Our game looked like this:

Our game now looks like this:

and this:

Fog particles. It’s got fog particles!

Things happened in between.

I had been a hobbyist game dev for a really long time (3 years feels long as hell okay) and I had published exactly 0 units of game. I’d get halfway through a game, or even finish it (but no sprites or music because I’m bad at stuff) then move on to the next project cause that’s what you do when you make a game right?

Some games I’d worked on before

But anyway I had just started making some metroidvania platformer that I figured I’d trash just like the rest of ’em. But pretty soon I realized I’d been working on it for 4 months and it was (spoiler alert) actually not terrible to play. When someone told me I should think about selling it, I freaked out and realized I could actually maybe do something with this. I decided to look into what some people on Reddit said about game development because anyone who browses r/gamedev is obviously a god-tier game designer that I should listen to. I watched like 2 GDC on marketing before deciding I was an expert and ready to go into the “real world” of making games. I whipped up a pretty bad blog post, spiced it up with 1 funny joke and a couple sentences that were entertaining enough to trick you into thinking they were clever. I posted it, told a couple friends then…

Holy Shit.

I got like a thousand views overnight (in hindsight not that much but c’mon I was hype). For a little bit, I was so excited, dancing on sunshine, etc. I was so happy that I pretty much ignored something that was super strange: no comments, no followers, no likes. I was so happy that I told everyone I knew of my success until…

Welp I’m just about ready to die

But screw him, I’mma actually get the game working out well and then I’ll become internet famous easily. I DONT NEED ANYONE!

Maybe the viewbot wasn’t so bad

I guess nobody likes a game about moving squares. I started to think I might actually need assets. Well, I can’t draw so I need someone else to join the team. Thus began the scramble to find people who were willing to work and be paid in pocket lint. Also not for 10 months. Also you have to make over 200 sprites. I asked a buncha people I know who do art and the response was always the same: “I got you, don’t worry I’ll do the art for you” Then I’d wait for a week…

“Hey where’s that art?”

“Oh… you like still want that? I haven’t started, sorry”

“ Go to hell” Understandable have a nice day.”

A NEW CHALLENGER APPROACHES

Yo yo, Contrary to popular belief, the writer of this blog is not an omnipotent being who produced an entire video game by himself. I am a gonna be a special guest writer for this [UNIT OF BLOG-POSTING TIME], and I’m gonna talk about some of the non-game design parts of game design.

The first thing, as mentioned previously, is that people who make art

(((Don’t actually MAKE ART)))

They just make drawings for fun and they’ve done it so much they look good. Now don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with that, and many of my friends fall into that category. However, when your offering relatively large quantities of money for decidedly large quantities of art, that’s not really a great work ethic.

Luckily for me, I was an active member (I basically just introduced myself and then lurked for six months) of a couple artist community’s discords. I asked a few of them if they would be willing to do “you know, just a few sprites, some concept art, not much.” which, while isn’t super true… It’s close enough okay it’s fine shhhh it’s fine. Anyway, I got little to no responses, until… Oh,until… An angel from on high came down in the shape of an online artist named Flabbs (obv. that’s not his real name, but that’s what we call him) with a little bit of concept art.

Interestingly, one of the images on that very first sheet actually went into the final character model.

And then we didn’t follow up for two months.

One of the reasons for this is Charlie actually did find an artist who was willing to work under the parameters who we knew in real life. That worked pretty well for a while until it dawned on us that we had hundreds of hours of work that needed to be done, and only one person who was willing to do it (BTW thanks so much Hen you’re amazing), so we began to look around for other sources. We found flabbs, they and Hen started making some A1 quality art, and here we are today.

Also, an old friend started doing music for us at some point in this process, and it’s honestly super good, but that went way smoother than it really should have so it’s not a very interesting story (also I kinda forgot when they started an I’m too lazy to go check).

And we are soon to release a new demo, this time with sprites and such.

As usual, Check us out on Twitter an Instagram, (we actually regularly post there now!)

CHALLENGER DEFEATED

So this was drastically different than anything I ever posted on the blog so if you like it or dislike it make sure to let me know, comment here, comment on reddit, write me messages using sky writing.