The indie gamedev grind

In early 2016, I agreed to start helping out a friend with his indie game. I was supposed to do some quick UI work to tidy up their menus and come up with a visual style to match the aesthetic they were going for with the game. So I did that in about two months. It’s now late 2018, and I’m still working on the game. We haven’t shipped yet, but are planning to soon.

This is by far the longest project I’ve been working on. It’s been quite an interesting ride. Many passionate gamers and game design enthusiasts revel at the idea of creating video games, but boy is it a different feeling from the other side. I certainly was one of these people. Being a gamer and a designer, I felt that game design (more specifically, UI/UX for games) was my natural calling. I’m quick to point out flaws in games I play and am constantly thinking about ways to improve them. So duh, I’m a great fit for actually making a game, right?

Not quite. Working on Skorecery has been quite eye-opening. We’re a bunch of gamedev hobbyists who would all one day like to work in the games industry. We love playing them and we’ve got unique skillsets that work well in a team. We have animators, artists, designers, and programmers all sharing weekly updates and working on the thing together. But we’ve all got full-time jobs and that leaves very little spare time for side projects. So it feels like we’re progressing at a snail’s pace. Weeks go by with no one having done anything substantial in the game and it feels like it’s slipping behind. It feels like a grind and motivation drops to new lows. What started off as a fun little experiment with us throwing a bunch of cool gameplay ideas at each other now turns into a slog of executing, implementing, and tweaking those ideas until it feels good to actually play.

A good friend of mine once told me, “No matter how fun or exciting you think it is, it always turns into a boring chore of assigning and completing tickets in JIRA when you break it down into its systems.” And it’s true. Gamers tend to think that working on games lets you experiment with wild ideas in a crazy den filled with creative energy and fun times all around. In reality, it’s no different than working on features on a mobile or web app — you’re building a software product that needs to sell to customers. When you’re working on micro-features like tweaking the grass movement to match wind speeds in a realistic manner, then it’s very hard to see the big picture of what you’re doing and just feel like you’re ticking tasks off of a list. This is what Skorecery felt like for a long time.

But then something amazing happens. Someone makes some really cool art and gets the rest of the team super excited to get that character into the game. The sound designer comes up with an incredible beat that feels fun to listen to as you play. The UI explorations bring some fresh ideas to how we can thematically tie the menus into the game. And everyone gets on board, feeds off of each others’ energy, and cranks out tons of great work in the span of a few short days. This is exactly what happened with our recent showcase at the Boston Festival of Indie Games. We had a deadline coming up when we needed to present our game on the show floor, so a lot of us rushed a bunch of work to get into the game before the deadline. We added assets for a new playable character and fixed a whole bunch of bugs. We then all came together to present the game and watched people play it and have an absolute blast.

And that was the most surprising thing to me. That people were loving the game. Having been so close to the development of the game, it was very hard for us to see the “fun” in it because it felt like it got sucked out of it. Every time we talked about it amongst ourselves, we would complain about what’s broken, what looks terrible, and how some gameplay systems feel bad. We were our own worst critics. But watching actual players see it for the first time with new eyes enjoying the game gave us some much-needed validation that what we were doing was actually making an impression. People were asking to replay the game a second or third time, which motivated me even more to continue working on the game.

Having experienced this, it completely boggles my mind that game devs who work in AAA-studios can spend six to seven years working on a single title. That to me is absolutely insane. I could barely handle two years of doing it bit-by-bit on the side, much less full-time for over half a decade. How do they get past multiple years of grind and slog? How do they feel motivated to keep going on such a long timeline? How are they content with waiting an extra five years to see the results of their work? These are the types of questions I think about when I really ask myself whether or not I actually want to work in the industry full-time, because I genuinely don’t know if I could do that. I’ve been working at tech startups for the past few years where my design work gets implemented and shipped to users almost immediately, on the scale of a few days to two weeks. I can’t even fathom what it would be like to hear feedback from a player and go “oh yeah, that was a design decision I made 4.5 years ago on this product that just now released.”

What’s crazier is that this is the norm. Game dev, indie or AAA, is a giant squiggly mess of broken builds and uncertain processes. There were many times during our weekly calls in Skorecery where I felt like we were lingering too long on a seemingly simple design decision or going down the completely wrong path building out a system that no players wanted. We’d talk them over and debate it for hours, and get nowhere. And guess what? This is exactly what all other game dev is like. Every GDC talk I watch, the speaker just goes “yeah, we weren’t really sure if this was a good idea, but we shipped it and players liked it”, or “we didn’t really have a good process for making this game, we just tried things until something work and thankfully people liked it.” And then that makes me think about all the games that failed to make an impression on players and how many of those we never hear from. It’s mostly just luck. Survivorship bias is a strong thing in the game dev scene.

So yeah. Indie gamedev is quite a struggle. I’m really glad I got to experience this by tinkering with a game in my spare time, because it has given me a very good sense of how much uncertainty there really is in the process and how uncomfortable you have to be with just going with the flow even when it feels like the outcome is completely out of your control. The players don’t see the half-baked prototypes, the rejected concepts, and the scrapped gameplay elements. They don’t see the endless debates about menu flows, character poses, transition animations, save game functionality, or the in-depth discussions about how much rumble to add on the controller on a specific hit pause frame. They just experience the entire thing in one go, and they have high expectations. They want to lose themselves in the game and feel in control. They want to get a hang of the mechanics quickly but also need to feel like there’s a reachable skill cap that they could get to over time. They want to be temporarily transported into a welcoming and unique virtual space where they’re safe from the chaos and irreverence of the real world. They want to feel like they started off knowing nothing and worked their way towards mastery of the game’s systems.

The combination of all these factors is to me, is the greatest user experience challenge of all to solve for. So it’s worth it. It’s worth the slog, the grind, the long hours, the months and years of floundering in uncertainty and feeling like it’s going nowhere. Because for that one brief moment when you watch someone play your game for the first time, everything feels like it comes together. This random team of individuals with complementary skillsets that decided to work with each other on a weird game managed to leave a mark on someone’s life by allowing them to engage with the world they had created in an interactive medium. Their combined efforts manifested on the screen and immersed the player in the few minutes or hours they spent with the game, and it briefly took them to a different place mentally, where they were free to tinker and mess around with the game within its defined ruleset. They were encouraged to get better, play creatively, and engage with the world. And that feeling validates all the years of blood, sweat, and pixels that went into its creation.