Quigley

Either way congrats, you have successfully made it from fairytale idea land to actual gameplay.

Bonus! If you want to get feedback, show someone two concepts that are wild foils and let them try to pick between them. You'll learn whether to lean towards either or somewhere in the middle.

Step 6. (I'm here now) Test those core directions. Lets go see where the rubber meets the road and what's actually fun. Maybe we've been right for the start or maybe we got to loop back to another of our gameplay pitches.

Step 5. Pick your favorite (s) (preferably 1-3) and start actually going into detail. If you like aspects of other directions, strip them for parts and rebuild them as variants on your core directions.

Step 4. Take your building blocks and build 5-10 concepts. Try leaning in/letting different core systems take the lead. How does Swordfighter 20x feel when it's more about 20x than sword fighting or vice-versa. Build a range of directions focusing of drastic variety.

Step 3. List our what are the core mechanics/systems you'll need for this experience. In Swordfighter 20x, I'm going to need a sword system. What that means, idk, but it kind of has to be there.

Next, list every optional or axillary system.

These are your starting building blocks.

Step 2. Then, go through each moment and ask every gameplay question you can. What happens if the player fails? How much notice do they get? Do they get to try again? What's the cost for trying again? What's the cost for succeeding?

Swing a pick axe at every possible under-the-hood gameplay choice.

What are the stakes? Where are the major player choices? What goes wrong, how does the player solve it, and what goes right as a reward?

Focus on framing the moment start to finish.

Step 1. Turn the player fantasy into a moment-to-moment example of the core gameplay loop. For this I choose to do a story board, stepping through an "episode" in the game.

The goal here is to narrate what an possible engaging session of gameplay is like, as if you were retelling it to a friend.

I want to talk about the process I've gone through the past week going from "blue sky" gameplay to 2 specific mechanic proposals. 🧵

Combat Designer is a fulltime position, you were given CR and expected to figure it out

at least for now figuring out "business" is tickling my adhd brain in a fun way

have enjoyed how painless buffer is although it has a thing where links attached won't embed for the visual pop up when posted

I don't think I've reached that point yet and I personally get a lot of energy from working/enabling other people so even when I'm not doing the creative work I still feel like I'm equally contributing if that makes sense.

What do you think? Do you feel like you've had to do less game making as you've gained more experience? Is there some step you hate that I missed?

I defiantly feel like I'm getting a daily crash course on the fact that running a games "business" is 1/3rd making games and even a slice of that is the fun creative work that started me on this path. But weirdly everything is kind of it's own fun "game/puzzle" and it's engaging to learn.

My gut says the biggest blocker is probably "the books need to be on shelves in front of customers" whether that's online, in local game stores, or at conventions/fairs

It's just a lot of learning and trying new things right now (so my ignorance will either be rewarded or punished)

This also involves doing a lot of big boy things that I was hesitant to do in college and have probably still been slow on like registering an llc, getting a business bank account, and talking to retailers/distributors.

I think this will weirdly have the most tangible effect because it's hard to understand the performance of how good my games are if people aren't really choosing to buy or not.

3. Giving people an easy opportunity to buy your stuff. I think I'm literally the worse at this. I literally have a backlog of maybe 100+ copies from previous print runs that have just sat with me for 3+ years.

A big part of this is "not starting from scratch" for every new game which is why for FinBy I've made a big effort to be posting dev progress in our discord and trying to pull backers into it.

Hopefully one day I'll be a real boy who people are excited to see start a new project.

I think at this point I have a good amount of "tools" in my tool box that I functionally understand (for PREQUEL I ran an affiliate campaign with 6 influencers, for FinBy I tried out meta ads and youtube)

but I don't think I'm "good" at any of them, so I just need to keep trying.

2. Letting people know about those games has probably been the main focus for the past year. PREQUEL was the first time I tried to put any thought into marketing trying tiktok, substack, and just posting on blsky.

To actually turn things into a real money machine it may be I have to take steps away from designing and focusing more on organization (which I already saw for FinBy with 1 month where had to leave writing to my co-dev) but I honestly don't have much of a problem with that.

Part of this is also getting people who are just better than me to do things. FinBy will be the first time I "hire people" to do things like editing and layout (i've always commissioned atleast 1 artist) but I want to figure out if there's other things I can leave control of.

The question then becomes: "what can I speed up or delegate" or "what can I do to improve the process". After 4 Zinequests, I think I have a basic idea of what I need to do at a 500-2000 funding scope and the question is can I do it faster/more often.

1. Releasing games is the thing I have the most experience with, developing games as a student and now a professional for 8 years. I am incredibly confident that if I have a game idea or goal, I'll eventually figure it or at least know where to look to figure it out.

The way I see it there are 3 things that directly impact how much money I make from games.

1. releasing games
2. letting people know about those games
3. giving people an easy opportunity to buy those games

I want to talk about the 3 very basic things I'm trying to focus on while trying to grow my indie deving from a hobby to something profitable🧵

game dev idea backlog

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