Written by Otaku Apologist
I recently had the impulse to play good old SteamWorld Dig (2013), made by Image and Form Games, on my Nintendo 3DS handheld. This excellent little indie game spawned several sequels. While digging for ore with my upgradeable pickaxe, I was reminded of this incredible design that also illustrates poignantly how a successful indie title should be.
You start out with just a rusty pickaxe, no special abilities. But as you progress deeper and deeper, you augment your robot body with new abilities that act as both quality-of-life enhancements and progression enablers, kinda like Legend of Zelda. Eventually your robot digger is using teleporters to initiate town actions, he can punch several layers of rock, runs at a blazing speed, jumps like a super hero. Most abilities improve your movement, constantly reducing the tediousness of digging deeper.
The game ends just about after you’ve unlocked the last upgrade, just when you’re becoming a total beast of a digger bot. Shouldn’t there more of an endgame?
No. And that’s the lesson. Knowing when to end your fucking project and ship it.
So many erodevs that I speak with try to express way too much in one product. This often leads to hellish projects that drag on for 3-5 years and then get shelved, because the dev is either bored, broke, or otherwise his life is in shambles.
I know what I’m talking about, because I’ve scripted and developed my own games since 2015. My first games I scripted for Doxy, a famous hentai artist at the time. Before I even got into hentai, I was writing an ambitious fantasy novel, Journey Into the Source of Light, that I’m now rewriting and self-publishing at novel.otakusexart.com. But that novel, as well as my own games like Fertility Clinic, almost destroyed my life’s trajectory. Because overinvesting into a passion project is a bad idea.
Don’t get stuck in development hell! Learn about Hentai Cooperative LLC. We’ll help you finish that pesky project!
At the time of writing, I’ve nearly finished my first commercial game, a point-and-click adventure that will be announced and available for sale later this year. By applying the very lessons I’m listing in this article, you too will get your hentai game finished. The announcement of the project will be readable on otakusexart.com as well as Hentaireviews.moe!
Let’s talk about game development!
Define a budget and stick with it. SteamWorld Dig has barely any cut scenes, a unique song for each three zones, something like 5 backgrounds, all zones have just 2-3 enemy types. You can break down a successful game into numbers and execute the numbers to help with budgeting. Any extension to the budget, to have more art, more music, whatever, think it very carefully, because expanding the experience in one direction will easily lead to expansion in other directions. You’ll want to bring those other aspects to the same level of quality, and that’s the trap.
Start from a simple, clearly defined idea. SteamWorld Dig is such a simple game. You’re just a damned robot digging for ore. You got a cute gimmick and a handful of characters and everything built around that. A short and sweet experience that leaves customers hungry for more. Exactly! Make a fucking sequel. All your new ideas go into the sequel.
Consider the hurdles of the business side. Just making a product isn’t enough. You also have to create publisher accounts to all platforms you plan to sell on, create bank accounts and e-wallets, report your taxes, there’s paperwork to manage. Even a mediocre product can do well, if your business is well done from accounting to marketing to your hiring practices. If your software takes all your time, because you’re having to routinely troubleshoot the code and the programs and the hardware you make it with, plus deal with the moodswings of your creatives, you’re doing it wrong! The hurdles of the business should also limit the complexity of the product you’re making. The quality of your life and your products will be better with limits.
Find the corners to cut. Your indie game should max out in one area. Whether it’s your art, your gameplay or your story, one of those should be stellar. In the case of SteamWorld Dig, the dev maxed out the gameplay. In other areas, the title is mediocre but competent. Reason you want to cut corners is that you’ll exhaust yourself pushing for excellence in every direction. You’ll exhaust yourself emotionally and financially. Trust me, even bigger companies I’ve worked with struggled when they tried this war-on-all-fronts approach. I know you won’t take my advice, because you’re an ambitious fuckface who thinks he’s special.
Limit the team size. More people in the production doesn’t always mean better results. Creatives can disagree on the direction of the product and start beef, it happens often. Cutting the team size to what you can manage, while perhaps limiting some of your wilder ambitions, can be the exact remedy to the problems in your production. Learn a wide range of skills, so you can shoulder more aspects of the production. Then, all you gotta manage is yourself and maybe one partner, instead of commandeering a whole team of bitchy creatives.
Set a soft release date. When it comes to art, I don’t believe in hard deadlines. And videogames are absolutely art, the most demanding kind. But if you have no deadline, that’s trouble. Human beings are naturally lazy, we’re like lions who sit around in the shade masturbating, until we’re hungry. But living in developed countries, we’ll probably never experience real hunger, so you’ll never have an impetus to work on your project. That’s why, set a release date. Don’t worry, you can extend it, but set the damned release date and orient your life around it. From when you wake up in the morning to your eating and exercise habits, orient everything to support your development ambitions.
Just keep it simple and you’ll succeed. Happy devving!
