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broknd20 karma

Hello,

Thank you for posting. I have gone through a very similar experience to you guys during 2012-2013 when the indie games wave was just starting.

We did not get as far as you guys did because we were only working off savings that we had from previous jobs that we quit to pursue the dev dream. Our savings ran out before we could ship a finished product and my partner had a health crisis in the family.

I believe our failings were due to our own flaws but I do not regret what we did because the timing was absolutely perfect. Steam greenlight had just come out, kickstarter was just getting big and there weren't yet millions of potentially trash games for customers to have to trawl through to actually see what they wanted.

games that appeal to the masses

I want to ask you a question about this concept because this is something that we struggled with the entire time. Part of the reason why we decided to quit our jobs and get into game development was something we called "dev salt". Essentially, we both hated seeing really shitty projects being successful on places like kickstarter and mobile stores.

We thought to ourselves that if shitty games were getting this much attention and funding, getting a "real" game noticed would be relatively easy. How naive we were.

Eventually, we became aware of how niche our ideas actually were and began to constantly debate this every time we wanted to add new features, obscure mechanics or even certain types of humor. Eventually, we even began to go too far in the opposite direction by putting things in to specifically "appeal to the masses". Soon, we realized that going in this direction would lead to us becoming the "shit" projects that we used to despise.

One side of the extreme is that what you're making is purely masturbatory; something that you really like a lot that few others can appreciate. On the extreme other side, constantly trying to appease the least common denominator strips us of identity and making sure no one hated our game was also causing it to have no one that loved it.

My question is: How did you guys manage the balance between trying to make money and therefore wanting to appeal to the largest demographic vs staying true to what you actually wanted to make?

Personally, I came to the conclusion that having creativity restricted by business is actually worse than having no creativity at all.