Try one of the many "2d game library" things. They tend to be limited to playing sound, displaying gfx, and handling input. But if you're a programmer that will at least give you an idea of what is implemented and what isn't.
- Use Unreal with Blueprints. "But I'm a programmer, let me write code!" Trust me, when you are using blueprints you both get a much more discoverable API, and can actually get all the fancy built-in 3d stuff to work. Also if you're not working on something by yourself, suddenly other people can help out a lot.
- Use Game Maker Studio! Being a programmer means you might have some more systems thinking, but ultimately having stuff like tile editors easily means you're not going to spend a month building out your own little tools.
Programming everything from scratch is overrated if you actually want to make something that works. But Unity has a lot of half-baked features and is actually pretty hard to get working nicely for so many things that it can easily end up being a massive source of incidental complexity.
1) Starting to build the game straight away in Game Maker Studio
and
2) Learning C# / Unity and then starting to build your own engine and plug together tile editors and things which will then let you build the game.
In the case above, Option 1 will probably have more success as you are starting to build the thing rather than defering building the thing.
We had actually attempted to develop the game since the time too. Development started around March 2019 and a 99% work was spent on investigating engines alternate to GameMaker, which I used for Chapter 1.
Without getting into the details, I decided a few months ago to go back to GameMaker after all. It still felt like the best fit for the project. So using Chapter 1 as a base, we've started creating Chapter 2 since May 2020.
A lot of progress has been made since that time. I believe we can complete this chapter, content-wise, before the end of the year (not accounting for translation, bugtesting, and porting).
I feel very confident. And the strange thing is, even though we ended up using the original engine, I don't regret the lost time, either. Not only was I still busy designing the game, but during that long period, I was able to think of many ideas that make the game's story and characters better.
Obvious caveat: He already had development in the game on one engine so that may have swayed factors. And of course, DeltaRune isn't going to be struggling to perform on any reasonable platform. But ultimately, the tool didn't limit his choices enough to make the jump.
At the end of the day, work to your strengths and consider your scope. Many people here are programmers so I understand if they want something more flexible than Gamemaker. But I wouldn't necessarily jump to Unreal Engine 4/5 if I'm making a small-ish scale 2D game.
Minecraft would probably never have happened, if Notch started by asking in the forums if he should use Java or not.
Likewise many 8 and 16 bit titles started as BASIC, C, Pascal prototypes before being rewritten into Assembly, after their concept was proven, or thrown away before too much was invested into them.
Discussing what languages, middleware, API, whatever, instead of actually designing the game is what slows development down.
This is not true in the slightest.
I don't agree that GML is designed for people who are not programmers though. I actually grew rather fond of GML (The language in Game Maker Studio) over the 2 years I learned to work with it (and that's coming from an experienced Software Engineer (TypeScript, Go, Clojure, Java, C/C++)). It's not perfect by any means, but it's very easy to get started with, has lots of features designed specifically for 2d gamedev, is actively improved by YoYo Games and getting better all the time. And it allows for rapid experimentation which was a huge benefit during development on Kells, given how many ideas where repeatedly thrown away.
Some highlights (none of them mine!) include "Kellraiser", "Jingle Kells", "Skellington", "Two kellholes are better than one", "For whom the Kells toll" and last but not least, "Kell Block H"!