This is what Atonal Dreams is though, essentially! It started off as Divine Dreams, some epic reimagining of the entirety of MARDEK plus a conclusion, but I realised it was insane to attempt some years-spanning project when I'm not sure how to market or whether people would even like it. I didn't want to get locked into some flop of a project for years, so I decided to use the work I'd already done to build Atonal Dreams, anticipating a relatively short development period.
It's just that even relatively short, simple games take a long, long time to make. Look at the game by the guy in the video, for example. Does that look complicated to you? It doesn't to me! And yet he spent a year on it, working all day every day from the sound of things. I once posted about a game some guy had spent five years on, which looked like some fairly simple throwaway mobile thing. These things take time, probably more than you'd expect if you've not been through the process yourself. Longer than I expect, too, despite my experience! I thought Atonal Dreams would be done by last November.
Whenever I've attempted the "oh, I'll just make something quick and easy!" thing, it never goes well. I mean, MARDEK's files were saved in a folder called "QuickQuests" because they were meant to be quick spin-offs of the other RPGs I was working on at the time (Deliverance and Fig Hunter, I think). I get carried away because the games I'm interested in making are focused on immersion, story, lore, etc; I don't seem to have it in me to make some quick plotless puzzler or whatever.
I've never done a game jam because they don't appeal to me, and I don't know how the devs make the games for them so quickly. I'm assuming they use a lot of borrowed assets (this seems to be the case in videos I've seen), or the game they end up with is crude and cobbled together. I don't know enough about games to know whether they ever end up selling them - checking other indie devs' sites suggests they just put them on there for free? - but I think I've seen some where they build on an idea started in a jam over several months or more before they have something they're happy to charge people money for.
Oh, there's also the fact that marketing itself takes months, or at least it should. This is one of the many mistakes I made before, and one of the things I'm learning this time around. I put Sindrel Song on Steam too soon before its eventual release, not nearly long enough to accumulate wishlists. I'm putting Atonal Dreams up early because I'm hoping to spend months building them up so I'll get a lot of sales on launch day. That seems to be how it works.
You need time to build momentum; I couldn't just make a game in two weeks, do two weeks of marketing and see results. And making a game in two weeks then marketing it for six months just feels silly!
I'm also still considering doing a Kickstarter, once I have enough done to show off for that. That'll involve a strong marketing push for a whole month... which I'm not looking forward to but which should be a good way to break through the ignorance and get the word out.
I'm not actually seeing Atonal Dreams as something I'm pouring my heart and soul into... or at least I'm not seeing it as some magnum opus or something. I'm putting care into it, because I can't not! But mostly I'm seeing it as a way to learn how to market a game. This seems a good fit for that because it's a familiar enough genre to (hopefully) appeal to people, especially those who liked my old work in the same genre, but it's also got enough uniqueness to it that it'll (hopefully!) be worth talking about and sharing.
Learning marketing is a process though, which I'm still in the middle of but which I'm continually working on. I've been writing those Promotion posts, checking indie devs on Twitter constantly, watching videos. I'm not there yet, but I'm getting there. Making the Steam page early is a big step.
It's just that even relatively short, simple games take a long, long time to make. Look at the game by the guy in the video, for example. Does that look complicated to you? It doesn't to me! And yet he spent a year on it, working all day every day from the sound of things. I once posted about a game some guy had spent five years on, which looked like some fairly simple throwaway mobile thing. These things take time, probably more than you'd expect if you've not been through the process yourself. Longer than I expect, too, despite my experience! I thought Atonal Dreams would be done by last November.
Whenever I've attempted the "oh, I'll just make something quick and easy!" thing, it never goes well. I mean, MARDEK's files were saved in a folder called "QuickQuests" because they were meant to be quick spin-offs of the other RPGs I was working on at the time (Deliverance and Fig Hunter, I think). I get carried away because the games I'm interested in making are focused on immersion, story, lore, etc; I don't seem to have it in me to make some quick plotless puzzler or whatever.
I've never done a game jam because they don't appeal to me, and I don't know how the devs make the games for them so quickly. I'm assuming they use a lot of borrowed assets (this seems to be the case in videos I've seen), or the game they end up with is crude and cobbled together. I don't know enough about games to know whether they ever end up selling them - checking other indie devs' sites suggests they just put them on there for free? - but I think I've seen some where they build on an idea started in a jam over several months or more before they have something they're happy to charge people money for.
Oh, there's also the fact that marketing itself takes months, or at least it should. This is one of the many mistakes I made before, and one of the things I'm learning this time around. I put Sindrel Song on Steam too soon before its eventual release, not nearly long enough to accumulate wishlists. I'm putting Atonal Dreams up early because I'm hoping to spend months building them up so I'll get a lot of sales on launch day. That seems to be how it works.
You need time to build momentum; I couldn't just make a game in two weeks, do two weeks of marketing and see results. And making a game in two weeks then marketing it for six months just feels silly!
I'm also still considering doing a Kickstarter, once I have enough done to show off for that. That'll involve a strong marketing push for a whole month... which I'm not looking forward to but which should be a good way to break through the ignorance and get the word out.
I'm not actually seeing Atonal Dreams as something I'm pouring my heart and soul into... or at least I'm not seeing it as some magnum opus or something. I'm putting care into it, because I can't not! But mostly I'm seeing it as a way to learn how to market a game. This seems a good fit for that because it's a familiar enough genre to (hopefully) appeal to people, especially those who liked my old work in the same genre, but it's also got enough uniqueness to it that it'll (hopefully!) be worth talking about and sharing.
Learning marketing is a process though, which I'm still in the middle of but which I'm continually working on. I've been writing those Promotion posts, checking indie devs on Twitter constantly, watching videos. I'm not there yet, but I'm getting there. Making the Steam page early is a big step.