Mar 2020: "Oh, are you in Steel?"
And everyone's in the industry, and I hate when they use that word
And when they say they're in the industry, I say, "Oh, are you in steel?"
Well, I got nothing to prove— Jill Sobule, “Nothing to Prove”
We’ve hit that point in our development cycle where we no longer ask ourselves “How much more time will it take to get the features on our list done?” but rather “How many of the remaining features on our list can we finish in the time we’ve decided to devote to this game?”
It’s tough to cut features you’ve been dreaming of out of your plans, but it’s something nearly everyone who has ever managed to actually ship a game has had to deal with. But overall, we’ve been a fortunate studio. We’ve had the leeway to make decisions that serve our artistic vision for the game, but that might have financially ruined a different indie. Chats with other developers in our circles have made this abundantly clear, and the whole situation has gotten me thinking about the dual nature of our craft: games as art, and games as industry.
Above: our beloved Radioactive Space Bees weapon. Currently, they act more like fireflies than bees, because we don’t have swarming and flocking behaviors implemented… and this might be the way they stay, even at launch.
Industry and art are not forces operating at cross-purposes, but neither are they orthogonal. Rather, they are like two different currents, flowing the same direction at times, and pulling in different directions other times. For our case, both the industrial and the artistic currents are really encouraging us to wrap things up. So no, I’m not here just to bash business-driven decisions, nor to boil things down to a simple “art good, industry bad” — yet still, I have concerns at the extent to which industrial wisdom seems to be the prevailing winds right now.
Industries, you see… tend to be particularly bad at producing healthy ecosystems. Literally, in the case of the fossil fuel industry. Figuratively, in the case of how the United States treats healthcare as a private industry rather than a public service. And I’m starting to spot some of these negative feedback loops popping up in the game industry as a result of conventionally-held industry wisdom.
Show of hands.
Who here has heard that the indie space is really crowded, and that it’s super tough for any individual game to get noticed right now?
And who here has been advised that the best strategy for indie developers is to make a bunch of smaller games, on shorter timelines?
I mean, that last bit of advice isn’t wrong, nor is it even without its artistic merits. And yet… as soon as everyone starts following the advice in the second question, the problem described in the first question is only going to get worse. Rapidly. And we’re game designers who collectively said “sounds good” and walked ourselves right into this and really should have spotted the dynamics at play here. (I mean, heck, if we missed this, then what hope is left for the folks in other industries?)
I don’t have solutions — but I’m not hearing anyone talk about the feedback loop here, and I’ve been desperate to start a conversation about it. Maybe I’m just naive, maybe I’m over-privileged, and maybe loops like these will continue to be a necessary evil until we reach some kind of Star Trek post-monetary scarcity-free utopia. And yet, I can’t help but feel that slowing down and entertaining maybe just one more detour than industry wisdom allows for might be good for the community.