"There is a lot of crap here" - Feed the kind postmortem

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So I made a game. Here is how it went.

I spent around 33 hours on making a game. Around a weeks of full time work. And I think it went quite well, I felt very happy with the game as it came out, and for me it was a massive success. But also, there are a lot of things I want to improve on, and I’ve gathered the most important ones here. Mostly for my own documentation, but I think you can learn a lot from others experiences. Also it’s marketing.

“There is a lot of crap here”

This is the first gamejam I did with a proper playtest. After around 22 hours of working on the game (actually working on the game hours, not real hours. All times going forward are work on the game hours) I sat down with my dad and silently watched him play the game. So first off he is very new to games, so he doesn’t how games “usually” work. He is not the average game jam player. But so he played the game, and I was sitting in large amounts of pain watching him struggle through it for 30 minutes. Afterwards I had a list of things that just didn’t work in the game. That list was genuinly a gold mine, and even though it was painful to watch him play, it was so incredibly helpful. You learn a lot about your game (and how players work in general) by watching others play. Having watched him play, there was one major flaw in the game; there was too much shit in it.

Remove the garbage.

When I come up with games I always think about how complex the game is. I want things to be deep enough so they don’t get boring for the player. So even before I write the first line of code, I’m thinking about how the game will fulfill this arbitrary complexity goal. The initial idea of the game was “your are on a farm, trying to feed a hungry demon. If you don’t, it’ll eat your kids”. It actually took until around 8 hours in before the idea to make your body the farm even popped up. Anyways, when my dad played the game it contained: planting and farming (some plants could only be planted on specific ones, and each plant created their own type of resource when harvested), sacrificing body parts to gain blood, and more story with the demon. It was just too much for him to understand. And it was too much for me to polish. It was just not gonna work, things had to be cut and simplified.

First off was the sacrifices, that was just a matter of removing it. It hurt to remove it, and I was scared the game would be less fun without it. I was afraid it just wouldn’t be interesting to play the game without it. In the end, removing that made the game more focused, and made it possible for me to improve the most important part in the game; the farming. I removed the different resources and made it into only one (I don’t count the blood as a resource), and redid what could be planted on what. It doesn’t sound like such a big deal when it’s just written out here, but I felt a bit sad cutting those things from the game. I had spent time and emotional effort on that, and changing things both undid some work but also felt scary. I hadn’t really done that before. As development went on, it was clear that it was a decision that made the game better, so it was totally worth it. So here is a lil bite sized takeaway:

For my next game I will try not to add new systems just because I think it will add complexity to the game (for FTK that was the sacrificing). Instead I will try to a tart simple, focus on one core system (the farming) and make that as interesting as possible. I will try allowing myself to add more to that core system, but will try to not be afraid to remove or drastically change things that don’t work.

Now that was a nice and coherent few paragraphs, now I’m going to talk about something completely different.

Prioritization and using the brain.

I personally have a tendency to start “just doing things” when I get stressed. Then I get more stressed because time is ticking and I’m not actually getting anywhere. Because I’m spending time on things that are not the most important. During the games development I spent 2 hours working on the eyes in the game. Most of that was trying (and failing) to write a perlin noise function for the jitter of the pupils. They are literally just jittering back and fourth. I also spent an hour making a tiktok of those eyes. Those eyes really wasn’t important right then. The game could not be played from start to finish, and that’s what I was spending my time doing. That is a perfect example of poor prioritization. What I was doing was polish, which is super important! I was just doing it when it would have been more valuable to work on the gameplay of the game. So the golden brain nugget is something like:

For my next game I will try to work on the most important thing for the game first.

However, it is really hard to prioritize when your brain is going monkey mode because it’s stressed and tired. Feeling fresh as you are developing really helps when looking for bugs and errors, but also makes it easier to prioritize and think through your game design. Getting up and moving for a few minutes every half an hour really helps me. I usually just slap on an EDM song and agressively jump around for the duration of it. It looks super silly to furiously headbanging and do some sort of jumping squat, but it gets the blood flowing. Blood flowing into brain make brain fresher. Fresher brain make better decisions. I also get away from the computer to do something different (often taking a walk outside) every two hours. That makes it easier for me to focus, since I can separate things into “now I’m very focused” and “not I’m just being silly goofy”. I did slip on that sometimes, continuing for more that two hours or not moving every half. I’m also aware that when I start working, I will be very deep into the little thing I’m working on, and I will lose the broader perspective. So before I start working, I always think “what is the most important thing right now?”. I often do a list at the top of my file, writing out the first, second and third most important things. When that’s done, then I allow myself to dig into writing code. Here’s that collected into two golden nuggies:

For my next game, I will try to make 2 hour blocks that I then stick to. During those blocks I will take a break to move every half an hour.

For my next game, I will try to take a few deep breaths, try to get an overview of how things really are, and then decide what to do.

Now, since I’m close to starting a commercial games studio, a thing that has gotten higher prioritization lately is the question “how do I make a game that people want to buy and play?”. Let me talk a bit about marketing.

Does anyone actually care about what I’m making?

This is for me, a very very scary topic. The short story is that I’ve always struggled with my self image, and creating things have been a way to feel fulfillment and to distract myself from my view of myself (that’s a work in progress, its improving, don’t worry about it). But with that background, having used the positivity around the stuff I create to feel better about myself, it’s terrifying to start thinking “what are my games really worth?”. “Are people willing to pay for this?”, “will it be shared on social media?”, “does anyone actually care?”. All my previous games have been smol things put up for free with up to a few hundred players. I’m not a large creator by any means. I don’t have an audience. I want to make games for a living. A developer I’ve followed since they made crummy games three or something years ago has been getting plays in the tens of thousands. I’m comparing myself to that. I don’t know if I’m good enough. I’m scared. Hell, some days I wonder if I’m good enough for anything.

With “feed the kind” I’ve been testing the waters of “marketing”. I’m putting marketing in quotation marks, because marketing is often understood as “how do I make an instagram post that goes viral?”. Most of my knowledge is from a book about value propositions, and reading on the howtomarketagame website. So let’s get that out of the way, I barely have a clue of what I am doing. I know enough to start. This segment will not really contain any takeaways, but be more do a summary of my experiences. Anyways let’s talk about tiktok.

First off: fuck social media. I have a strong dislike for software designed to get users / players addicted. But yea most of players are on tiktok, and I try to work with reality instead of what I wish reality was. Yes that is me defending using tiktok to you and to myself. Anyways, my first instinct was just to make a short clip of the game, and then publish that. However, after reading up a bit on what other developers have done that works, seeing that shitposts do very well and remembering the story about the pottery school, I tried to come up with as many ideas for tiktoks as possible. I ended up making 5 tiktoks (will probably make a few more, more chances to learn) that ended up doing 200-1000 views. Not horrible, not enough to make a living, but it’s a start. Feed the kind is not a very visually attractive game, that will be something for me to work on. How to make games that people instantly can get that “I want to play it” feeling from. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride I’m sure. But I kinda like putting together silly and short videos, so it’s not that bad. Now let me talk about streamers.

I actually managed to have 3 streamers playing the game within 24 hours and one who is planning on doing it within a week. I was really not expecting that, I was expecting radio silence from all of them. The way I did it was:

1 - go on twitch and find streamers who recently had played inscryption (my guess was that players who enjoyed enscryption also would enjoy feed the kind)

2 - find ways to contact them (I did it via discord and email)

3 - write slightly personalized messages (adding something that showed I’d actually read their bios to each message) to each of them telling them that I had made a game, it was available, and that I’d like to be told if they were to stream it (both because watching someone play your game is awesome, but also to make them feel like I didn’t just stomp in and advertise, but that I actually care about them)

4 - patiently wait

5 - answer responses and watch those that play, being active as they do

I found ~30 streamers to reach out to, managed to contact maybe 15 and got some sort of response from ~7 and 3 have played it so far. These were small streamers with 5-30 viewers, but it did prove to me someone might actually want to play it on stream.

The first streamer who played the game is called moths and I watched her stream the game. She was super sweet and really funny, here is the link: https://twitch.tv/dumbmoths

I think that with marketing my approach will be something like read up on marketing -> try a lot of different things -> think about how to improve -> repeat. That has been my most succesful way of improving so far, so I'm hoping it will work on this too. But I'll see.

The stuff you are supposed to say at the end.

First off, thank you for making it this far! There are a bunch more things that I could have talked about, but I had to pick a few things (prioritization!!!) because one: I only have energy to be coherent for so many paragraphs and two: if I make it too long it will be too much to digest for the person reading. Below are some estimates of how much time I spent doing what, might be interesting to see. Also, I’d love to hear what you thought about this postmortem (two stars and two wishes are a great feedback format, just saying) and I’d love to hear what went well and not so well with your game! Also, if I were to make a post-jam update, what would you like to see in that? That’s it for me, Issie out.

Roughly how much time I spent doing what:

Initial idea: ~3 hours

First draft: ~5 hours

From first draft to playtest: ~14 hours

Other person playtesting: ~0.5 hours

Post playtest fixes: ~4 hours

Visual polish and audio: ~4 hours

Playing and rating: ~9 hours

TikTok: ~2 hours

Connecting with streamers: ~6 hours

Writing this: ~3 hours

Total time: ~55 hours

Feed the kind

You are dying. An undead gardener promises to stop your death. The catch? She wants your blood.

Add Game To Collection

Status	Released
Author	Wistpotion
Genre	Survival
Tags	2D, Dark, Farming, Horror, Pixel Art
Languages	English
Accessibility	Configurable controls, Interactive tutorial

Comments

abhimonk1 year ago

Haha you’re incredibly brave for having someone new to games playtest your game. I’m not sure I’d be able to handle watching my mom or dad play any of my games.

It’s always interesting to see what stuff got cut from a game; The sacrifice mechanic sounds pretty cool! But it also sounds like you’re glad you cut it, which makes sense. Cutting content always feels really bad, but I don’t think I’ve ever regretted cutting something either.

Really cool to hear about your process, I always enjoy hearing stuff like how people prioritize things and all the random time sinks that pop up. The “spent 2 hours on the eyes” thing definitely resonates with me. I can’t explain it, but sometimes there are small things that I simply must spend a disproportionate amount of time on, even if it’s something the player will may not notice (i.e what’s the perfect number of dust particles to spawn when the player lands? let me spend an hour testing different values).

For what it’s worth, the eyes stood out to me as very cool, especially the little jitter fx.

“Does anyone actually care about what I’m making?”

Goddamn this hits hard. That question pops into my head now and then and it always makes me feel so empty.

As someone who spent way too much time marketing last year, I think your ‘marketing strategy’ sounds solid. Finding influencers that enjoy your game seems like the main way to get actual ‘non-gamedev’ eyes on your stuff. I’d also recommend looking for a few smaller subreddits to post to as well, sometimes that’s helped me in the past (i.e if you haven’t already posted a gif of this game to /r/pico8, you def should try it, including a link to the itch page in the comments).

It’s been really cool playing your games for these past few years. I remember like 4 years ago we played each others GMTK jam games. I know art isn’t just about ‘improvement’, but it feels like your work has come really far. Your games have style, and it’s been cool to watch it evolve over the years.

Wistpotion1 year ago(+1)

Wall of text incoming!!

I think the timesinks sometimes come in as “polish at the wrong time”. The eyes were super important in the game for the player to feel unsettled. But I should just have done that later, when everything else is done. But like with the particles you talked about, I think you get a feel for what to spend your time on and not, but sometimes you just end up doing the right thing at the wrong time. Prioritization is fucking hard.

I’ll think about digging into Reddit for sure! If they still have the 1/10 post rule I might give up on that for the time being tho. I’d rather do a few thing that have a lot of impact that spread myself too thin. That’s why I have TikTok (low effort shitposting, can get good visibility, low conversion tho) for the possibility of vitality, and then the influencers who are more safe. Like if I reach out to 100 I know I’ll get at least 1 playing the game. Also quite low effort.

And about evolving through the years: I think I finally have let go of the notion that “everything I create has to come straight out of my brain and I can not be influenced by anything because then I’ll be a miserable unoriginal failure” and started to realize that I create my best stuff (and more importantly it’s way more fun) when I liberally take inspiration from everywhere. Feed the kind is just a heavily modified Inscryption. Clamber is just slay the spire + signs of the sojourner + celeste (and a bit of creative person angst). The music and art I’ve been working on the last few days all have references, and I dig through both Pinterest and YouTube as I’m making stuff.

True innovation would be to create really good stuff without taking any ideas from anyone else. Your mind just creates these amazing things out of nothing. By the world doesn’t work like that, we have been building on what came before us since forever. What I was trying to do is kind of like if hunter gatherers were to see someone farming and being like “no we can’t do that, it’s been done before”. It’s a great idea, use it. And then you see that the flowers grow better when there’s a small stream nearby, you start watering your farm. And then someone makes a really amazing drum groove, and you use that but with some fills that you heard in a different song. Do you see what I’m getting at?

Again, I create way better stuff when I feel like I have a direction. And I get that direction by snatching all the best ideas I can find and putting them together. And hell, that’s so much more fun than stumbling in darkness. And it would be a bit of waste to just ignore all the work smart persons have done just to feel original. So now I’m using ideas from everyone, and I’m very happy with it.

abhimonk1 year ago

I really like this. The hunter-gatherer analogy is perfect. I feel like I do that a lot, where I’ll hear a piece of music and immediately pull my phone out and start writing down what I specifically want to take from it and where it would fit with other ideas.

I feel like if someone wanted to, they could guess what games I was playing / listening to during the development of each of my games.

Some of the best games I’ve played in a while have been reimaginings or distillations of ideas from other games. Whole-heartedly embracing “all art is derivative” feels really good and freeing.

Wistpotion1 year ago(+1)

It sure is more fun! I think it’s a good way to spread credit as well. When you subconsciously use ideas you’ve picked up it’s way harder to tell people where you got the ideas from. When you do it intentionally it becomes like a little appreciation message to the one you got the idea from, and you can credit them wherever you can! Also, a person who I’ve made some music with ended up having more samples I’ve made than I had myself, and was using them a fair bit. Talk about an ego boost. So as long as it’s done tactfully I think building on what others have created before is a really good thing.

churros3961 year ago

Very intriguing to read. I learned a lot and want to work on more games myself (maybe solo), but am intimidated by the variety of roles a dev has to cover. Especially the side of game mechanics and marathon of social media. Good luck and have fun along the way :)

Wistpotion1 year ago(+1)

Thanks! I’d say mechanics is a real beast to tackle, but insanely fun when it starts to get intuitive. You get to a point when you can start predicting how things will play out, and you learn that a lot actually emerges from just putting a few simple mechanics together and letting them interact. So solo is definitely fun, give it a shot for a gamejam!

Engon1 year ago(+1)

Very great breakdown of how this project panned out and the overall process to get it to where it was!

Totally resonate with a lot of these points and, coming from more of a music background, absolutely understand the feeling of needing to have your hard work validated or at least viewed by others -- slowly starting to get past it but it does linger in the back of my mind.

Keep on rockin' cause I definitely enjoyed your game and can't wait to see what things you make next!

Wistpotion1 year ago(+1)

Thanks for reading! When it comes to validation, I think (a favorite artist of mine) Porter Robinson can be used as inspiration. He said something along the lines of “one of the most important things we do is to forget what we are doing is work”. In his best moments he has just let himself be driven by curiousity, and I think there is a lot to be learnt from that. While if you are going to do something for a living, you of course should check if what you will make is viable before spending half a year working on it, but I think it makes a big difference if it starts with curiosity, and after being validated is driven by curiosity. Making it possible to have it as a job, but also just letting it be fun and silly.

Magic Hat1 year ago(+1)

Your devlog is very rich, thank you for taking the time to write about your experience and your feelings.

We feel identified on many points; stopping on details without working first on the most important, not taking breaks, thinking a lot about whether the game will please … behind a creation there are often doubts, perhaps almost inevitable to feel.

In any case, for our part, we’re very happy with the constructive and kind feedback we’ve received, which helps us to progress…

Wistpotion1 year ago

Thanks for reading! Interesting to see others having common experiences. If you want feedback on something sometime, feel free to reach out to me!

ThibaultLG1 year ago(+1)

Very interesting !

Wistpotion1 year ago

Thanks!