Making Games for Yourself

Over an hour ago I sat down to tell you my thoughts on advice thrown around in the world of game development. It took me literally an hour to type these two sentences, first I had to get music started, set the lighting and get distracted with an XKCD comic. That led me down a path of playing with a dark mode extension with Google Docs that.. Well who cares about all that non-sense.

Have you ever heard or spread the advice “you should make what you want to make!” Or even the somewhat opposing advice “make what an audience wants.” Well, my current game, Rushcremental, has been shifting and shattering many feelings and beliefs I’ve held dear. For the last decade I’ve been trying to build within the intersection of three circles;

This has been passed around for years, perhaps decades or even longer. I’ve been chasing it since I started my Indie Adventure with varying levels of success; none. I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down. Really, I thought Eggcelerate! landed somewhere near the sweet spot given how well it was received during LudumDare #46, and Turbo Boom! has shown promise with my audience on twitch.tv/timbeaudet but it has yet to be released, or finished for that matter.

Rushcremental was aimed a touch more towards the “What an Audience Wants” target by looking at the data and chasing towards the new hot-genre of incremental games. Now even at the start it was important to me that I wanted to make the game, and that it had some ties back to the roots of racing games. It is still early days, and there is always a chance that the final release of Rushcremental will actually be a solid success, I am certainly hoping for it. I am extremely proud of what AllovQC and I have created in less than 100 days of development. But there are also some signs that have me bracing for impact. During the week of Next Fest none of the press outlets or creators I reached out to, or anyone for that matter, covered the game. That burned a fair bit and for a few days I struggled to get back into the flow. It is quite hard to work on a game when it feels the world won’t want it. After some reflection progress has been moving forward again, but that reflection is what I would like to share with you.

The Target Audience

It is important to make a game for someone specific, rather than trying to please everyone. This is something I still believe. Rushcremental has been made for that person who just wants to shut off. They don’t exactly want mindless progress, but they don’t want to sweat over details and solve problems to get there. Honestly, when balancing the game I’ve felt the chill, thought-free zone and it delivers.

Building for an audience is great but, going back to the diagram, I don’t think the area or importance of each circle is the same. At least not for me. This probably depends greatly on your goals, my primary goal as a fulltime indie developer is to find a way to fund my future projects. My goal is in fact to make a game that appeals to an audience well enough that it sells copies. Enough copies to sustain my frugal cost of living.

You would probably agree then that the “what an audience wants” circle should be the larger influence. This is what I believed. Until recently that is. I am shifting towards the belief that the creators’ wants and desires should always hold a bigger influence; even if they want to sell copies.

Who am I to discuss any of this, I haven’t even made $10,000 on a single-game release, yet! That said, I’ve spent 20 years making games, reading post-mortems, and immersing myself in the world of game development. I might not be financially successful, yet, but I am successful in having the job/career I dreamt of and desired. Why then do I disagree with common advice to chase what the audience wants?

Because there is no Audience

Not really anyway, and certainly not in the sense of following a recipe. We are all just taking guesses, and risks. There are games that people thought were going to be huge that weren’t and games that blew up for reasons that remain mysterious. Working on Rushcremental has convinced me, more than ever, we need to create the thoughts that demand our attention, the ideas that refuse to quiet down.

I have forgotten something really important for longer than I would like to admit. By striving for success, by approaching my adventure one project at a time, by becoming the boss. Even with monthly reviews, I lost sight of the most important thing; I am a maker of toys, a bringer of joy. The whole point of creating a thing is to bring an idea, a thought, or an emotion into existence.

We can’t just “build it, and they will come” to make a business or career from making indie games, but we can’t simply chase what we think the audience wants. We may think wrong. Data exists, but reading it wrong is easy too. Even watching for bias, the theories we come up with are just theories until tested by spending weeks, months or years building a game.

So make the game you want to make, but define the audience you are making it for. After 5-years fulltime, this is perhaps the best we can actually do. Rushcremental is a solid project and I am proud as hell at what has been created in less than 100 days. It is the most polished game I’ve created in my adventure and I’m hopeful it will find the audience it deserves.