Marshmallow Bear /
A Sony conference changed my perspective

In my last post I was investigating an idea for an isometric 2.5D game inspired by final fantasy tactics. However, since then, I went to a private Sony conference and was honestly bothered seeing a bunch of people who probably never played a game in their life talking about publishing, developing, and the business of video games; and honestly it struck a nerve with me.

The Sony conference

We are all deeply aware of what is going on in the game industry, and particularly in AAA, many of us work for those same companies. In fact, my company's parent company was one of the 4 guest speakers for the "state of the industry" fireside chat. You could imagine that the main topic was money, numbers, and how to scale. Another topic was how do AAA companies do what indie developers are doing, how can they artificially create these smaller scale, small team games and take that portion of the market? There was some ideology nonsense sprinkled in there, but not as much as you would think, probably from current trends.

Of course these big companies have a lawful requirement to do whatever they can for shareholders, but they also have to make money to keep alive. It's not such a crazy idea, I know many indie developers are making games to either make a "hit" game to make a lot of money, or are making indie games so that they can make it their day job and stop working for someone else. So, indie or AAA, it seems to be a lot about the money, and very little about the games themselves.

Indies? Hustler culture?

We could balk at big AAA or even AA game companies and point to indie developers as the "last bastion" for creating fun, memorable games; but is that true? How many simulator games are there, how many horror games are there, how many games are made for a YouTube audience? Really, I don't think there are many "indies" out there holding up the last vestiges of a once experimental and thriving craft. You see a bunch of "survivors games" pop up out of nowhere, but some of us are old enough to remember "Smash TV", "Robotron" and "I made a game with zombies in it". How many mine-craft voxel games came after mine-craft, even huge hit indie titles just played off of the idea, just in 2D.

So many indie developers are spending so much time creating games in hopes that it'll "pop off". I can't even begin to count how many instances of indie developers I've ran into who have a "great idea" (meaning money) rather than a "fun idea". It feels like the same hustle culture that I felt at the Sony conference. And... The worst part of the whole thing is that I fell into the same trap as everyone else.

Going back to "the good old days"

I reflected on what was going on in my head for a bit and realized that I perhaps have fallen into the same trap that everyone else seems to be falling into. This results in me making games that are well beyond what I can do on my own and ideas that are just too big to tell if they are fun. Now, it is a risk saying "fun", what I should say is "fun to me"- which probably isn't fun to most, and that's okay. Fun to me sometimes means technology, sometimes gameplay, sometimes art.

I have always just done what I want to do, and that's why I have so many dead projects. I find one thing I'm interested in and then try to make some big ol' game idea based off that. Then I do the stuff I want to do and abandon the project. What I need to do is what I used to always do, which was find a very small scoped game I want to make, then make it for the fun of it and not even care if I sell it or make any "return". There is no return that I want other than to do the work to make the game. I thoroughly adore "the process" and not the goal, so when my view shifts to "the goal", I completely lose interest.

More than just mere words

Since that conference and my reflection, I turned around and have nearly completed a game in just 2 weeks. I decided that I'm going to use my Go game engine (instead of my C or C++ one), simply because I want to just write code and make a game. I don't really want to deal with all the technicalities of lower level languages, though I do absolutely love doing so at times. I've done so much low level stuff that I think I'm just ready to make things these days, process and perfection be damned!

The game I've been working on for the last 2 weeks is a multiplayer Sudoku game. The game will use PBR rendering, and network code I developed just for the game. I've also developed a master server registry so that players can find each other and utilize UDP NAT hole punching. The primary gameplay loop is playing sudoku, getting a token for playing easy/medium/hard/multiplayer, and unlocking name tags and special player cursors (which show in multiplayer).

I can have a more formal development log for the Sudoku game specifically in another post, but that's basically just me "putting my money where my mouth is" as it relates to these things I've been feeling since that Sony conference.

Where do we go from here?

From here, we make games for the fun of it.