Overall I’ve been kinda down on indie game development for the last few months. I am working on a new card game here and there, and there will be upcoming news on Through Broken Land in the next few weeks, the truth is I’ve been more de-motivated than at any time since I got seriously started in indie dev back in 2006 or so. Maybe going back further even, because I was extremely hype to make games as early as the mid 90s. But yeah, just been feelin’ pretty low about it of late.
In the last year I launched Spellstorm and Scary World, and both of them kind of felt like they went absolutely nowhere, just disappeared into the void, and so that has been pretty disheartening. I mean, my career has been full of disheartening responses, and actually the overall trajectory has been just worse and worse as I’ve gotten better and better at making games. So I mean, the obvious explanation is just that it simply gets harder and harder for indies (actual indies, like people who don’t have millions of dollars of dev and marketing funding provided by another group such as a publisher) every year. Even ten years ago, people were talking about the “indie dev apocalypse”, and from my vantage point, it was apocalyptic then and it just kept apocalypting. The whole industry, of course, is in a difficult spot, not even indies. Which I always come back to thinking, that’s kinda weird, because this is a MASSIVE industry – the money is there! But something about how we allocate attention and resources sort of means that a tiny tiny percentage of people are able to make games and make *any* money from doing so. (Perhaps this is not that unlike every other aspect of our economy and society: the money is there, it just is being hoarded.)
Scary World was kinda a quick little thing, almost an extended game jam game that I made in 6 weeks. I do think it’s more of a fun, palatable videogame than most of my past stuff. I do think that its potential audience is way wider, than almost anything I’ve ever made. I am really proud of it, and I think it’s a great game. But, I can also kinda understand why it didn’t go anywhere: the assets do look a little on the rush-y side and I didn’t do any marketing for it.
Spellstorm is really what’s more of an “oof” kinda feeling. Firstly, I developed Spellstorm over the course of 3 years, not counting all the time spent doing shipping and all of that. And it was not a smooth development either, it required a lot of heavy lifting in every way. I paid a lot for the art, which I think is so beautiful, and I’m really proud of the final product. But the annoying thing is, I also paid a pretty good amount of money – more than most indies would, for sure! – to promote the game and build up for the Kickstarter.
While the Spellstorm Kickstarter did technically “succeed”, the truth is that it… kind of didn’t, actually. At the last minute, I just had a feeling that I should reduce the goal from 20k, which we had been planning for for a long time, to 10k. I mean the people I was working with had run Kickstarters many many times before, for board games, and they felt confident that we’d easily hit 20k with all of the benchmarks that we hit in terms of mailing list and all of that. We were planning on having 30-50k and 20k was like the “bare minimum”. But I’ve been around the block enough times and I just had a feeling that we weren’t going to make 20k, and I really really wanted Spellstorm to exist, even if it meant I lost a lot of money. Losing a bunch more money seemed way better than sweating and working hard those 3 years and commissioning all that great art, getting hundreds and hundreds of playtests going with dozens of playtesters, and having that all just disappear.
So the Kickstarter went onto just barely squeak by on the 10k line, which… after Kickstarter fees and everything, was way less than I really needed. I had to change printing companies because a lot of printers won’t do a print run as small as 250 copies. Same with shipping companies. This caused a bunch of difficulties throughout the process of getting the game printed and made, but also yeah just totally drove the game deeper into the negative in terms of what I spent on it.
In any case, the good news is this: Spellstorm is great. In no way am I like, “eh, that was a failed game idea”. Like, it’s a strong, interesting, original, fun game. It’s not an Escape the Omnochronom! situation. And I believe just about everyone has gotten their copies at this point. But also, of the 170 or so copies that have been shipped out, basically nobody has said anything about it yet. The game has mostly positive ratings on BoardGameGeek, but not enough ratings to even get a formal “rating”.
(As a point of comparison, which sort of highlights the feeling of “the better I get the worse I do”, Dragon Bridge is a game that I created in a tiny amount of time, like less than a year, and has had a ton more players and interaction over the years. It is an older game, and it was a smaller production overall, but I also didn’t hire an artist, did the art myself, and it’s just a lot lower production values, and yet, I feel overall a lot more satisfied with how it went.)
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Going forward, Through Broken Land is something that feels so artistically and creatively important to me, that I feel like… I don’t even care that no one is going to play it. I just need it to exist. I’ve been writing a lot of songs recently and thinking about art and its role in changing the world for the better. Some of the songs that I’ve been writing, it’s like therapy. I’ll write a line, and then it will hit me: “holy shit, that’s actually TRUE” and it will profoundly impact me. Some of these songs are the most “true” and “me” things that I’ve ever made. Here is the latest, if you’re curious.
In any case, this way of thinking about art making as a process of better knowing yourself, feels really important. Because when you know yourself on a deeper level, you are more able to humanize yourself. And I think, as you can more deeply humanize yourself, it will allow you to see the humanity in others. So many of our problems stem from a fundamental failure to see the humanity in ourselves and others – in people, in general. We put up these hierarchies: often, it’s things that feel unimportant. This person is attractive, that person isn’t. This person is intelligent, that person is less so. But it’s this same dynamic that allows us to accept the concept of billionaires while people are living on the streets, and it’s this same dynamic that would allow us to build, basically concentration camps in the US.
I’m just one person and so the impact that I can make is limited, but I do believe that change does need to start with yourself, and it’s in this way that healing, self-healing, is a revolutionary act. If you can manage to heal yourself, even a little bit, then you now have created this tiny beacon that moves through the world slightly affecting everything you come into contact with in a positive way. It’s like the “hurt people hurt people” concept, but in reverse: healed people heal people.
Through Broken Land is a story that, like my songs, feels like it is really expressing something real about myself in a way that none of my games have ever been able to – not even close. I’ve been working on the script for well over a year now, and there are multiple scenes that when I read them, I cry – not because “oh wow this is like the best script ever!” or anything like that, but because what I wrote feels so deeply true for me. I think the hope is that maybe it will strike some people in a similar way, that it will come through.
But yeah… I’ve been in a mode of just writing songs every day, and doing local open mics. That said, Blake is working on a couple of really cool things for Through Broken Land that I think will really inspire me to dive back in, probably in the fall.
I WILL make this game, one way or another. And I’ll make other games. I have a small card game prototype I am working on, I’d love to get some playtests going for that soon. I will be back! In the meantime, let me know what you think of Spellstorm!
Thank you for reading.
-Keith
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