Work Post

3:13am - So I'm laying in bed with my old laptop right now, thinking about what to do next in my life, now that I've lost my passion for my last passion project.

I talked with my friends some and they had some thoughts to share with me. In particular they encouraged me to think about what I really want out of life. Also though, my friend Alex told me to think about what I fear out of life, to get inspiration that way. Like, what I fear to lose, or have happen as a result of inaction. That sort of thing.

Either way I think about it though, the straight answer for what I'm doing with myself hasn't changed in over a year. The last year or so, and as far as I can tell for the next year or two, maybe even longer, my main goal is to get my friend Alex to live with me and my roommate, in a stable way.

My want is Alex. My fears are losing Robby (my roommate) and not getting Alex here.

I have others but those are the driving purpose behind everything I've been doing.

So I'm already doing what I can for those goals. I've been looking for work, despite my disability and the pandemic, and it's been hard. I even found a job for a few weeks. I might find another. But it's largely a waiting game. I can't go pounding the pavement, even without the lockdowns, because of my disability. But I have a job coach/developer/guy and he's helping me.

In the mean time I have to keep my spirits up and do whatever else I can. Sometimes that means checking job boards myself. Sometimes that means playing video games to stave off the madness. And sometimes it means "Working on my Projects" which has become the focus of my problem right now.

I started that last project to pass the time by creating something cool. I didn't have a lot of investment in it, apart from the fact that it was an idea I liked and I knew I could make it. But it's a lot of work, and eventually in any project there's going to be times that are tough or boring or just unfun, and you need some reason to do the thing despite that, or you won't do the thing.

Losing interest in things is normal for me, so it's not a big surprise that I'd lose interest in a passion project. I'm not a very passionate person, and no single game project calls out from my very soul demanding to be made. I've got lots of cool ideas and even a few I'm interested in right now, but I'm worried that if I start another project without something more backing it, it'll end up the same way.

My main motivator for my personal projects is a sense of prestige. I made something cool, and other people like it, and that makes me happy. It also makes me proud. I'd lose a lot of my pride if I stopped making games entirely, so I keep at it. But I also love the challenges involved in making games. Usually.

So what can I do? Well I'm reluctant for a lot of reasons, but I think there's only one path towards making and finishing projects for me, and it's not prestige. It's money.

Money, or a lack of it, is the biggest barrier to me getting Alex up here and in my home where we want him. I need to dedicate my next project towards making money. A lot of these projects I've done I think about making open source eventually, to enrich the world and get greater prestige as the originator of something that others make even greater.

I'm not sure what to make to make money at this stage, or how to go about monetising things, but that's gotta be my goal for now in order to make my greater desires come true.


So that's that. If you have any advice for making money in indie games I'd like to hear it.


For now I'm going to do some research and see what I can figure out.


4:32am - I read a few recent articles on making money as an indie game dev. It's the same sort of stories I've heard before. Work hard, live cheap.

Of course I'm on disability in Canada so I survive by default, and any money from game dev is better than no money.

One interesting thing I noticed was that many of the indie devs interviewed got some funds from their government's funding for the arts. So I'll have to look into that sometime, but I think I'll need something a little more done first.


Earlier I mentioned I had a few cool ideas I'm interested in right now. I'm not sure if I could make money with games based on those ideas, but it wouldn't hurt to discuss them a bit.

A while back I talked about making a Zelda-like generator, and that idea has stuck with me somewhat. While I think generating EVERYTHING might be a little bit overboard, I'm still caught on the idea of randomly generated dungeons using the Cycles design style from Unexplored.


Looking at Google's list of Indie Games (Where do they come up with lists like this?) I see Binding of Issac and Spelunky among the first that show up, with Dead Cells just peeking in from the edge. Roguelikes can be popular but there is a lot of competition.

The Binding of Issac and Enter the Gungeon are both popular games I'd be competing with, not to mention Unexplored itself which, probably due to a lack of marketing, isn't as popular as those two.


The other ideas bouncing around in my head right now include things like Space Pirates! again, which is probably back up there because I've been reading Sid Meier's Memoir! and also I recently saw some french person doing a homage to Ultima 1 and Sundog and I'm like, yes please, except maybe I could also do it myself?

I'm not sure those are reasonable timeframe projects though, especially solo. What's a good game to make that won't take four to eight years? I mean, it would be nice to be in the Stardew Valley dev's shoes, making the money they're pulling in for a game like that, but I don't want to spend four years toiling at it. At least, not until I have Alex and the stability I want.

I could throw together a platformer pretty quick but it would get lost amongst the sea of mediocre platformers. I noticed rather sharply that it would take me a long time to implement every feature that Super Mario Maker 2 already has and anybody can make levels of that.

If you look at Google's list of indie platformers, well, they're all very pretty games. Some are prettier than others but they're all very stylized, and I'm not an artist. I'm not a sharp platformer guy either, so games like Super Meat Boy and Celeste aren't my thing.

Google's list of indie adventure games on the other hand barely has any that aren't actually some other genre. The action adventure roguelikes I mentioned earlier are actually the only ones that come to mind, though I'm confident there are others I don't know.

Ahh, I found one while checking googles indie rpg games list. Moonlighter. Which I don't think is an RPG strictly, but whatever, Google.


5:15am - Looking at the popular games on Steam gives a different sort of picture. Everything and anything can be popular. It's mostly a matter of being good, I think.

Some of the most popular games are recent ones, but going a little deeper you see the standards of quality that people expect.

5:26am - Anyways I'm getting tired and hungry so I think I'll finish up for now. I'm still not sure what I'll do with myself but soon I'll do some math and planning to see how long some of these games might take to make.

Work Post

11:30pm - So I slept on it and thought about it a lot. I figure there's three ideas for me to make an indie game right now and I need to figure out which one would have the shortest dev cycle and thus the earliest return on investment. I think they're all good ideas so I shouldn't be heartbroken picking just one.

The ideas:

- A Space (Pirate?) Game

- An Action Roguelike Game

- A relatively small RPG


The Space game is one I've wanted to make forever, but have problems with because of my preference for hard sci fi getting in the way of gameplay decisions. I was reading Sid Meier's Memoir! and the parts where he talks about the creation of his Pirates! game and how it differs from the simulators he made in the past, kind've gives me some ideas how to deal with that. I think the biggest danger of the Space game would be feature creep.

An action roguelike's main problem would be gameplay. I'm pretty confident on my ability to make interesting procgen dungeons, but I'm not as confident when it comes to action gameplay. It's something that would require a lot of tuning.

An RPG is generally a long undertaking, but indie hit Undertale was done in a year. I'm a little less confident in this idea since the game would have to be gimmicky and short and have a good story all in positive ways.


12:00am - Let's look at the game ideas in more depth.

I've got a lot of ideas on how to do the space game, and they're all pretty interesting, but some are more difficult than others.

Like, one thing I'd like to do is have everything be in constant relative motion. I probably wouldn't show the stars moving, but things like planets, gas clouds, asteroids, stations and ships would always be moving.

I'm not exactly married to the idea but I think it would be a good quirk that I haven't seen in other space games.

The big question is how do I want to handle the gameplay? My main inspirations are Sid Meier's Pirates! and Platinum Games' Infinite Space and Toys for Bob's Star Control 2. They're pretty different games though.

Following the advice and display of Sid Meier, there should be many 'right' things to do and no 'wrong' things to do, and it should capture the essence and adventure of being in space.

I don't want to have the player directly control the ship though, and so it loses a bit of the fun of Sid Meier's Pirates right off the bat. The thing of it is, space is big, and if everything is moving then it's easy to get off course.

Rather I'm thinking the player will be given flight paths to different objects in a solar system on a map, which would vary depending on time. So, it might be a shorter or longer distance, but the ship would always be able to catch up to it.

For interstellar travel, I'm thinking about using point to point jump gates to make 'roads' between stars. I'm not sure if they'd be located in system or out in interstellar space, such as the oort cloud. I would probably make something up to satisfy whatever was best for gameplay.

Game-wise you'd set the course on a map screen then watch the ship travel from a bridge view perspective between the two points, and any events that happen in the interim would be handled by the player.

I worry this would lead to a lot of sit and wait gameplay, but even in Pirates! you had to wait a bit to get places without much usually happening, and I personally at least enjoyed watching space fly by in Infinite Space, which used this style of view, interrupted occasionally by ship encounters.

Ship encounters wouldn't be terribly realistic in space but I think I can allow them for gameplay's sake.

Actually let's discuss what is neccesary for a Space Adventure and figure out how we can put that in the game, or not.

Flying in Space, Space Pirates, Laser Guns, Far Off Alien Worlds, Robots and Androids, Aliens, Body Modders, Cyborgs, Space Ships, Trading between Locations, Smuggling...

I feel like I'm missing some important things.

Let's look at the activities from Pirates! There was Swashbuckling, Ship-to-Ship combat, Dancing and wooing governor's daughters, trading was a minor part of it, and there was searching for treasure, and sneaking in and out of hostile towns...

6:01am - Things got really distracting and I ended up not working for a while, and now it's frickin' six am and I can't stand to look at the whiteness of the screen. I'll have to work on this more tomorrow.