Author: Trafficblast

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Game development is a risky endeavor. Between designing, programming, QA testing, and all the other steps involved, you can spend years working on the same project. There’s no guarantee that what you’ll make will be well-received when it’s released and, even if it is, a lack of exposure could still spell financial loss. There’s a lot of pressure to succeed, and failing to meet expectations might mean there’s not enough money for a next time.

And yet, despite this pressure, there are some people out there who choose to shoulder this burden alone. There are over a dozen success stories of indie developers who forged ahead with little to no outside help, managing to achieve both wide-spread critical acclaim for their work and earn enough money to make a living. It’s not a very common occurrence though, and asking those who’ve managed to do it reveals plenty of reasons as to why that could be the case. Developing a game can already be a fairly mentally and emotionally taxing process, and doing it solo without a support system can exacerbate the stress and feelings of self-doubt. Some appreciate this challenge, but others do not.

Jonathan Blow, Derek Yu, Lucas Pope, and Joakim Sandberg each has a history of going it solo in developing at least one indie game that caught traction and went on to be both a critical and financial success. Blow is commonly cited for inspiring the indie game boom that started in late 2008 with Braid, before going on to design the critically acclaimed 2016 puzzle game The Witness. Yu’s initial open-source Spelunky is also a part of that pre-2010 indie boom, and Yu is now working on its sequel, Spelunky 2. Pope made a name for himself in 2013 with Papers, Please and then went on to wow the industry again with 2018’s Return of the Obra Dinn. Sandberg delivered the well-received metroidvania-inspired Iconoclasts in 2018.

Each of the four, as it turns out, express similar experiences of the emotional and mental toll associated with developing a game solo. Pope and Yu had more positive things to say about the process, while both Blow and Sandberg expressed more instances of pressure and stress that accompanied the development of their respective breakout hits Braid and Iconoclasts.

“[You] get mowed under by the sheer amount of stuff there is to do to finish a game,” Blow said when asked about the hardships he had to overcome to finish Braid. “And so, you have to believe that you will be able to finish eventually, which sometimes is hard to believe… If you start believing it’s too much to ever do, and your motivation starts falling, then you get less done every day. And then [you believe] there might be too much to do because your rate of progress toward the goal is not so good. And when you see that, you might get upset about that or depressed about that, and then it gets worse… There just is something fundamentally, mentally hard about working on a game where you’re the main person.

“[It’s] actually easier in a bigger company,” Blow continued. “Because I think you can rest a little bit and you can at least, even if not everybody else is working hard, you at least feel like other people are doing something and that you’re allowed to relax a little bit and the whole thing won’t collapse. Whereas, if it’s your project and without you it won’t go forward, then it’s very easy to feel like it’s just going to die at any minute and that you don’t have the luxury of relaxing when you need to relax. And it’s just a bad combination.”

Blow’s primary motivation for using Super Mario Bros. as inspiration for Braid is that Nintendo’s game is simple and thus fairly easy to emulate. “3D games are a lot of work,” he said. “I told myself, ‘Look, I’ve done all these technical projects that were super ambitious, and I never finished them. So let’s make a project that is technically as easy as we can make it, but put all the effort into the design because the design seems more finishable.” Both Yu and Pope similarly went as simple as they could right from the start. “Yeah, I started small and I just kind of kept the scope to something that I could really do by myself,” Yu said.

All four developers endorse some level of personal restriction at the outset of making a game. On the surface, this can look counterproductive, but it ensures the game is completed in a reasonable time frame–which, in the long run, can curb a lot of the pressure and self-imposed stress to finish. It’s something Blow, Yu, and Pope learned through their experiences prior to their major breakout hits, as all three were members of game development teams before going it alone with Braid, Spelunky, and Papers, Please respectively. As a counterexample, Sandberg placed few restrictions upon himself when he started on Iconoclasts in 2010 (when he was in his early 20s) and the game continued to evolve and grow more complex for years, ultimately releasing when he was in his 30s and more appreciative of the wisdom found in self-imposed restrictions.

“You just have more people, and as a result, more people are struggling.”

Despite the process allowing him to produce one of the more well-known indie gems of 2018, Sandberg hopes that no one ever emulates what he did. “People shouldn’t follow in my footsteps,” he said. “Working this hard solo and giving all their life, essentially, all their time to a project and ignoring everything else… Being that antisocial and not interacting with people enough depletes tetralin in your brain–it creates depression. If you do it for that long you’re going to get depression, regardless if you have genes for it. You need to actually take weekends off, you need to not let friends disappear, you definitely need to be able to support yourself because you shouldn’t go into debt making a game–which I luckily didn’t.”

“I kept telling myself, ‘When the game is done, I can get a life again,'” Sandberg continued. “Instead I kind of collapsed afterward. Yeah, it was entirely my own fault for pushing myself that hard, but it’s easy to fall into that trap. You keep saying, ‘As soon as this is done, it’s going to be great.’ Then your body realizes that you worked a little too hard.”

Sandberg also had to break into an indie game landscape that looks very different than how it was a decade prior. None of the four believe the industry is heading towards some indie game apocalypse that will see the market implode on itself, but they agree the space has been saturated with a lot more titles in recent years–making it far more difficult for individual indie creators to find their audience and thrive. It’s a problem that wasn’t as nearly as big back in 2008. “You just have more people, and as a result, more people are struggling,” Yu said. “I could certainly see from the perspective of people who are trying to enter the space and struggling, it does feel like there’s an indie-pocalypse and they’ve got to work extra hard to be seen, and I do feel some of that pressure myself. And even though I know I have a leg up just having some visibility and being in this industry for a while now, everything still feels a little tenuous, even for me.”

To be noticed and garner some level of critical and financial success, your best bet is name recognition from a previous success. “For someone who’s just starting out?” Blow said, “I don’t know, because you know, the biggest problem is just getting attention for your game. How do I get players to care that we released this game? I have that problem less than a lot of people simply because I’m already established.”

“But then again, if I had made a bunch of smaller games, maybe no one would’ve noticed them. I wouldn’t have been able to financially support myself. You can never guess.”

Without the name recognition, you need to find a well-known publisher, such as Trinket Studios’ Battle Chef Brigade with publisher Adult Swim, or build something that creatively explores a theme in a way that hasn’t been done much (or at all) before, like Matt Makes Games’ Celeste. Regardless of which strategy you go for, both are far more achievable–and thus less stressful to aspire for–when working within a team. As Sandberg can attest, you can do it alone, but it will probably take you much longer and likely lead to hours of crunch. Not ideal if you want to maintain a healthy work-life balance.

Even Pope, who enjoyed his time working on both Papers, Please (which took him nine months) and Return of the Obra Dinn (which took him five years), admits that crunch is just a part of his process now as a solo developer. “I crunched for thousands of hours on Obra Dinn but it was all self-imposed and in the end, I’m happy with how the game turned out,” he said. “I consider long grinds and moments of intense crunch a necessary part of my game development process.”

Blow, Pope, Yu, and Sandberg don’t hate game design. They wouldn’t still be doing it if that was the case. But the pressure to make something that people are willing to spend money on (while maintaining the original vision they’re proud of) can make the process more stressful than they like.

“Some days I sit and think, ‘How many games could I have made instead of Iconoclasts,'” Sandberg said. “But then again, if I had made a bunch of smaller games, maybe no one would’ve noticed them. I wouldn’t have been able to financially support myself. You can never guess.” On this topic, Yu said, “I think if you’re making a commercial product, it’s a lot easier to work on a team to shoulder that burden a little bit… Once money becomes involved, it’s not just that it changes your expectations, you know it’s going to change everybody’s expectations. Because people are going to have to spend money on it and you know that reviewers are going to take it more seriously. You’re thinking about Metacritic. All kinds of stuff come into play that don’t when you’re working on freeware.”

As it stands, in today’s indie scene, it doesn’t seem very probable you’ll create an indie breakout hit when you’re still operating solo.

Since their breakout hits, Blow and Yu have returned to working as part of a team, though they maintain control over the overall design of their games. “Having more people just really helps,” Blow said. “The Witness is a way bigger and more complex game than Braid, and part of the reason that could happen is that we had other people building the engine and making the art. If it had been mostly me, it just would not have been possible to make a game that big.” Yu is currently working with BlitWorks–the studio responsible for porting Spelunky to PSN–to develop Spelunky 2. Blow and Yu’s transition back to working with others is becoming a more widespread standard in recent years, as more indie developers see that a team can stave off some of the stressors that are predominantly associated with indie game development. When Eric Barone decided to put his newest project on hold to work on more updates for Stardew Valley, for example, he wrote in a blog post that he would be hiring help to “take some of the workload off,” and Undertale‘s Toby Fox has explicitly stated he will only make the follow-up chapters to Deltarune: Chapter 1 once he’s put a team together because continuing to make the game on his own is “actually impossible.”

This makes Pope and Sandberg, who have continued to operate solo after their breakout hits, part of a dwindling breed. Though Pope has found success with his follow-up to Papers, Please–Return of the Obra Dinn was met with widespread success and is one of our top 10 games of 2018–he still had to scale back in terms of visuals and number of gameplay mechanics. Though, he admits he does “personally enjoy” the challenge of scaling back a game’s scope far enough so that he can make it himself. Sandberg has adopted a similar approach for his next game, making a plan for something that’s manageable as opposed to trying to design something that’s as big as he can make it. “I don’t hate the idea of [making a game] alone, but I have to start properly,” Sandberg said. “I’m going to prototype [my new game] and see what happens. It’s going to be an action game and smaller [than Iconoclasts], something that I can do alone and add onto later if need be. Which means, no story. The story is what makes a game huge.”

As it stands, in today’s indie scene, it doesn’t seem very probable you’ll create an indie breakout hit when you’re still operating solo. Trying to do so certainly seems emotionally and mentally unhealthy as well, as there’s a good amount of crunch you have to deal with on your own. Which isn’t to say it’s an impossible task, but if you’re planning on following in the mainstream successes of popular indie games such as Dead Cells, Outlast, Into the Breach, Hollow Knight, Doki Doki Literature Club, and Gone Home, then recruiting a well-structured team (or at least finding a good partner) seems to be a far more practical course of action.

Getting humor in video games right is tough. While games share a lot with the medium of film in terms of visual storytelling, the presence of a player introduces an unpredictable variable that can totally blow a joke. You never know if they will miss the gag, look the wrong way at a crucial moment, or ignore a punchline because they’re too busy running, shooting, jumping, or looking for their next challenge.

Humor is a big part of Journey to the Savage Planet, the first-person “explore-’em-up” and freshman offering from Typhoon Studios. Savage Planet puts you in the role of a space explorer hired by the fourth-best space company in the universe, Kindred Aerospace, and dumps you on a strange world where it’s your job to explore and catalog the flora and fauna. The creatures are all a bit goofy, like orb-shaped Dodo-like birds that eat slop and poop valuable resources. Interacting with them elicits one-liners delivered by your AI–which is eager to help you explore, but more eager to warn you about limits to Kindred’s legal liability should you meet a horrific demise.

The writing is part of the humor of Journey to the Savage Planet, but it’s not Typhoon’s main focus in getting you to laugh. The game primarily leverages what creative director Alex Hutchinson calls “interactive slapstick,” where Savage Planet’s systems let you create moments that turn out funny, whether on purpose or by accident.

“I think the problem with humor in video games traditionally is people have tried not to embrace the player,” Hutchinson told GameSpot in an interview during E3 2019. “You know, they basically see it as a movie. So all the humor is in the dialogue. And we have what we hope our witty one-liners happening there as well. But I think the true humor in the game is in the actions the player performs, and it’s kind of an interactive slapstick where the player can launch a joke that ends up paying off on themselves. If we get these systemic collisions, then I think it’s a new form of humor, because it’s based on decisions you made as a player and the wacky consequences that float out of it.”

Hutchinson was previously creative director for Far Cry 4, a game known for its in-game systems sometimes interacting in unexpected and hilarious ways. Moments like those served as inspiration for what Typhoon is trying to do in Savage Planet.

“In Far Cry 4, there was nothing funnier than seeing a bear on fire rush into the camp and kill your friend after you’d thrown a molotov cocktail 30 seconds earlier, and it was a joke you created,” he said while appearing on GameSpot’s E3 stage. “So we’re trying to get that sense of interactive comedy into the game, because one-liners and things are funny, but they’re funny once.”

Making A Bet On Laughs

While those moments feel random or unexpected for the person playing, they’re not completely emergent from the design side. Hutchinson said the process of creating interactive slapstick is partially about iterating unexpected moments, and partially about working systems into the game that the team knows will lead to funny moments.

Hutchinson described filling an encounter with explosive pods, for instance, knowing that one stray shot could turn a battle with a dangerous creature into a deadly fireworks display that could kill the player, or trigger other interactions they might not see coming. But the player’s options are finite, as are the behaviors of creatures and other elements in the game–so from a design standpoint, the team knows how things are going to work, and therefore, is often looking to set up ridiculous situations.

“I think there are some [mechanics and level designs] where you make a bet,” Hutchinson explained. “…You bet this is what can happen, and then we have to work on it and iterate to make sure it sort of happens. And then other [funny moments] just start to emerge and when they emerge, you can reinforce them, you know? Then you can make them happen elsewhere in the game, or encourage the player to do them.”

Mechanical jokes might be the focus of its humor, but there also is plenty in the way of comedic writing in Savage Planet as well. Kindred’s position as the fourth-best aerospace company means that it’s perpetually strapped for cash, so despite the fact you work for the corporation, you’re also bombarded with its ads.

Those commercials are largely gags–they look like those old TV infomercials in which some hapless actor catastrophically tears open a bag of chips or slams a hammer through a wall, then mugs for the camera to show us how frustrated they are with their own foibles. But the ads shown in Savage Planet’s E3 preview, for things like gross space food Grob or a mall for sea monkeys, double as world-building. They set up a satirical universe where even on a distant planet, you can’t escape the ever-present force of someone trying to sell you something.

The Gravitational Pull Of The Gun

Several of Savage Planet’s in-game ads focus on the items you wield in your left hand as you explore. Those items are meant to yield clever ways to solve problems and deal with the hazardous life you encounter–as opposed to the gun in your right hand, which provides a more straightforward solution.

Hutchinson said he had hoped to keep that gun out of your hand in favor of goofier, nonviolent solutions to problems, like using bait to draw creatures toward other things that might eat them, or planting springy pads in their paths that might send them over cliffs.

“The biggest challenge is always to rise above the noise and to offer something compelling and unique that will hopefully resonate with people,” Hutchinson said. “So, you know, we chose to be optimistic and upbeat and colorful and humorous, and also to try and get you to use different tools, you know, than just the gun. Because we’re never going to be the best shooter on the planet.”

Despite Hutchinson’s best efforts, though, Typhoon couldn’t manage to keep a gun out of Journey to the Savage Planet, he said. But the studio is still working on making it possible to avoid firing it if you don’t want to when the game releases in 2020.

“We tried really hard to emphasize that stuff, but this sort of gravitational pull of a gun was too much to bear,” he said. “A player, after playing, was like, ‘I love these tools, but sometimes I just want to shoot him in the face.’ … So the goal for the game is to say that you don’t have to use the gun, but obviously you can–we’ll see how it pans out. At the moment, we haven’t figured out a way to make it so you can beat the bosses without the gun. But that would be the goal.”

“I have a very soft spot for nonviolent approaches in video games,” Hutchinson also said on the GameSpot stage. “There’s a joke at the start of Far Cry 4, which is, essentially, if you just listen to [Pagan Min] and wait, he lets you do the thing you came for without having to murder anybody. So these things, I’ll sneak it in as much as I can–I wanted to do it again on this game. It’s very tricky but we’re getting closer and closer. I can’t promise that there will be a purely nonviolent way through the game, but there’s often a way to avoid [using a gun] if you want.”

Coming from Jo-Mei Games, Sea of Solitude is the next EA Originals title, following 2018’s A Way Out from Hazelight studios. Taking an unorthodox approach to something of a well-worn adventure premise, you’ll explore the ruins of a seemingly flooded world that’s completely abandoned. But therein lies the hook; in this puzzle-adventure game, that sense of isolation and loneliness is palpable, which is reflected in the struggles the main character has with her own mental state. While at E3 2019, we had the chance to check out a near-final build of Sea of Solitude and spoke with the CEO of Jo-Mei Games, Cornelia Geppert, about why it’s essential for more games to tackle some challenging issues like mental health.

Beginning in a rowboat, the protagonist Kay comes across a flooded city in the middle of the ocean. As she maneuvers through the canals and alleys of the town–which is loosely inspired by Berlin–she’ll encounter evil blights that seem to have a deep connection to her–shouting vile insults that seem akin to intrusive thoughts. By finding the strength within herself to explore further, she will be able to restore the city, slowly raising the buildings from beneath the surface and restoring color to the different areas of town. Even from the short demo we played, it’s evident that Sea of Solitude tries to tackle the complex and challenging topic of mental health, and the creator describes the game as the most important project the studio has ever made.

“I want people not to feel so bad about feeling lonely, and that they understand that almost everyone experiences that in some way and that it’s a part of human life,” said Cornelia Geppert. “It’s a very human story. You never quite overcome your worries and fears, and this game isn’t a superhero story where everything is perfect after you finish it. But it’s about how you come down and relax about life, suffering and pain is a part of life, and it’s something that [Sea of Solitude] focuses on a lot.”

Described as a “wide-linear” game, you’ll have the freedom to explore and row about the flooded city. However, it’s not quite an open world. While you do have the freedom to choose which direction to sail towards, there is largely a set path to follow through the city that leads to the key moments of the story. While there are major story threads to follow, you can also leave your boat and explore some of the abandoned buildings, letting you search through the remains of the homes that once were.

Although there’s always an element of danger in Sea of Solitude–even leaving your boat to swim in the water puts you at risk of getting eaten–I found that the game had something of a relaxing cadence, despite how heavy some of the subject matter was. In some ways, this made me more drawn into what Sea of Solitude was trying to say about Kay’s journey. According to Geppert, video games are in a unique position to tell exciting stories that put players in the shoes of characters that are in occasionally extraordinary, but still relatable circumstances.

“Compared to films, you can actually experience the feels and situations of the main character in a game,” said Geppert. “The main goal of Sea of Solitude is for people to experience those feelings of loneliness and despair. I also want people to see that characters like Kay are not perfect and that they have flaws, which is something we all live with. It’s a very human look at the struggles of keeping up with your mental health.”

Much like other games tackling the topic of mental health, the developers at Jo-Mei focus a lot on putting you in the shoes of Kay to understand her present circumstances. That feeling of empathy is a big part of Sea of Solitude, and many of the events that occurred in our brief demo were incredibly relatable in some form or another, which will undoubtedly hit close to home for some players. There’s a fine line Sea of Solitude walks with its topics of mental health, and I couldn’t help by be intrigued by how this game goes about its handling of a troubled woman dealing with her inner demons, and what that means for the larger adventure she finds herself on. I have a deep respect for games that at least try to talk about issues relating to mental health, and Jo-Mei Games’ approach with their game is both haunting and empowering–in its own way.

Sea of Solitude will launch on July 5 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.