Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[Zanzoken]

The biggest problem with indie game development imo is that it's hit-driven. Studios either make hits, or they fail. I think a middle ground does exist, but very few have the discipline to navigate it.

The only developer I can think of off the top of my head who has this business figured out is Jeff Vogel. Say what you want about him as a creative (based on Queen's Wish, I think he is pretty bankrupt in that area at this point) but the guy is a living blueprint on how to make it as an indie dev. His blog is a good source of knowledge about the indie games business, and there's also a Codex thread discussing it.

https://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/jeff-vogel-soapbox-thread.91814/

 

[Bad Sector]

There's nothing wrong, the market is flooded with shitty indie games.

Not all games are shitty though, note that the context in my reply wasn't about the games' quality but about doing them as a solo developer and expectations - or actually lack of. The later replies should make it more clear that i was talking about your state of mind as a developer (ie. not going into it with the expectation you'll fail - if you do then what is the point of making a commercial endeavor?).

 

[d1nolore]

https://howtomarketagame.com/2020/10/19/steamgenres/

Charts

I don't know if this is a reputable source or if the data presented is reliable, but the tl;dr is that the market is flooded, but only in certain genres. If you're trying to make the next hit platformer or whatever, then you have to be extremely good or extremely lucky to not drown in the sea of competition. But in more monocled spaces like RPGs and strategy, getting noticed is much less of a problem.

This lines up well with my experience as a consumer. I doubt there is anywhere on the internet that tracks the RPG market more closely than the Codex... if there's a good RPG out there, no matter how small, someone here will find it. And yet more often than not, I find myself without anything interesting to play.

There's a lot of fertile ground still out there, just waiting for someone to come along and farm it.

one thing to consider is that it’s much easier to create a platformer or puzzle game that’s why people do. Creating a decent RPG is much harder or at least takes a lot longer. Think about all the dialogue, story, combat mechanics, npc interactions, character skills and abilities, etc etc.

So yes there is perhaps a gap in the market for the genre based on that information. But certainly not an easy task making a decent rpg without a team. Jeff Vogel is a bad example because he’s like the only guy who does it that way. I can’t think of any others off the top of my head. It would be great to see it work for some of the devs here.

 

[Zanzoken]

Vogel is the perfect example imo, because he is an RPG developer like all of us wish we were, and he's managed to stay afloat for 25 years without ever landing a major hit.

Imagine this scenario: you've busted your ass for the past 4 years to release your first game, Exile. And luckily for you it's a moderate success, netting you $200k in revenue (a number cited by Vogel himself on his blog). What do you do next?

The wrong thing that most developers do is immediately expand the studio, hiring more developers to spread out the workload. And then they either try to make Exile 2 a bigger, shinier, much more ambitious game than Exile 1... or they move on to a new franchise entirely, which means most of the work from Exile 1 is retired and has to be done over. Either way, they spend another 4 or 5 years on their second game, hoping that it sells as well as the first one did. And oftentimes, it doesn't, and the studio can't make payroll and has to fold.

Vogel, on the other hand, was smart enough to realize that by leveraging all the work he did on Exile 1, and keeping the scope of its sequels similar to the first game, he could crank out Exile 2 (and subsequently Exile 3) in much less time. Maybe he even envisioned the story as a trilogy from the beginning. And by being efficient and reusing as much as he can, he was able to crank out 2 sequels over the course of 2 years.

Even if the sequels don't do as well -- let's say E2 only sells 50% of the original, and E3 only sells 40% -- they're still bringing in $180k in revenue. That's almost all of what you made off the first game, but in half the time! And because you were smart and did all the work yourself, all that money is yours.

I really think that's the ticket nowadays. Work alone, do as much of the work yourself as you can, and plan your projects to span 2 or 3 (or more) releases at a time so you can get the maximum amount of use out of everything you do.

 

[d1nolore]

Vogel is the perfect example imo, because he is an RPG developer like all of us wish we were, and he's managed to stay afloat for 25 years without ever landing a major hit.

Imagine this scenario: you've busted your ass for the past 4 years to release your first game, Exile. And luckily for you it's a moderate success, netting you $200k in revenue (a number cited by Vogel himself on his blog). What do you do next?

The wrong thing that most developers do is immediately expand the studio, hiring more developers to spread out the workload. And then they either try to make Exile 2 a bigger, shinier, much more ambitious game than Exile 1... or they move on to a new franchise entirely, which means most of the work from Exile 1 is retired and has to be done over. Either way, they spend another 4 or 5 years on their second game, hoping that it sells as well as the first one did. And oftentimes, it doesn't, and the studio can't make payroll and has to fold.

Vogel, on the other hand, was smart enough to realize that by leveraging all the work he did on Exile 1, and keeping the scope of its sequels similar to the first game, he could crank out Exile 2 (and subsequently Exile 3) in much less time. Maybe he even envisioned the story as a trilogy from the beginning. And by being efficient and reusing as much as he can, he was able to crank out 2 sequels over the course of 2 years.

Even if the sequels don't do as well -- let's say E2 only sells 50% of the original, and E3 only sells 40% -- they're still bringing in $180k in revenue. That's almost all of what you made off the first game, but in half the time! And because you were smart and did all the work yourself, all that money is yours.

I really think that's the ticket nowadays. Work alone, do as much of the work yourself as you can, and plan your projects to span 2 or 3 (or more) releases at a time so you can get the maximum amount of use out of everything you do.

I’m not saying he’s not a good source of information or can’t be an inspiration. I’m saying he’s a bad example to drag out and say “see, you can do it too”. He’s a really unique case, and I think you’d have a hard time emulating his path. If you can pull it off great stuff, it’s certainly easier these days than when he started.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Imagine this scenario: you've busted your ass for the past 4 years to release your first game, Exile. And luckily for you it's a moderate success, netting you $200k in revenue

that's not a 'moderate success', that's putting him in the top 0.1% of indies

 

[Zanzoken]

Imagine this scenario: you've busted your ass for the past 4 years to release your first game, Exile. And luckily for you it's a moderate success, netting you $200k in revenue

that's not a 'moderate success', that's putting him in the top 0.1% of indies

Well sure but again, "indies" covers a lot of territory, the vast majority of which is low effort garbage. If you're in the business of making serious RPGs, then you aren't really competing with the thousands of puzzle games and Flappy Bird clones that are posted on Steam each year.

From the data above, $200k revenue puts you between the median and 70th percentile for RPGs, which is what I would call a moderate success. That $200k is not my number btw, it's Vogel's. It sounds like a lot, and it is, but at the same time it's also well within the realm of possibility for a quality RPG.

For example, the Kickstarter for Queen's Wish raised just shy of $100k with a little over 2k backers. You lose about 10% of funding to fees, plus some amount for taxes, so round it down to $70k. That leaves a balance of $130k, which at $20 per copy and assuming a 50% net after fees and taxes, leaves him needing to move an additional 13k units at full price in order to hit his net revenue target.

Like I said... it's a lot, but still very achievable. In fact, I am looking at its Steam page now, and Queen's Wish just hit the 2-year mark today and has a little over 200 reviews. Using the common "number of reviews X 50" metric to estimate sales, that puts him at around 10k units just on Steam. Then you also have GOG, itch.io, Humble Bundle, mobile, etc.

 

[bionicman]

The reason Jeff's new games sell is not because they're serious or good RPGs but because his old games were once good and he's living off his reputation, which is also why he re-re-releases his games.

If someone who was a nobody entered the Steam market with Queen's wish today, the game would probably sell very few copies.

 

[infidel]

I wouldn't bother if i wasn't going to make a game that wouldn't let me live from selling it, which is why the games i make and release that are purely for fun are free and on itch.io (which doesn't require any upfront fee - if it did i'd just give them from my own site).

(ie. not going into it with the expectation you'll fail - if you do then what is the point of making a commercial endeavor?)

Why, what's the difference between inputting $0.00 into a form on itch or $5.00?

There are developers who make money living off Steam though obviously not all do, but for me starting with the assumption that i wont make living money is the wrong approach to have for a commercial endeavor.

Let me clarify that - I was speaking about the first game. You just won't make a living from a single game unless you're very lucky and it does feel that the chances are getting lower and lower because of the flood. From multiple games sure, that becomes more possible with every new game if you've got a modicum of talent, skills and persistence. Even more, if you focus on some niche like Vogel, your chances grow even higher. As to why you shouldn't hope to break even, that shields you from disappointment when you inevitably "fail", that sober look on your chances is important to not go crazy or fall into depression, imho.

Vogel is the perfect example imo, because he is an RPG developer like all of us wish we were, and he's managed to stay afloat for 25 years without ever landing a major hit.

Vogel is a perfect example of a creator who found his niche and continues to produce creations that satisfy the tastes of that niche. He created his platform and he tells his stories on top of it without changing much (though from his GDC talk I recall how he was proud of characters moving in scripted cutscenes at some point, was a big deal for him). He's quite akin to the Patreon artists who draw tits or webcomics monthly. I wouldn't want to draw tits for 25 years but that's just me

 

[Zanzoken]

The reason Jeff's new games sell is not because they're serious or good RPGs but because his old games were once good and he's living off his reputation, which is also why he re-re-releases his games.

If someone who was a nobody entered the Steam market with Queen's wish today, the game would probably sell very few copies.

That's probably true. Vogel does have a certain name value and it's likely that Queen's Wish would be overlooked if it didn't have his name attached to it.

Just out of curiosity, I looked through the last six months of Codex news posts, found the ones that included a release announcement (excluding obvious shovelware and low effort crap that Saint Proverbius sometimes posts) and pulled up the Steam data. Here are the results.

Spoiler

Sorted by Date

Sorted by Revenue

Obviously these are just estimates based on Steam reviews, which is an imprecise metric, but one that has been shown in meta-analysis to be fairly accurate on average. But apart from a few outliers, the numbers are better than I would have anticipated.

Note however that some of these were in Early Access, so the numbers include those reviews too. But as a measurement of revenue over a game's lifecycle, they're still applicable.

 

[d1nolore]

I’m curious how do people store dialogue trees; do the use prebuilt tools, XML, or handle other ways?

Do engines like unity have built in tools? How do they store the data?

 

[Bad Sector]

Jeff Vogel is a bad example because he’s like the only guy who does it that way. I can’t think of any others off the top of my head. It would be great to see it work for some of the devs here.

Jeff does it for longer but other solo RPG developers exist - e.g. i think Legends of Amberland is basically Chris Kozmik + contractors like Vogel.

I wouldn't bother if i wasn't going to make a game that wouldn't let me live from selling it, which is why the games i make and release that are purely for fun are free and on itch.io (which doesn't require any upfront fee - if it did i'd just give them from my own site).

(ie. not going into it with the expectation you'll fail - if you do then what is the point of making a commercial endeavor?)

Why, what's the difference between inputting $0.00 into a form on itch or $5.00?

Not sure what this has to do with what i wrote. I mentioned itch.io as a place to upload your free games where others can find them.

Let me clarify that - I was speaking about the first game.

Yes but my first reply on this discussion wasn't about Tavernking's first game, it was about the people who put very low priced games on Steam and how viable that would be, it has nothing to do with these games being their developers' first or not.

You just won't make a living from a single game unless you're very lucky and it does feel that the chances are getting lower and lower because of the flood.

There are many solo developers who do make a living off their games - it becomes harder, sure, but it is far from impossible to have an "you won't make it" outlook from before you even begin.

Also it isn't just about luck - luck surely does help, but your game has to both be and look interesting.

As to why you shouldn't hope to break even, that shields you from disappointment when you inevitably "fail", that sober look on your chances is important to not go crazy or fall into depression, imho.

This is what i point out as being a pointless outlook - if you do not believe you can make a living (which is actually more than just breaking even) then there isn't a point into making a commercial game. Otherwise just release it for free which is IMO much better for your mind too as you have zero obligations for a free game.

I mean, not starting something with the expectation that you'll fail because that will lead you to failure is one of the older advices ever. Be prepared for failure, certainly, that is good and you should do that (e.g. don't take a loan for making your game in case the game fails and you end up with a loan you cant pay), but go with the goal and expectation that your game will be successful enough for you to live from it. Otherwise if you just expect to fail, why bother, it is a waste of time.

 

[infidel]

Not sure what this has to do with what i wrote. I mentioned itch.io as a place to upload your free games where others can find them.

You wrote that "I wouldn't bother if i wasn't going to make a game that wouldn't let me live from selling it". Since you will still release the finished game on itch.io, in practical terms it becomes either setting zero price or non-zero price. Hence my question - what does it matter to you which price you're setting, zero or non-zero, since you will release the game anyway?

There are many solo developers who do make a living off their games - it becomes harder, sure, but it is far from impossible to have an "you won't make it" outlook from before you even begin.

Also it isn't just about luck - luck surely does help, but your game has to both be and look interesting.

How "many"? Just because you know a hundred or two hundred or maybe even a thousand of first games that made it in the past 10 years doesn't make it any viable when you count the ones that didn't.

That's how much shit there is just on itch currently since it's apparent that due to the lack of entry price it has become a storage for all student projects and "look ma, i did a gaem"s that are out there. Imho with this amount of stuff competing for people attention it's increasingly more about luck rather than perceived quality. And marketing.

This is what i point out as being a pointless outlook - if you do not believe you can make a living (which is actually more than just breaking even) then there isn't a point into making a commercial game. Otherwise just release it for free which is IMO much better for your mind too as you have zero obligations for a free game.

Do you need to believe in something to do it? It can just be a hobby, you know. If someone pays you money for it, all the better. That was my point. There aren't that many crucial obligations for a paid digital product either. It has to be there, it has to look close to the screenshots and it has to run without much crashing and bugs in case of a game. Customer enjoyment is not guaranteed.

I mean, not starting something with the expectation that you'll fail because that will lead you to failure is one of the older advices ever.

Once you start treating the results of what you're doing as some sort of failures and successes, sure, that sounds reasonable. Except then that opens you up for depression when you fail, doesn't it? What if you fail constantly, what then? My point is that if your motivation to work is based on hopes of success with the risk of failure, then you'd better prepare for the failure which looks very likely for anything without a marketing budget and strategy in the modern oversaturated content market.

 

[Bad Sector]

You wrote that "I wouldn't bother if i wasn't going to make a game that wouldn't let me live from selling it". Since you will still release the finished game on itch.io, in practical terms it becomes either setting zero price or non-zero price. Hence my question - what does it matter to you which price you're setting, zero or non-zero, since you will release the game anyway?

This isn't about making a decision after the game is made but before you even start. If your decision about selling the game is made after you have the game done it is already too late.

There are way different decisions you'll need to make based on if you want to make money from a game or not - e.g. i wouldn't give a rat's ass about a game's graphics (or anything else really) for a free game i'd make, i'd just make whatever i felt like, but for a commercial game i'd need to also take into account how the game will need to be received for actually making a living from it.

How "many"?

It doesn't matter, the point is that there are a lot of people who manage to do it.

it's increasingly more about luck rather than perceived quality.

This is something i remember indie developers saying back when majority of them would fit in an obscure forum, way before even Steam started accepting 3rd party games.

And the situation is the same as it was back then: luck alone wont help you, you need both luck and an interesting game.

(and yes, you also need to promote your game, people wont learn about it just because it exists)

If someone pays you money for it, all the better. That was my point. There aren't that many crucial obligations for a paid digital product either.

There are income taxes and other obligations associated with accepting money from others to the point where you may actually end up spending more than what you gain.

This is why, for example, i do not have any donations for Post Apocalyptic Petra even though it itch.io makes it otherwise trivial to have that: for itch.io to send me money i need to take a tax interview with the payment handling company they collaborate with, which in turn needs me to register a company here to receive the payments and registering a company means i also need to pay insurance fees as a company owner or freelancer. This can actually cost me considerably even if i have zero income.

Once you start treating the results of what you're doing as some sort of failures and successes, sure, that sounds reasonable. Except then that opens you up for depression when you fail, doesn't it?

Anything can do that, though. Wouldn't having to spend your precious time working for hours for someone else's benefit instead of your own be depressing? Personally i find that quite depressing myself.

What if you fail constantly, what then?

Try to figure out why you failed and attempt to fix it or avoid it in your next attempt.

My point is that if your motivation to work is based on hopes of success with the risk of failure, then you'd better prepare for the failure which looks very likely for anything without a marketing budget and strategy in the modern oversaturated content market.

Right, you should prepare for that scenario, but not start with the assumption that you will fail. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, etc - as i wrote previously, one of the oldest advices :-P

 

[d1nolore]

You wrote that "I wouldn't bother if i wasn't going to make a game that wouldn't let me live from selling it". Since you will still release the finished game on itch.io, in practical terms it becomes either setting zero price or non-zero price. Hence my question - what does it matter to you which price you're setting, zero or non-zero, since you will release the game anyway?

This isn't about making a decision after the game is made but before you even start. If your decision about selling the game is made after you have the game done it is already too late.

There are way different decisions you'll need to make based on if you want to make money from a game or not - e.g. i wouldn't give a rat's ass about a game's graphics (or anything else really) for a free game i'd make, i'd just make whatever i felt like, but for a commercial game i'd need to also take into account how the game will need to be received for actually making a living from it.

How "many"?

It doesn't matter, the point is that there are a lot of people who manage to do it.

it's increasingly more about luck rather than perceived quality.

This is something i remember indie developers saying back when majority of them would fit in an obscure forum, way before even Steam started accepting 3rd party games.

And the situation is the same as it was back then: luck alone wont help you, you need both luck and an interesting game.

(and yes, you also need to promote your game, people wont learn about it just because it exists)

If someone pays you money for it, all the better. That was my point. There aren't that many crucial obligations for a paid digital product either.

There are income taxes and other obligations associated with accepting money from others to the point where you may actually end up spending more than what you gain.

This is why, for example, i do not have any donations for Post Apocalyptic Petra even though it itch.io makes it otherwise trivial to have that: for itch.io to send me money i need to take a tax interview with the payment handling company they collaborate with, which in turn needs me to register a company here to receive the payments and registering a company means i also need to pay insurance fees as a company owner or freelancer. This can actually cost me considerably even if i have zero income.

I’ve seen you link this before. Curious how you did the old school 3D graphics for this?

 

[Bad Sector]

I’ve seen you link this before. Curious how you did the old school 3D graphics for this?

The oldschool way, i wrote a rasterizer :-P.

This very old tutorial might help. There might be better tutorials out there, but that is what i read this back in the day and got into 3D graphics.

 

[Tavernking]

The whole thing is just so depressing, I'm just gonna go out there and make the best game I can, a game I would enjoy playing, and if people don't like it then I had a lot of fun making it in my spare time. The odds of anyone here obtaining Vogel's success are slim to none.

 

[infidel]

This is something i remember indie developers saying back when majority of them would fit in an obscure forum, way before even Steam started accepting 3rd party games.

And the situation is the same as it was back then: luck alone wont help you, you need both luck and an interesting game.

My point is that it was bad then and it got worse now. Before it was the costs of development and lack of solid distribution platforms, now that these problems were somewhat solved (good art is still ain't cheap and likely never will be), it's the sheer amount of produced content that makes it hard to stand out.

There are income taxes and other obligations associated with accepting money from others to the point where you may actually end up spending more than what you gain.

Okay, that's a good one, I see your point. Coincidentally, I see now why you make it a binary choice, you really can't do it as a paid hobby as a result

Anything can do that, though. Wouldn't having to spend your precious time working for hours for someone else's benefit instead of your own be depressing? Personally i find that quite depressing myself.

Not if you like what you're doing and found a good job that pays well enough while not draining you mentally or physically to the point of exhaustion allowing you to have some energy for your hobbies.

Try to figure out why you failed and attempt to fix it or avoid it in your next attempt.

It looks to me that you're starting to describe a second job Which is not unusual with your approach.

Right, you should prepare for that scenario, but not start with the assumption that you will fail. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, etc - as i wrote previously, one of the oldest advices :-P

Well, I've said it before, if you don't treat the result as either commercial failure or commercial success, it won't matter. I'm mostly advocating for personal fulfillment as a motivator. Taking satisfaction from a job well done with the time and resources you've spent.

 

[Arbaces]

All this talk of software rasterizers makes me lament how 3D APIs seem to have gone backwards in terms of human usability. Compared to writing a software renderer, OpengGL 1.0 was dead simple. However, convert the same rasterizer to Vulkan and it blows up to over double the length! Maybe D3D12 and Metal strike a happy medium, but unfortunately they are outside my wheelhouse as a Linux guy. To illustrate simplicity's importance: it was why Id chose OpenGL over D3D.

D3D's interface is by execute buffers: You build a structure containing vertex data and commands, and pass the entire thing with a single call. On the surface, this apears to be an efficiency improvement for D3D, because it gets rid of a lot of procedure call overhead. In reality, it is a gigantic pain-in-the-ass.
...
If I included the complete code to actually lock, build, and issue an execute buffer here, you would think I was choosing some pathologically slanted case to make D3D look bad.

Sounds a lot like criticisms of the modern low overhead 3D APIs like Vulkan doesn't it? The difference is that now there isn't any simple, cross platform "almost as good" alternative. OpenGL 4.6 is not so bad, but it's only going to fall behind as it stays unchanging, and you're still restricted by the per thread GL context. I feel there is an unfilled niche of friendly graphics middleware that is designed for humans instead of rendering engineers.

 

[Bad Sector]

The neat thing with OpenGL is that unlike Direct3D it is fully backwards compatible - you can use OpenGL 1.0 in an OpenGL 4.6 context if you want (though you most likely want at least OpenGL 1.1 since OpenGL 1.0 doesn't provide texture objects :-P).

But the thing is, for the functionality it provides Vulkan is actually simpler to use than OpenGL in that if you want to do the same stuff in OpenGL as in Vulkan you may actually end up having to write more code - and have driver bugs to deal with too. The biggest issue with Vulkan IMO is how ugly the API is while pretending to be low level with all these structs you pass around, but functionality-wise it is actually quite simple.

But from a high level "lets draw textured triangles" perspective OpenGL 1.1 is actually quite simple indeed. Another very simple API from the 90s is S3D, the proprietary API S3 had for S3 Virge and its offshoots. I made some Free Pascal bindings recently and wrote some documentation (which is complete enough to be used without needing the official SDK or docs) and the API is one of the simplest out there (it only has ~16 calls, which are essentially setup, shutdown, set/get state, fill rect and draw triangles). The only negative is that because this was before T&L was done on hardware (on PC at least) you draw triangles in 2D space and have to do the transformation and clipping yourself (you do not have to be too strict about it, the driver can handle triangles outside the screen, you'll just get some glitches - here is a video of an early port of Post Apocalyptic Petra to S3D which does not perform real clipping and instead clamps Z to near plane like the software rendered version - btw i have fixed the crash at the end).

 

[Twiglard]

I was thinking of doing a GL-based renderer for isometric games. The basic idea was to draw tiles, walls, etc. as 3D geometry from procedurally-made crappy textures that don't even need UV mapping. Right now I'm waiting for the Magnum framework to finish its keyframe animation support. It's pretty useless finishing up tile drawing but having to wait an arbitrary amount of time till the player character can be drawn.

The Magnum framework is quite usable, kind of like XNA was for pure 2D. There's no opaque untyped GL handle stuff, RAII and modern C++ support. Less boilerplate than using pure GL.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The whole thing is just so depressing, I'm just gonna go out there and make the best game I can, a game I would enjoy playing, and if people don't like it then I had a lot of fun making it in my spare time. The odds of anyone here obtaining Vogel's success are slim to none.

Basically every retrospective I've read from an indie developer was they wish they paid more attention to marketing and/or had someone doing marketing for them.
It has been years now since Steam alone was enough marketing by itself.

 

[Tavernking]

The wrong thing that most developers do is immediately expand the studio, hiring more developers to spread out the workload. And then they either try to make Exile 2 a bigger, shinier, much more ambitious game than Exile 1... or they move on to a new franchise entirely, which means most of the work from Exile 1 is retired and has to be done over. Either way, they spend another 4 or 5 years on their second game, hoping that it sells as well as the first one did. And oftentimes, it doesn't, and the studio can't make payroll and has to fold.

So in your opinion, Iron Tower Studio should have started working on a slightly improved Age of Decadence 2, using the same engine, rather than starting over with a brand new engine, new shiny graphics and a new IP that is Colony Ship? Because if so I think you're right, would have a much greater chance of success.

 

[Mustawd]

should have started working on a slightly improved Age of Decadence 2, using the same engine

They made Dungeon Rats, which is effectively the same thing.

 

[Tavernking]

should have started working on a slightly improved Age of Decadence 2, using the same engine

They made Dungeon Rats, which is effectively the same thing.

Not really, Dungeon Rats never interested me because it was purely combat-focused.