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whats the biggest challenge always facing the indie devs when creating an adventure?

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is it the startup;  having a good story to begin with?

is it the complete design before touching anything?

is it the artwork and whos gonna make it if the dev doesnt have this talent?

is it the programming and what platform he/she will/could use?

is it the animation presentation?

is it the voice actors availability?

is it Marketing the game and setting price?

is it .......?

what is it?

     
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Talent

     
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I think having a coherent plan and the discipline to implement it is the biggest challenge. How many times have you played a game (movie, book, play) and by 3/4 of the way through, you’re feeling like the devs have lost their way or got so tired of the project that they hurried the ending to get it on the market. Or released it before the bugs were worked out.  Any creative thing starts with an idea but having a plan for implementation enables others to see the vision. Writing/fine tuning the story, hiring a crew (programmers, graphic designers, voice, sound, etc), QC, marketing and all the rest will fall into place with a good plan.

     
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Jofog - 29 November 2017 01:35 PM

How many times have you played a game (movie, book, play) and by 3/4 of the way through, you’re feeling like the devs have lost their way or got so tired of the project that they hurried the ending to get it on the market.

very true, even with Hollywood movies and the greatest directors, Django Unchained is a very good example; after they reach the Leo role and his death there is about half an hour/45-mis ending which were very low comparing to epicness of the first 2 hours of the movie, also Hateful Eight has it; there is a part pushed in before the ending that is completely rubbish!
so it happens. all the time, i can think or bring the AG list from A-Z and come back with a 100 adventure with loose endings like that, the idea hits hard (no need to prove it)
thanks for this fruitful post Jofog!

     
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This is a good question.

In short: all of those things the OP mentioned are challenges to indie devs.

I responded to this question of what it’s like to release a commercial point-and-click adventure game on Steam in 2017 recently, and it’s probably relevant to this thread:

(This is the creator of Neofeud) I have to agree that the ‘Great Flood’ of games on Steam has meant a bigger denominator splitting up the attention provided to each adventure game. Being a one-person developer myself, that has proved incredibly challenging. I like to joke that simply being a fiction writer is essentially a public display of delusional schizophrenia, in that you’re inventing grand lies for hundreds of pages, flipping between personalities (characters) all day long, and then people shell out cash for your recorded insanity. Being a solo indie dev where you’re jumping between writer, artist, programmer, musician all day is like that, but magnitudes worse!

The hardest part, for me at least, has been the business and marketing hat. I literally spent eight hours or more every day for the last two months sending out press requests to over 1,000 websites, youtubers, streamers, bloggers, etc. as well as posting to social media, sites, etc.. A lot of the indie press’ response has been, “We have a thousand indie games on our plate right now! But we’d love to get to you!” but there have been some articles such as this one on IndieGames.com.

Unfortunately, I believe that article there was the biggest media splash Neofeud has had yet. I have been throwing the kitchen sink and everything short of a demonic ritual sacrifice to get RPS to cover my game, and after several pitch attempts I doubt even WannaCry ransomeware could help me get a signal boost from PC Gamer. And it’s fine. I understand.

Add to this the scourge on the indie and small-scale game landscape that is asset flipping, which has caused some players to be turned off to the entire Unity *engine*, let alone taking a chance on some small, as-yet-unknown indie point-and-click-adventure, and it’s just made the already tough nut of a sustainable adventure game business an almost adamantium shell.

I absolutely have hope for the adventure game genre, though. I had essentially given up on not only game development, but games generally, around 2013. I had worked for a couple mobile game companies, and a retired Microsoft executive who moved to Hawaii to start a game company. (I’m from Hawaii—fun fact, unlike most mid-life crises which involve splurging on Lambos, when Silicon Valley types see a grey hair, they move to Hawaii and start a game company.) Unfortunately, making The Next Flappy Bird, or working on the next Texas Hold’em, where the biggest creative input we had was, “Do you think Suicide Jack’s knife would look better in the left ear, this version?” along with the backstabbing and layoffs that came when the LA big fish came down and hostile mergerized the place put me off game dev for a long time.

But then, sometime around 2013, having resigned to teaching*, office drudgery, and possibly aspiring to be a programmer of high-frequency trading algorithms for Goldman Sachs or automating away blue-collar jobs to inspire Trump voters, I played a game called Primordia. It blew my frickin’ mind open. And then I read that it was created essentially ‘on the side’ by three guys, and the bits of neural tissue and skull that was left of my mind, also exploded. I said, “You know what? If three guys can do this in their spare time, I bet one guy/gal could do it all if they set their mind to it.” So I went down to part-time at the dayjob(s), and cut a deal with my wife to give me a good year and a half to take one good shot at a commercial indie game company, and got to working 12 hours a day. As an aside, my #1 tip for any aspiring indie developer is to marry a Canadian, because anyone else will divorce your sorry ass when you tell them you’re going to go make video games for a living. Smile

I will say, hands down, the best games I have played in the last two decades have come from teams of ten or less, and often one. All the Wadjet Eye titles, Primordia. I don’t know how many were on West of Loating exactly, but I’m guessing not a lot. This is my opinion, of course, and though I actually started out in the 3D FPS and ‘immersive sim’ space (my biggest project before Neofeud was a Deus Ex 1 mod called Terminus Machina), I am now a die-hard adventure lover.

It has been absolutely a tough gig, trying to get visibility as a small fish, but you know what? I wouldn’t trade indie dev for ten million dollars and tech lead at any AAA studio or almost any other job. I’ve worked in corporate / government monstrosities—I actually made an entire game about it called Neofeud, hah!—and I can tell you, even just having made the rent money** with revenue thus far from Neofeud, I have never been happier in my life. I have met the most amazing, dedicated, passionate people in the adventure game and indie world. I feel constantly supported and loved, rather than soul-destroyed and filled with self-loathing, that I was at the former places. I would be happy to make enough from gamedev to pay for a roof, food, and maybe get some brakepads for my squeaing 1994 Toyota, but all the rest of the money I would be throwing back into paying other creative and passionate folks to join me in a small team, and funding other indie projects.

I’d just emphasize that it has been incredibly difficult *even with an amazing game* to get people to even play your game, let alone buy it.. For example Journey Down Chapter 3, or any of the latest Wadjet Eye titles, which haven’t done nearly as well as the previous. You really have to be adaptive, agile, lucky, and very outgoing (or have other folks do that part for you) nowadays.

I go further into this topic in a recent talk I had with Primordia’s writer, Mark Yohalem:

     
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Silverspook - 30 November 2017 03:35 AM

I’d just emphasize that it has been incredibly difficult *even with an amazing game* to get people to even play your game, let alone buy it.. For example Journey Down Chapter 3, or any of the latest Wadjet Eye titles, which haven’t done nearly as well as the previous. You really have to be adaptive, agile, lucky, and very outgoing (or have other folks do that part for you) nowadays.

I think if your game is amazing people will get around to playing it eventually. Those games are few and far between, mind you.

     
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Ask any indie dev - including myself - and you’ll almost always get the same two answers:

Time and money.

If you’re not already earning a living from it, you won’t have anything like as much time as you would like to in order to actually make the game (my co-dev for Captain Disaster, which we’re close to completing after over five and a half years of work, recently calculated that if we had both been able to work full-time on the project and account for some cramming time, we could probably have made the whole thing in about 6 months.). 

If you take the plunge without funding to go full-time indie, you’re in serious danger of insolvency if the game takes longer than you thought to make it, of if once released it doesn’t perform as well as you’d hoped.

Of course you can crowd-fund… which takes your time away from making the game whether it’s successful or not. 

Lack of a clear and effective marketing plan is also a well-known issue for indie devs.

From the point of view of actually [b[designing and creating an adventure game, these are my thoughts from my own personal experience:

- When I started making the game, I honestly had no clear concept of just how complicated and time-consuming it is to make a full game that you could sell commercially with at least 6 solid hours of gameplay and enough polish to make it seem “professional”.
- I also had no real idea how difficult it was to keep a team together for the duration of the project.  The nature of indie devving means you’re often working as a team in several different countries.  Time zones can be an issue.  Even if all team members speak English (or whatever language), communication can be problematic - a phrase that I would understand as a native speaker might be rather differently understood by team members in Sweden, Germany, Greece, or wherever - and yes, even America!  No end of idiomatic differences have come up during the development processes of games I’ve worked on.  The fact that the teams did not hold together for one of my own - Troll Song - and another game I was on the team for - A Playwright’s Tale - amongst many other highly promising projects, is testimony to the fact that keeping a team together - and motivated - is highly challenging.
- While I had a lot of experience in playing adventure games and many good ideas for character, puzzles and locations, I had a huge weakness when I started out - a complete unfamiliarity with how to judge and manage game flow.  This doesn’t matter too much for small projects but the bigger they get, the more important it is.  I have been very fortunate in this regard that my co-dev on CD is a former industry professional and saw flaws in my designs, both in terms of putting them right and helping me to see how to properly set up the game flow myself in the future.
- Keeping up the excitement about a project over a long period of time is hard.  REALLY hard.  Popular wisdom tells you that updating your dev blog at least once per week is a good idea, but you just haven’t always got something new to tell people.  “Oh um yeah, we fixed some more bugs and tooled in a new puzzle” hardly makes for riveting reading!
- The dead times.  Days, weeks, even months go by without it feeling that you’ve made any measurable progress.  Keeping yourself motivating and on target is a huge challenge.

     
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Silverspook, I just bought Neofeud at Steam (full price which is unusual for me as queen of the sales) as a reward for NOTaspiring to be a programmer of high-frequency trading algorithms for Goldman Sachs or automating away blue-collar jobs to inspire Trump voters” (Thank the gaming gods for turning you around!), showing an appreciation of Canadians (I’m from the Metro-Detroit area and have spent my life running back and forth across the border and think Canadians are just lovely), for getting a head start on any potential mid-life crisis by already living in Hawaii (This shows good planning - see my post above.) and for having the intestinal fortitude to follow your creativity.

     
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From my own point of view, I have to say that I find the hardest part being now, after I’m done. Getting the word out when you don’t really know where to turn.

I mean, there can be problems with everything during the making of the game obviously, and there are lows that you need to get out of, but if you’re new to the scene, where do you market yourself?
I did get some tips, but it’s not a problem I was prepared for.
(not that you can truly be prepared for everything the first time)

     
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Jofog - 30 November 2017 10:18 AM

Silverspook, I just bought Neofeud at Steam (full price which is unusual for me as queen of the sales) as a reward for NOTaspiring to be a programmer of high-frequency trading algorithms for Goldman Sachs or automating away blue-collar jobs to inspire Trump voters” (Thank the gaming gods for turning you around!), showing an appreciation of Canadians (I’m from the Metro-Detroit area and have spent my life running back and forth across the border and think Canadians are just lovely), for getting a head start on any potential mid-life crisis by already living in Hawaii (This shows good planning - see my post above.) and for having the intestinal fortitude to follow your creativity.

Hey, thanks so much for that! I promise to never willingly code for a TBTF bank, or accidentally start the AI apocalypse by working on automated military bots. (If they have me at gun-point, no guarantees, though!)

Indies—which essentially *all* adventure games are—basically can’t compete with the giant death stars of AAA marketing and visibility wise, even when they’re microtransaction lootcrate-filled monstrosities, and the spotlight dilution means we’re basically relying on having fat trust funds (I don’t), being buddies with Markiplier-grade influencers, or crossing our fingers finding a lot of four-leaf clovers, collecting rabbits feed, and kindness of strangers. So seriously, thanks a lot!

Also say hi to the Toronno folks next time you hop the border! Mrs. Silver Spook grew up way way up north in Canada, almost the Yukon, filled with bears and where the ground is frozen solid most of the year. It was kinda a no-brainer who was immigrating where. Smile

     
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or trollin’

     

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