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KickStarter The Failure of the Adventure Game Renaissance

almondblight

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Yes, a fact I attribute to having achieved critical mass. (Perhaps "critical" is the wrong word, given critics' view of Primordia.) I assume a big part of the problem these other games are having is getting the same number of eyes on them.

That suggests that there's still plenty of demand for adventure games (at least, some adventure games), but that the information networks about them are very poor (not surprising; this is true for indie games in general).
 

Blackthorne

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That suggests that there's still plenty of demand for adventure games (at least, some adventure games), but that the information networks about them are very poor (not surprising; this is true for indie games in general).

I think you have a great point here; larger information network information isn't as available for adventure games. Most main-stream coverage seems to be written by authors who are ill-informed and ill-researched on the subject. Not all, but much larger coverage is lacking. I must admit, as an old and curmudgeonly adventure gamer that cut his teeth on old PCJrs, Tandy 1000s, and a Packard Bell with a fuckin' CGA monitor, I get a little miffed at some of these children writing stuff that they obviously haven't done any real research on. Getting old is funny to begin with, but getting old in the tech/computing community is just downright ridiculous. I'm the asshole shouting at the sky as I remember coding polygons using LOGO on an Apple ][+!

I still get emails from people who have just discovered Quest for Infamy, and they're super excited to find a game "like that!". Which is great to hear, but also a little funny considering it was released in the summer of 2014. I'm just happy people still keep discovering it and enjoying it.

I suppose time is the great measure and equalizer - in this post Thimbleweed Park Climate, we'll see if adventure games can continue and flourish, at least a little.
 

DeepOcean

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I think the problem with most adventure games is that they have a big barrier of entry for most developers and the rewards aren't so great. To make something like a rogue like is far easier and financially rewarding than do the extensive work of animation, storytelling and art design that a good adventure game requires while the rogue like may sell alot more.

The reason the adventure kickstarter renaissance failed is in part because alot of developers were out of the market for a long time and weren't used dealing with tight budgets, they ever were money men and were used with someone else doing this work for them and boy... this lacking on skill was obvious.

However, the big flops alone don't justify the poor health of the genre, it is kinda of a vicious cycle, developers don't do adventure games because they are a TON of work and they have easier alternatives with proven financial rewards, so most people nowdays don't play an adventure game because there are very few people making them or when they gonna read about them , they gonna read some idiot millenial ignorant "journalist" whining why they couldn't be more like TellTale games. So, most people don't know how an adventure game plays or worse, were misinformed by ignorant idiots into outdated prejudice that isn't valid anymore.

You need to be exposed consistently to a kind of gameplay, first learn about it, then learn to enjoy it to be finally converted on a fan to develop a taste. I hated adventure games when I started playing as a teenager but slowly I acquired the taste and discovered what was so good about them. For ten people that gonna play a game, maybe only a few will like it, maybe by consistently pumping out titles, more and more people will be hooked up and the genre slowly grow back up in shape.

I really have high hopes for the Thimbleweed park effect and other developers that go on that route. Maybe some developers aren't so afraid of trying out.
 

Blaine

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The only Telltale adventure game I've ever played was The Wolf Among Us. Someone bought it for me for some reason. The story progression was so stringently on-rails and the puzzles so simple and obvious that I just stopped playing it. It was more like pressing buttons, pressing more buttons for QTEs, and watching long cutscenes than an actual adventure game. Truly, it's the evolution of the genre that Jennifer "Hamburger" Hepler would have wanted to see. If that's what a lot of Telltale's games are like, then no wonder Millennials love them.

The overall best adventure game I've played this century was Hadean Lands, which was all-text with parser commands and about as old-school as you can get. The puzzles are so hard they might even have stumped my late grandmother, who was a PhD mathematician and solved puzzles as a hobby for 60 years.

There's something you know-at-all developers can try your hands at to "expand your ludographies"—text parser adventure games with puzzles that are extremely challenging, yet utterly fair and logical. They won't sell any copies, but you'll be able to feel very cool and prestigious.
 

HoboForEternity

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You need to be exposed consistently to a kind of gameplay, first learn about it, then learn to enjoy it to be finally converted on a fan to develop a taste. I hated adventure games when I started playing as a teenager but slowly I acquired the taste and discovered what was so good about them. For ten people that gonna play a game, maybe only a few will like it, maybe by consistently pumping out titles, more and more people will be hooked up and the genre slowly grow back up in shape.
true for me, i was exposed to adventure games back in early 2000's it was broken sword 1 i think, but at that time i was basically 9 years old, and my english skill wasn't quite up to the task of playing an adventure game. years later, i re-discovered the genre (it wasn't even that long time ago, around when i started college, maybe circa 2012 where i got this crappy laptop from my parents and i can only play indie and old games on that) and they drawn me in. it also helped i've discovered about japanese point and click like ace attorney, zero escape, hotel dusk, etc when i am in high school. although they're not exactly traditional adventure games, and more like visual novel with puzzles i think it helped the ease of climbing the P&C barrier that made me who i am now.
 

gaussgunner

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Interesting thread on the business of games, don't mind if I revive it...

People, stop making excuses for this shit. There is no excuse. $500,000 is more than enough money to pay four people (two writers/programmers, an artist/modeler, and an audio guy) around $60,000 per year for two years working full-time to get a proper adventure game out the door

Well.. the more money you have, the faster it burns, especially when everyone knows how much you have because it's on kickstarter. Employees don't realize 60k is really ~80k after social security, unemployment, health insurance, etc. So now you're up to 640k. Then you have sick time, vacations, shit that didn't work out as planned, someone quits and you have to hire a replacement and bring them up to speed. And dont forget the damned backer rewards you have to produce and ship. Pretty soon you've burned a million or two.

So if you only have 500k, you better aim to build the game in 1 year with 200k. No, make that 100k... hire 2 ambitious helpers at 40k, with a 40k bonus if they finish on time. They won't, but give it anyway if they're close enough. Then you pay them and some contractors to really finish it. QA is a bitch. If there's anything left at the end, be a greedy bastard and keep it as a bonus. If you're feeling generous, use it to hire people for your next project.

God help you if you're running your business as a democracy.


Don't try to tell me that two programmers, two artists, and two musicians can't produce a fucking computer game.

They can't. They'll just argue with each other.


pay out profits and bonuses to investors, directors, and company owners. These ancillary staff and expensive technologies are no longer necessary, especially considering that all the profiteers have been cut out.

The plebs grossly underestimate the importance of good managers and investors. Managers keep developers on track, crack the whip as needed, and buffer them from distractions. Business owners & investors have the financial savvy and skin in the game. High risk, high reward, they deserve it. Some of them are thieves and parasites, but then again so are slacker employees.


Today any asshole who takes the time can create game assets using free and open-source tools, or relatively inexpensive tools, with an inexpensive computer. All he needs is the talent.

In the old days, $10,000 workstations kept the riff-raff from starting game studios... and talent was still the primary expense.


Yes, for a long time now I've sensed a strong undercurrent of "we paid someone to do X, but they couldn't properly deliver" running through many of these troubled projects. It's an undercurrent because project runners virtually never come out and actually say so, for fairly obvious reasons.

This is just an unfounded personal theory, but I suspect there are a lot more low- or no-talent hacks floating around these days than there were in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Definitely. Software development became THE get-rich quick career choice just as I was coming up in the 1990s. The gold rush ruined everything to this day. Competent coders are extremely rare. A lot of veterans are making >500k in silicon valley. No other industry can compete on salary, especially not games.

If you're using contractors you'd better try them out in advance, make sure they're available and eager to work for you, and work with them closely. Don't expect them to disappear for 6 months and come back "All done, sir, 100% to your specifications!" The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and all that.

Unfortunately western labor laws basically force you to use contractors now, so it's that much harder to assemble a reliable team.
 

Dexter

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Worse in the sense that the white knight you thought was going to ride in and save the day turned out to be Don Quixote.

I am curious what would happen if the developer of Gemini Rue or Resonance released an adventure now -- would they capture comparable audiences, or has the market shrunk since then? My assumption with regards to WWS has always been the latter: any adventure we release will sell many fewer copies than Primordia, even if it is better.
Might have something to do with this:
number_of_games_released_on_steam_each_year_chart_sep_2017_1.png


I don't think it has anything to do with "Adventure games" in specific, I bet early "Digital Distribution" games around ~2010-2014 sold a lot better since it was a lot easier for people to discover them with a few hundred games released a year and a few of them being the "must have quality titles" that everyone spoke about and had to have/play e.g. games like World of Goo, Super Meat Boy, Braid, Torchlight, Audiosurf, Terrarria, Trine, Bastion and the likes would most likely sell a lot less nowadays than they did back in the day.

And I wouldn't even say that there are less Adventure games nowadays than back then, it's just that they are a lot less well known and there's a lot of "Noise" nobody talks about or plays: http://store.steampowered.com/tag/en/Point & Click/#p=0&tab=NewReleases

These are just from the last two months:




 

Dexter

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There's also a lot more Adventure games of dubious Ethnic origins:






And a lot of Random Adventure games that have barely more than 10 Reviews in total:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/460140/Midnight_at_the_Celestial_Palace_Chapter_I/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/619350/Sandra_and_Woo_in_the_Cursed_Adventure/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/601960/Under_That_Rain/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/430410/Memoranda/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/567010/Game_Royale_2__The_Secret_of_Jannis_Island/ (a few of them even only available in specific languages like German with this one)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/500320/A_Tale_of_Caos_Overture/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/555290/Little_Briar_Rose/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/368890/ARK_The_Great_Escape/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/416250/Tales_PC/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/350480/Tales_of_Cosmos/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/504380/Detective_Hayseed__Hollywood/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/603700/The_Low_Road/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/629000/Lydia/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/497730/The_Wardrobe/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/480900/Slap_Village_Reality_Slap/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/376520/Kelvin_and_the_Infamous_Machine/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/544970/Milkmaid_of_the_Milky_Way/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/443650/Wailing_Heights/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/543270/Mr_Shadow/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/377970/Void_And_Meddler/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/411610/Ticks_Tales/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/411590/The_Rivers_of_Alice__Extended_Version/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/356390/The_Slaughter_Act_One/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/327450/Ballads_of_Reemus_When_the_Bed_Bites/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/341690/The_Great_Fusion/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/325520/Fire/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/602590/SaucerLike/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/694420/Alimardans_Mischief/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/549190/Fetch/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/291770/The_Last_Crown_Midnight_Horror/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/597210/Bayou_Island__Point_and_Click_Adventure/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/378630/Shadows_on_the_Vatican_Act_II_Wrath/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/405780/Alpha_Polaris__A_Horror_Adventure_Game/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/373240/Black_Sails__The_Ghost_Ship/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/339850/Overclocked_A_History_of_Violence/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/395250/The_Adventures_of_Fatman/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/391590/Dream_Chamber/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/364350/The_Apotheosis_Project/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/322970/Subject_13/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/347710/Perils_of_Man/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/351340/Belladonna/

A lot of these would have never found their way to major distribution channels.

I think it's more of a sign of Market oversaturation with a lot of product of dubious worth, quality or relevance as everyone and their dog can become a "game developer".
 
Last edited:

gaussgunner

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A lot of these would have never found their way to major distribution channels.

I think it's more of a sign of Market oversaturation with a lot of product of dubious worth, quality or relevance as everyone and their dog can become a "game developer".

Damn, those got through even before Steam Direct, and only half of them are from obvious shovelware publishers. The other half appear to be one-off releases by noobs, although I wouldn't be surprised if it's just the shovelware devs setting up alts. I think you can create a shell company for $100 in some states.

It's only gonna get worse with Direct. Every wannabe dev can make a low-effort adventure in a month, pay the $100 and sell it for 5 bucks.
 

Blackthorne

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I think some of us die-hards are just going to have to wait a few more years again, until the genre is "forgotten" again! All I know is I have two games in the pipeline, but I'm not banking on them to be financially successful in anyway. We're working on them in our free time now because we love the genre and games, and hopefully they'll be fun and true-to-the-roots adventure games we love, but I have no illusions about any kind of financial solvency from these games. Mostly I just hope people play them and enjoy them - it's going to take a while to finish them at our current pace, but with the market saturation currently... I'm okay with that.


Bt
 

MRY

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I think one effect may just be to shift the cartel to a different place. For instance, after the floodgates opened on Steam, WEG's games seem to have a harder time selling: A Golden Wake, Epiphany, Technobabylon, and Shardlight initially performed much worse than Gemini Rue, Resonance, and Primordia. But then Dave put Technobabylon in the Humble Bundle, and it sold 100k copies -- now it's one of WEG's best-selling titles, with great word of mouth and overwhelmingly positive reviews. I suspect that the Humble Bundle, Kickstarter, prominent LPers, and Steam curators will now function as the cartel enforcers; maybe to some degree the indie game press (although their ability to move copies seems sadly declined in the past few years). Also, I think this underscores the wisdom of Dave's price hike -- if you can only sell to your niche, asking more from your niche is not a crazy business strategy.

Also, the craziest thing about Dexter's list of overlooked adventure games is that with one or two exceptions, the games are really visually appealing. No idea how the rest of the production values are (or the gameplay), but it seems pretty clear these would've all done pretty well back in cartel days. They aren't shovelware.
 

RapineDel

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I really enjoyed Thimbleweed Park but it sadly won't help the genre all that much I don't think. From what I've read of Ron's twitter account the game has done enough to make back the extra money they invested but that's about it. The problem with that is that's even with everything going about as smoothly as it possibly could. It was a success on Kickstarter, it was clearly well planned, they didn't over promise and if anything over delivered and it's had great critical reception even from the mainstream media. I think most developers would see all of that too and be put off. They'd be thinking that if the very best outcome that can happen is you break even then is it really worth the extra stress and hassle? Probably not.

I think the adventure genre probably does need a kick up the ass in some way if it's ever going to be more then a niche for nostalgic fans but so far most attempts haven't worked. Even going back to the 90s Gabriel Knight 2 tried something new but it was a bit of a flash in the pan. Grim Fandango and EFMI tried to go 3D with mixed results (GF is obviously a gem though overall, not owing to the 3D though) while Telltale basically started a new craze that only alienated original adventure fans by trying something new.

One thing I've found is that a lot of people including myself are a bit tired of the story focus in these games combined with easy puzzles. There were certainly some shockers n terms of puzzles back in the day but I really can't think of many modern P&C games that really challenge you these days. Most of them are pretty easy, linear with more of a tight story focus. It'd be great to see something like Monkey Island 2 with a more in depth puzzle structure but I doubt it will happen.
 

Dexter

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There's a lot more where those came from too if you browse through the Point & Click sludge:

Cyberpunk Adventure with crazy art that just came out two days ago and has no reviews so far:
A Square Enix-sponsored Animu Cyberpunk Adventure:

Monty-Python-style Adventure:

This one has a really great cartoon art-style with appealing animations:

Post-apocalyptic 3D Adventure game:


This one also looks interesting: http://store.steampowered.com/app/390290/Bulb_Boy/

This could basically be Spaceventure: http://store.steampowered.com/app/488770/Her_Majestys_SPIFFING/

Monkey Island 4 Ripoff: http://store.steampowered.com/app/472420/Duke_Grabowski_Mighty_Swashbuckler/

Not to mention Re-releases that some might be playing for the first time:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/369830/Toonstruck/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/495700/Gabriel_Knight_Sins_of_the_Father/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/501990/Phantasmagoria/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/501970/Phantasmagoria_2_A_Puzzle_of_Flesh/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/502750/Quest_for_Glory_15/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/494740/Police_Quest_Collection/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/359620/Call_of_Cthulhu_Prisoner_of_Ice/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/389470/Call_of_Cthulhu_Shadow_of_the_Comet/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/377070/Noctropolis/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/359420/The_Journeyman_Project_1_Pegasus_Prime/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/410120/AGON__The_Mysterious_Codex_Trilogy/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/353980/Ankh__Anniversary_Edition/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/356210/Tony_Tough_and_the_Night_of_Roasted_Moths/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/328430/Rex_Nebular_and_the_Cosmic_Gender_Bender/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/257260/Inherit_the_Earth_Quest_for_the_Orb/

And there's also a bunch of Adventure games stuck in Steam library Limbo that can't be found over the "Point & Click" tag because they haven't been tagged properly yet, for instance you'll be able to find "Red Comrades", but not "Red Comrades 2+3":
http://store.steampowered.com/app/443360/Red_Comrades_2_For_the_Great_Justice_Reloaded/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/546220/Red_Comrades_3_Return_of_Alaska_Reloaded/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/610120/Little_Kite/

So yeah, I think talking about the "death of the Adventure game genre" as a whole based on the fate of two or three KickStarter projects is yet again a little bit premature.
 

Infinitron

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So yeah, I think talking about the "death of the Adventure game genre" as a whole based on the fate of two or three KickStarter projects is yet again a little bit premature.

"Failure of the Adventure Gaming Renaissance" and "Death of the Adventure Game Genre" aren't the same thing.

The point is that things could be better. Those Kickstarters you refer to could have been tentpole projects that helped the entire genre go forward (like what's happened with RPGs) and they failed to do that.
 

Explorerbc

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Damn, those got through even before Steam Direct, and only half of them are from obvious shovelware publishers. The other half appear to be one-off releases by noobs, although I wouldn't be surprised if it's just the shovelware devs setting up alts. I think you can create a shell company for $100 in some states.

It's only gonna get worse with Direct. Every wannabe dev can make a low-effort adventure in a month, pay the $100 and sell it for 5 bucks.

Actually like MRY said, most of the stuff in that list are good efforts with some being even great and well known in niche adventure circles. I would argue that the genre has received a lot less shovelware compaired to say platformer, fps, roguelike etc games because as DeepOcean mentioned you have to put some thought and artistic effort into a point-n-click instead of adding generic assets to unity tutorial levels. If one of those games was released 10 years ago they would at least have been featured in a few dedicated websites.
 

gaussgunner

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Actually like MRY said, most of the stuff in that list are good efforts with some being even great and well known in niche adventure circles. I would argue that the genre has received a lot less shovelware compaired to say platformer, fps, roguelike etc games because as DeepOcean mentioned you have to put some thought and artistic effort into a point-n-click instead of adding generic assets to unity tutorial levels. If one of those games was released 10 years ago they would at least have been featured in a few dedicated websites.

I don't doubt there's a flood of genuinely original P&C games. All you need is artistic talent, basic coding skills, and GameMaker. The genre is low hanging fruit for aspiring game devs.

But what about publishers like these?
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=Headup Games
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=Daedalic Entertainment

They seem like content mills. A few good(?) rpgs/adventures and a whole lot of possible shovelware by their other devs. I wonder how many of these P&C adventures are just formulaic stories with attractive partially-recycled artwork. If they're careful to only feature new art in their screenshots, you'd never notice until you've played several of them.
 

SilverSpook

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There's a lot more where those came from too if you browse through the Point & Click sludge:

Cyberpunk Adventure with crazy art that just came out two days ago and has no reviews so far:


Thanks for the shoutout! (This is the creator of Neofeud) I have to agree that the 'Great Flood' of games has meant a bigger denominator splitting up the attention provided to each adventure game. Being a one-person developer myself, that has proved incredibly challenging. I like to joke that simply being a fiction writer is essentially a public display of delusional schizophrenia, in that you're inventing grand lies for hundreds of pages, flipping between personalities (characters) all day long, and then people shell out cash for your recorded insanity. Being a solo indie dev where you're jumping between writer, artist, programmer, musician all day is like that, but magnitudes worse!

But the hardest part, for me at least, has been the business and marketing hat. I literally spent eight hours or more every day for the last two months sending out press requests to over 1,000 websites, youtubers, streamers, bloggers, etc. as well as posting to social media, sites, etc.. A lot of the indie press' response has been, "We have a thousand indie games on our plate right now! But we'd love to get to you!" but there have been some articles such as this one on IndieGames.com.

Unfortunately, I believe that article there was the biggest media splash Neofeud has had yet. I have been throwing the kitchen sink and everything short of a demonic ritual sacrifice to get RPS to cover my game, and after several pitch attempts I doubt even WannaCry ransomeware could help me get a signal boost from PC Gamer. And it's fine. I understand.

Add to this the scourge on the indie and small-scale game landscape that is asset flipping, which has caused some players to be turned off to the entire Unity *engine*, let alone taking a chance on some small, as-yet-unknown indie point-and-click-adventure, and it's just made the already tough nut of a sustainable adventure game business an almost adamantium shell.

I absolutely have hope for the adventure game genre, though. I had essentially given up on not only game development, but games generally, around 2013. I had worked for a couple mobile game companies, and a retired Microsoft executive who moved to Hawaii to start a game company. (I'm from Hawaii -- fun fact, unlike most mid-life crises which involve splurging on Lambos, when Silicon Valley types see a grey hair, they move to Hawaii and start a game company.) Unfortunately, making The Next Flappy Bird, or working on the next Texas Hold'em, where the biggest creative input we had was, "Do you think Suicide Jack's knife would look better in the left ear, this version?" along with the backstabbing and layoffs that came when the LA big fish came down and hostile mergerized the place put me off game dev for a long time.

But then, sometime around 2013, having resigned to teaching*, office drudgery, and possibly aspiring to be a programmer of high-frequency trading algorithms for Goldman Sachs or automating away blue-collar jobs to inspire Trump voters, I played a game called Primordia. It blew my frickin' mind open. And then I read that it was created essentially 'on the side' by three guys, and the bits of neural tissue and skull that was left of my mind, also exploded. I said, "You know what? If three guys can do this in their spare time, I bet one guy/gal could do it all if they set their mind to it." So I went down to part-time at the dayjob(s), and cut a deal with my wife to give me a good year and a half to take one good shot at a commercial indie game company, and got to working 12 hours a day. As an aside, my #1 tip for any aspiring indie developer is to marry a Canadian, because anyone else will divorce your sorry ass when you tell them you're going to go make video games for a living. :)

I will say, hands down, the best games I have played in the last two decades have come from teams of ten or less, and often one. All the Wadjet Eye titles, Primordia. I don't know how many were on West of Loating exactly, but I'm guessing not a lot. This is my opinion, of course, and though I actually started out in the 3D FPS and 'immersive sim' space (my biggest project before Neofeud was a Deus Ex 1 mod called Terminus Machina), I am now a die-hard adventure lover.

It has been absolutely a tough gig, trying to get visibility as a small fish, but you know what? I wouldn't trade indie dev for ten million dollars and tech lead at any AAA studio or almost any other job. I've worked in corporate / government monstrosities -- I actually made an entire game about it called Neofeud, hah! -- and I can tell you, even just having made the rent money** with revenue thus far from Neofeud, I have never been happier in my life. I have met the most amazing, dedicated, passionate people in the adventure game and indie world. I feel constantly supported and loved, rather than soul-destroyed and filled with self-loathing, that I was at the former places. I would be happy to make enough from gamedev to pay for a roof, food, and maybe get some brakepads for my squeaing 1994 Toyota, but all the rest of the money I would be throwing back into paying other creative and passionate folks to join me in a small team, and funding other indie projects.

Because I don't want to live in a world that is filled only with toxic military-industrial complex propaganda FPS's, asset flips, infotainment, 50 Shades of Grey, et. al..

There are so, so, so many games coming out right now, and it's indietopia... and it's also a nightmare to sort through. Steam doing away with Greenlight and adding Direct was a good move. But ultimately I feel it's up to these global networks of passionate creators and fans to boost the signals of these countless hidden gems. They are out there, I swear, so many of them, it is just a matter of finding*** them and helping them be found.

I am absolutely hopeful.


*Teaching has been immensely rewarding, and I continue to do it. Doubly so, as I was teaching 'at-risk' youth in the inner-city where I lived, who really needed it. I do still continue to teach, I help home-school my two kids along with Mrs. Silver Spook, and provide a STEM / robotics education guru of sorts to families in the community where I live. If anyone is considering it, it is highly, highly recommended.

**I am also freelance writing on the side to make a little extra cash right now, and trying to grow some food on our little homestead out here!

***To that effect: immediately go and check out The Journey Down 3!
 
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MRY

Wormwood Studios
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But then, sometime around 2013, having resigned to teaching*, office drudgery, and possibly aspiring to be a programmer of high-frequency trading algorithms for Goldman Sachs or automating away blue-collar jobs to inspire Trump voters, I played a game called Primordia. It blew my frickin' mind open. And then I read that it was created essentially 'on the side' by three guys, and the bits of neural tissue and skull that was left of my mind, also exploded. I said, "You know what? If three guys can do this in their spare time, I bet one guy/gal could do it all if they set their mind to it." So I went down to part-time at the dayjob(s), and cut a deal with my wife to give me a good year and a half to take one good shot at a commercial indie game company, and got to working 12 hours a day.

...

*Teaching has been immensely rewarding, and I continue to do it. Doubly so, as I was teaching 'at-risk' youth in the inner-city where I lived, who really needed
These two points are not unconnected. When I taught, far and away the best part was the fact that you could, with dumb luck and a large enough population, wind up actually making a difference in someone's life. I would say that was the case for two or three of the students (for sure one of them) that I taught over three summers and a winter. With Primordia, the best part is that having a much larger population, I've gotten to hear a non-trivial number of things along these lines -- maybe 30-50 such messages ranging from the "thanks in part to you I made a game" to the "I was suffering from terrible depression and somehow your game helped me get through it." As someone who fishtails between overweaning self-love and overbearing self-doubt, those kinds of messages are a really great thing to hear. Much better than the money.

The problem with the fragmentation of the market for indie games is that you hugely reduce the likelihood of that kind of engagement. It's not just that developers may not make enough money to make games full time, they may not get enough attention to justify making them at all. Releasing a game (like posting on a forum!) is a public performance; but if there's no audience, it may be hard to bother to perform at all.
 

Blackthorne

Infamous Quests
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Codex 2014 Divinity: Original Sin 2
Hope is a hard thing in indie-game development, let alone indie-adventure games development. Five years ago, when the whole possibility of an Adventure Game renaissance seemed possible, I had all the hope in the world. Years pass, and my hope has definitely been tempered. I've been not only hardened by my own struggles in the world, but by the struggles and failures of others whose work I really loved and respected. There was a lot of promise, and it just didn't quite hit the way many of us hoped. (I'm now musing in mind about projects like Shadowgate and any of the Cinemaware stuff... I loved those games back in the day too, and hoped their projects would also be successful, in addition to the myriad of ex-Sierra and LucasArts people's projects...)

I'm not totally cynical about it, because I know if people like stuff, it'll find a way. I'm less hopeful about it being financially viable, but that's business/market concern. Like I said, if people want to make these kinds of games, they'll find a way and if people want to play them, hopefully they'll support them best they can. I hope Neofeud makes a good splash in your life - and I'm glad you came here to talk about it. The adventure game renaissance may have failed in the way most of us hoped for, but adventure games are not dead. If you'll excuse me now, though, I do have to drain the deep-fryer, we've been cooking the fries and McNuggets in the same sludge for days, and my manager says if I don't clean it tonight, I can take a hike over to Wendy's and see if they'll take "my video game designing ass" over there.


Bt
 

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