I’ve spent the past few months revising and reworking some core mechanics, filling out skill sets, and improving the GUI and QoL. This week I am starting design on the final dungeon, which has been challenging to work on. Since it’s the final dungeon, I feel like I need to step up the complexity while still keeping up with thematic elements, so it’s going more slowly than the simpler early levels.

The very first game I can remember making as a kid was a dumb space shooter that I made with Game Maker for MS-DOS (no relation to the modern Game Maker), but the first one I released to the public was a basic platformer called Godawful Quest. It was made for the “I Can’t Draw” game jam in 2019, which I saw as an opportunity to finally release something with no pressure to make it look pretty. The whole thing also ended up being a metaphor for a lot of my frustration in trying to make games up to that point.

The most important thing I learned from it was how to scope and finish something.

It’s not necessarily worth playing, but here it is anyway:

https://midnightspiregames.itch.io/godawful-quest

I’m a hobbyist working with Unity. I have messed around with making games in some form since I was a kid, but only got serious about it as a hobby some years back. I started out biting off way more than I could chew, but eventually started over, did some game jams, and started actually releasing games. I’m tired of jams for the time being, though, so I am taking another stab at a more long-term project.

I’m working on a traditional (Wizardry / The Bard’s Tale-style) dungeon crawler with magical girl and horror themes. This is only my second RPG, building on the groundwork from the first, so it is still relatively simple. It’s decently far along, but it is my biggest project so far by a wide margin, so there is still a lot left to do. I realize that it’s a niche game that probably won’t appeal to most people.

I mostly post bits and pieces on Mastodon. Occasionally I post a bigger devlog on Itch, but I’m not very good at those and I don’t know if anyone really reads them anyway, so I don’t do it that often.

https://midnightspiregames.itch.io/minerva-labyrinth

I don’t want to pan them, as it is always easier to be the clever one afterwards: But imho their idea proved to not work out. “Indie”-Gaming, “Social”-Media and the Internet in general opened up channels to avoid the publishers and big conglomerates, but the structures that they criticized where mostly just replicated in a weakened form as the rules of the market still apply (you already pointed this out in the OP).

Something that frustrates me about the discussions around indie game development, both in the community and in published articles, is that a lot of it focuses on money and marketing and on development primarily as a business venture. If you just search for “indie game cost”, the first results will ludicrously tell you to expect to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars making one. The games media in general is guilty of conflating “indie” with “professional,” partly because articles about glossy, pretty games get the most attention from readers, but also because games that have 800 square foot booths at PAX take a lot less effort to find and cover than obscure freeware on Itch. It’s basically in their interest to push hobbyists out of the conversation, unless it’s some viral streaming hit that they can similarly exploit.

It is upsetting to see so many stories of people quitting their jobs and living off of their savings to develop and release a game, hoping to be able to make it into their new full-time job. I sympathize with the people who don’t make it, but I don’t think it’s a wise decision. Designer R implicitly cautions against doing this (“They are made at night, on weekends, during vacations or whenever one can… in essence, it costs little or nothing to make a scratchware game”), though Designer X might be romanticizing subsistence living a little too much.

The scratchware folks didn’t really seem sure how their work could be distributed; maybe they were hoping to sell it in ziploc bags in local bookstores, like some of the very early pioneers did. I think though that they definitely did not foresee indie games exploding as much as they have. There are literally hundreds of thousands of them, of varying quality and states of completion, and the underground manifesto points out that this is a huge problem for discoverability. The scratchware people wanted to sell their work as an alternative to AAA productions, but they were not anticipating nearly infinite competition in their space. Indie developers still ironically rely on the loudest media voices to make themselves visible, whether that be streamers, the traditional gaming press, or even just favorable storefront placement. The people with the biggest platforms still have a lot of power to dictate other peoples’ success, and they use that power to further grow their own platforms, not spotlight deserving creative works.

I get it; if you make a game, you want people to play it. And I don’t begrudge people wanting to make a little bit of money from their thousands of hours of hard work, any more than I begrudge people selling handmade jewelry on Etsy. But most of us will never be lucky enough to make a living solely from our personal art, and even established professional independent studios are often only one failed release away from shutting down. I think it is a mistake to go into this hobby with a primarily commercial mindset.

Thanks for the reply. I know things like open source, political focus etc. aren’t strictly required, but they seem to be considered the “ideal” or preferred target for an underground game, and I am considerably far away from that ideal. That is why I’m not sure my work is really appropriate here. Then again, I rarely feel like I belong anywhere, so maybe that’s just me.

As far as money goes, I thought for a very long time (and talked to other hobby developers) about whether I was justified in putting a price on my work, or if I even wanted to. I still have a hard time with these questions. All I can say is that this project is not a business venture, nobody is funding or investing in my work, I’m not running a marketing campaign, and my design is absolutely not influenced by earning potential (if it were, I would be making completely different kinds of games, anyway). Basically, I make what I want to make.

I also feel strongly that MTX / RMT inherently degrade the experience of any game. You mentioned this in part 4 and I cannot see myself ever implementing these. I understand why some developers opt for a “freemium” model, but that doesn’t make it a good experience. I have never played an f2p game that wouldn’t have been a lot better if it had been sold as a complete package. Formerly premium games have been damaged or ruined by their botched transitions to f2p, and fully f2p games are rarely if ever good enough to justify the MTX costs that they engineer.

Charging full price for the game AND having MTX on top of that is inexcusable. The game is automatically made worse for every piece that you deliberately carve out and sell as extras. “It’s only cosmetic” is no defense.

I also absolutely shun anything related to NFT or blockchain, but that’s a whole other rant.

Occasionally I hear from folks who push for more indies to charge for their work, and to charge more. There are a few different arguments for this, so I probably shouldn’t speak for anyone else.

Not sure. I don’t think I would call my own work underground, but I don’t mind if other people think it fits what I do. I just call myself a hobbyist, but of course this is more general than what you have in mind.

It took me a bit to settle on my thoughts, so here is what I have:

#0 The “games as art” thing has been going on for ages, but I’ve never had a strong opinion on it. Games are what they are. I don’t really think of myself as an artist, but if someone wants to call me that, I won’t object.

#1 This part is what probably disqualifies me as underground. I am not too interested in open-sourcing my games at this time, and while the games I have released so far have been free, I am planning to sell my next one. Not because I expect to make a lot of money or because I am making it for that purpose, but because it feels like the right choice for the project.

I am also not particularly anarchist and political messaging is not generally a priority for me. Of course my work is still political to an extent, as is anyone’s, but thus far I haven’t made anything with overtly political themes. At least not the way I consider it.

#2 This seems like two different points. Bigotry should be excised, of course. I’m not sure what is meant by “developers and players are both participants.” Is this about the nature of games as interactive art, or referring to playtesting and feedback, or referring particularly to open-source development?

#4 This is the point that I find most peculiar. I know that there are a lot of dead prototypes and abandoned projects out there, but every game is a work in progress until it is finished. This seems to imply that games should not be mentioned, shown, or talked about in the underground scene until they are complete, which I think is counter-productive.

#5 I agree that democratizing game development is overall a good thing. Some of the work that has helped that happen has come from corporations putting out products like Unity and RPG Maker, but of course using these proprietary tools makes your work less portable. It’s a tricky situation.

#8 If this refers to mod support, this is always great to have, but unfortunately it also requires a lot of work and planning.