Enemby

Making games, starting a business, and sharing what I learn

[enembydev]

The Problem with Tech Evangelists and Unrestrained Capitalism

First I should say, I absolutely love reading about new technologies. I find emergent trends and new mechanics arriving into the world absolutely fascinating. The one issue I’ve been finding, though, is that a lot of ‘new’ technology, these days, isn’t really new.. closer to a horribly flawed amalgamation of whatever tech is trendy at the time.

If you take the reductive viewpoint that technological progress is old innovations attached to eachother, you can find that that is essentially accurate to the current landscape.

As an example, very simplified, a GAN, now typically referred to as an image generation AI, such as DALL-E or Stable Diffusion, is a bunch of deep learning networks, first concepted in the 1920s, grafted on to eachother. Of course, calling any of it AI is a bit of a misnomer, because unlike a theoretical intelligence of any kind, it is unable to learn by itself, and is instead lead hand and foot into drawing its conclusions. To put it literally.. it is unable to 'think’ or embark on actions by itself. It can only react, like an instinctual animal, programmed over centuries by genetics. Which is funny, considering it has a lot in common with genetics software models, but is significantly less iterative, since unlike a lot of genetics models, it cannot really be fed its own data without a lot of issues turning up. It has no method to analyze itself properly and get its 'score’, and needs humans for a vast majority of its function.

I think it says a lot that this technology could not exist usefully, and does not exist, without widespread, fundamentally violating and unconsenting theft of humanity. Since it cannot learn without a human, designers decided to feed it as much of humanity as it could in bulk, which in a historical context would be fine, but when applied to people who are still alive today, and do not consent, is very, VERY violating. These 'AI’ can output unmodified images of real, living children, who even in most international law cannot consent to being distributed, in pieces or in whole, to anyone in the world.

But I digress. Let me refocus. What GANs claim to be, an evolving intelligence that can draw anything you ask it to, is objectively false. Since it requires human data to draw from, technically speaking, it can only draw what its seen before, and generally only the 'average’ of what it is fed. It cannot exist without humanity and therefore exists currently as a parasite for its owners to spout poetic ramblings about with no concern for reality.

At the end of the day we are living in an environment where what is said about a product, and what it can actually do, and what it is when you interact with it, are fundamentally irrelevant.

If everything is a commodity, like capitalism desires, than that commodity has no historical, emotional, or moral value, only market value. Simply put, it is only worth what the market will pay for it. Since our data as humans exists on the internet for free, then from a capitalistic mindset, it is only natural that it is taken for free regardless of what the current law is, a pattern that modern tech companies love to follow, no matter how old the tech actually is.

Lime and Bird, the scooter ridesharing companies, both essentially littered their product on city streets illegally. After all, humans walk on the street for free, why can’t their product too?

Tesla, a company that has claimed to run a robotaxi service, operate self driving cars, and invent several technologies that existed before Elon Musk was born, fails to meet almost any of its claims. It is believed, statistically that a Tesla has the highest accident risk in the united states, all while being advertised as 'safer than humans’. Is not the idea of the falsehood, just as dangerous as the reality? To not even be honest with your customers, who are paying as high as $50k for a product, how dangerous it really is is categorically insane.

I can’t help but feel we’re living in the height of lunacy, a state that cannot persist and will eventually break down. If no company is held accountable for their false claims, we rush into a rat race where nothing is what anyone says it is. You could definitely make an argument that’s where we’re already at.

Just some late night thoughts about how thin the barrier between truth and fiction is getting lately.

[enembydev]

Making Surgeons Please ( jam postmortem)

Surgeons Please is my entry for the Utah Indie Jam, 2022. I enter every year if I'm able. It was made live on twitch in 29 hours (counting sleep/etc). The theme of the jam was "Re-connect".

What game am I making, anyway?

I spent almost the entire first night thinking about how I could make a game based on "re-connect". I had a few ideas, like making a game about repairing a ship, and reconnecting with earth, but by the end of the night I'd decided on a game. The idea was such. You're an alien surgeon re-connecting limbs to races you've never seen nor understand.

Influences

Upcycling

Last year had some really strong competition, and there were several games that stood out to me as something I'd want to replicate. Chief among them was the understated "Upcycling: Giving Trash New Life", by Palladian1881, which, if I'm remembering correctly was a small team. I remember watching the presentation of this game and feeling really warmed by the concept. It's a crafting / sales game about crafting useful items from discarded trash. There's a great video on the gameplay on the page if you're interested.

Papers Please

Papers Please by Lucas Pope is a dreary simulation game where you work as an immigration checkpoint in a corrupt soviet-bloc era fictional country of Artotzska. I think about it a lot, as its a very charged, emotional game, yet is also entirely systems driven to demonstrate its message.

What we take and what we leave

With these influences, there were a few things I saw as necessities for the project.

•Have a low-fi, ideally dual-tone art style

•Have 'customers' that walk to the counter

•Have a counter, where you can organize papers and have various accurate depicted real world objects to interact with. I wanted a clock, a radio, and as many other gadgets to interact with as possible.

Hitting the ground with a Plan

The next morning, I had a little more than 24 hours left, and I intended to still enjoy my normal life, making dinner, going out etc, which meant I had to be BRUTAL with the scope and cuts of the game. There are a few decisions borne out of this that made the game fairly unique.

• The game would have a fixed resolution of 256x144. I came to this resolution by comparing with Paper's Please.

• I would do all art at this resolution. This had several benefits, but the biggest was the time save in placement and handling of the sprites. I would only have to drag the sprite into the game and it would be at the perfect scale and position. Every time.

• All music is from Audiio, a licensed music site which I purchased a lifetime license for years ago. I would listen to music purely from audiio while working to help nail down the tracks and style used.

Creating the artstyle

Using photo reference, I sketched out a pharmacy background and a counter top. The photo reference had consistent lighting that I was able to use to inform my art. Deciding where the light is is one of the first steps you should have when created art. For all my of pixel art, unless otherwise necessary, I use the same palette I've been using for several years.

Originating in a pixel art forum, Pixelation, I have made slight customizations over the near decade I've had it. Choosing a palette is important for time efficiency in my art. If you've locked in your colors, you can't overthink which color to use as much, which can make creating new things very time consuming. Before I adopted this palette, it would have taken me days, if not weeks to do the amount of art I did for Surgeon's Please, and I likely would have had to do significant revisions as well to maintain a cohesive style. By locking in my colors, I was able to do all of the art for the game; before even opening up a code editor for the game; in 1 hour. The time save I get from these techniques (locked in palette, photo references), is insane.

Overthinking the interface

While I had the gameplay art locked down for the game, I always struggle with UI. Your user interface is a great opportunity to inform your world and really get your player invested, which means I always struggle with it, because the style for every game is a little bit different, and requires a different approach for the UI. I ended up deciding on an office theme, and attempted (probably unsuccessfully) to style various buttons as manilla folders, or clipboards. I'm still very happy with how this turned out, though I made the decision to off-color some things to make the world feel more sickly and sterile. That, I kind of regret. I think I could have made better art without this decision, and I ended up having to recolor a few things in the editor anyway.

Controversial architecture

Time to talk about the programming. Like any game jam game, the code is FULL of bad practices that you should never do normally, but there were a lot of time saves here too. First, the most controversial (for some reason) choice.

I used a very old version of Unity Intentionally.

For quick projects like this, I tend to use Unity5.0, for one reason, and one reason only (though it's good practice to lock your engine version unless you need new features). I needed Unity-script.

Unityscript is Unity's fake language, it's intended to be used like HTML5's javascript, but it breaks tons of stuff, despite basically being C# with a funny hat on.

But using unityscript as a solo developer is very important! You lose the ability to do webGL builds, the performance is worse, and there is basically no compatibility with C#, nor is the documentation any good, occasionally non-existent, especially for Unity5's UI. The result of course, is that I hate working on UI, but the time save is HUGE, comparatively.

For that tradeoff, every single script you write is going to be much shorter. As much as half the size in some situations. Because Unityscript handles your includes, references, and in general technical, time consuming programming tasks, automatically.

What that means for me is I can save myself thousands of words in my script, meaning the script gets done faster, and conversions that C# can't do, unityscript can without any hassle, meaning I also don't have to declare new variables to create new references, and can assign by references, and Unity will fix all of it.

There's also some other benefits, namely that Unity is getting slower and slower in the newer versions, and the newest of them forces recompiles practically constantly. Using an older version like Unity 5, means that I never have to deal with this:

There are ways around that of course, but the less things I have to fix to finish, the less time I spend making the game, which in a short deadline of 29 hours, is VERY important.

After that, there's some other considerations that are actually good practice, and saved me a lot of time. I try to do this in every project.

I never, NEVER write the same code/logic twice.

No duh, right? Kinda. But specifically, in Unity, this is extra important. Unity uses an ECS(Entity-Component System), which requires some extra considerations. Instead of writing a script of how X works, you have to write that script AND put it on an object (an Entity!) that will then call and activate that script.

What this means, practically speaking, is that I can create simple, 5-10 line scripts that only do one thing, when asked, and I can duplicate that script across every object in the game world, rather than having each object script need to recreate that function.

Don't get me wrong, this is NOT better performance wise than how 'best practices' would be for a professional project, but you know what?

It's faster. It's a LOT faster to make.

Because of these tactical choices, the game was mechanically 'finished' in 14 hours. Just over 8 of those hours was actively working on the game. With that, the second 'work' day had finished, and I went to bed. If this is what I had to submit, I'd be happy with it.

The Next Morning (9 hours later)

With the bright, bleary eyed morning, came problems. I was proud of what I've done, but all I had so far was a simulation of the pharmacy. I had completely neglected polishing steps, so there was no menu or plotline visible in the game. With about 5 hours to submission time, I decided I could do something about it.

I would normally create a full menu, with a settings menu, but decided that wasn't necessary due to how I built the simulation. Music was controlled directly by the radio on the desk. I added an opening cutscene with some plot, and buckled down to spend the rest of the time on polish.

Typical polish I worked on

One of the biggest things I've adjusted to since selling games for money is the difference in quality and polish between a free game and a paid game. Since learning these differences, I've tried to put a lot of work into making every game I release match up to commercial standards. To this end, there were a lot of nice-to-haves to work on.

• Sound effects for surgeries / medications

• Animations / effects for surgeries

• Full game testing and bug fixing

• Beginning and end of game / failure state

I managed to get a lot of sound effects in, but it became pretty time consuming and I got caught up in what these purely fictional surgeries would sound like. In the end, I chose the funniest sounding option and left it at that, but still left a lot of medications and surgeries with no sound effects.

I created new art, and effects for surgeries, in amputations I made it so a piece of the customer's sprite was cut, randomly, and for replacement limbs I drew a human arm and placed it randomly with the customer. There was a rather nefarious bug that I didn't have time to figure out, where the effect would work properly once, then fail with an odd stretching, dotted pattern. I tried to fix this, failed, and decided to leave it.

I tested the game, and found a number of small bugs to iron out, and also commenced with hiding my debug UI from the end user (just button collision boxes, mostly). I took the time to write a tutorial prompt and pretty up some items on the desk.

I had to create, quickly (about 10 minutes? probably less?) a game over screen, which I used a stock photo of prison for reference.

Release Panic!

With an hour to release, I made a discovery and panicked! My fixed resolution wasn't scaled properly at some common resolutions, meaning for some players they'd be able to see a number of things that should have been off screen, and it also wouldn't be sized for the screen appropriately, about half the size it was supposed to be.

I didn't have time to fix this properly, but something had to be done about the ability to see the operating room, and the front counter at the same time. In a rush, I made a 4k image, cut out a hole for the smaller resolution, and threw it over the game UI. This hid the operating room, but technically, it was all still accessible.

That 'fixed', I compiled the game and submitted to itch, and relaxed until presentation time. I was done.

Presentation Time

Presentation was a big of a mess. It's a mostly in person event, and most things are planned with the intent of having everyone there. I wasn't, and had to wait my turn in the chaotic speaker connected to a group discord voice chat.

I had my thoughts together, knew exactly what I wanted to say, but by the time my turn came up, I was frazzled. I rushed through the explanations of the systems of the game, and I failed to show the variety of problems, and worst of all, all the effects and polish I worked on for the last 5 hours, I completely forgot to show it off! Overall I still think my presentation was fine, but I was disappointed by my own standards on showing the full game. I also forgot to give other jammers a chance for questions, which would have been polite. Well, better luck next year!

Awards

Now for (some) the most exciting part. The award ceremony. I was very surprised to find I took home the "Most Educational" category with Surgeon's Please. Here's a photo of the trophy.

Overall, I'm really happy with Surgeon's Please, and if I deduct sleeping / eating times, I can very easily say it was made in less than a day. Till next time!

Enemby

[enembydev]

How to replace the OS on a Kindle Fire 2 (Master Guide)

I recently found and bought a Kindle Fire 2 for $13 at a thrift shop. I had originally thought it was a more modern device, and when I powered it on I found that it barely functioned at all, since a factory reset had removed access to the amazon store and changes to the login process on amazon made it impossible to normally log in and download apps.

So I set my sights on rooting and reinstalling the thing, and boy it was an adventure. Almost all of the resources for this are now gone, having mostly been made around 2012, and putting together everything necessary took nearly a full day of browsing the XDA forums. So for future searchers, here's a full guide to installing LineageOS on a Kindle Fire 2 (commonly called the Otter 2) using Windows 10:

You will need:

Google's SDK Platform Tools

Minimal ADB and FastBoot (this is technically not neccessary, but I couldn't get regular fastboot working on my machine 100%).

Every file mentioned in this github guide.

If anything linked is not available, I'll have a full mirror linked at the end of this post.

Make sure that adb is installed and working, by plugging in your kindle and typing "adb devices" into a command prompt. If it doesn't immediately work, try reinstalling based on this guide in Windows Device Manager.

Once adb is definitely working, follow all steps in this Github Guide.

You'll need to root, and with the stock tablet, which has no access to a file manager this is impossible to do without an external device. I used Kingoroot, the desktop version. Keep in mind KingoRoot does install some basic adware, but windows 10 can detect and remove it easily.

If you're like me, once you reach the fastboot section, every command attempt leaves out errors. At this point, navigate to the folder of the Minimal ADB and Fastboot programs installed earlier. Open it in command prompt. You can do this quickly by typing cmd into your file explorer.

Then in these folders, try running the fastboot commands again. This will instead use minimal fastboot, which for some reason works while official tools don't.

Then you need only follow the rest of the Github Guide, making minor changes in the filenames depending on what you downloaded.

Mirrors:

Mediafire

MEGA

Google Drive

[enembydev]

My Tag Game: Part 4

Of course, everything before this took place a long, long time ago. I’ve spent time since August of 2020 working on this game off and on between other projects, and it shows. Primarily, it shows in one particular area, and that’s the fact that I can no longer use Unity’s automatic matchmaking. I’m using Unity’s now removed Raknet based networking. Raknet is an open source tool that has been sold and resold, now owned by Facebook, who has not necessarily maintained compatibility with older versions. Unity’s Raknet was poorly documented to begin with, but when I boot up my tag game in July of 2021, I find that it’s no longer documented at all. Facebook’s version was last updated in 2017, which means that I have a hell of a time getting it to compile in VSCode, and any visual studio it would have been built in is either expensive or literally no longer available to buy. Unity has now not only killed their matchmaking servers (which I was using), but also deleted any mention of their open sourced master server, while also changing the page the documentation about it links to.

As someone who didn’t think to backup their master server code, I have a problem. I can’t find anything compatible with what I’m using, and the closest options that might work can’t be built on a modern system with modern tools without a lot of work with software I don’t use and barely understand. I hurriedly search through unity forums, github repos, sparsely documented forks of the software, and all of it is essentially useless as I’d need to adapt my template, and I don’t feel I can in a timely fashion, considering I’m shoving this in between 3 games I need to release this year, I decide the best solution is to add the ability to connect to players through IP. I don’t have IP forwarding, and currently can’t get it, so I actually end up spinning up a free AWS trial, after trying quite a few server hosts, all of which don’t offer enough memory or don’t have graphics processing. I end up creating an entire new version of the game to run on these servers, one that disables graphics and just starts a game so I can do more playtests. It takes weeks to add these features, it’s painful.

As I’m doing this I decide to also add the option to connect to a different master server, incase I do manage to solve the matchmaking / port forwarding issue. I’m now a server administrator along with all of other hats I’ve been wearing, and working further on this project has become very stressful and difficult, since all available resources just.. Disappeared.

That added, I decide to look one more time. I’m scanning github repos, just looking for any random developers that have even touched Raknet in their unity projects, when I find someone who forked Unity’s (now deleted) raknet repo, but they’ve modified it to be pretty much unusable for my project. I look into reverting it, already knowing that I don’t have the spare time to screw with this, and that’s when I find a COMMIT message, which includes a direct link to Unity’s master server. A direct link? I’ve looked everywhere and haven't been able to find a download link. This is relatively recent, there’s a chance. I click it.

Unity is still hosting the master server, preconfigured with all the files I need, so I immediately download and archive it, hoping there’s a binary I can run to finally solve this problem. I open it, and.. Oh my god. There’s no binary, no exe I can run, but there’s at least the exact code unity was running for their matchmaking. I can copy it!

Except… this project was apparently compiled with Visual Studio 2007? The hell? How??!! I take one more look at Microsoft’s website, and short of dodge piracy, I can’t find a way to get Visual Studio 2007. Screw this..

Now that I know where to find the download for the master server, I search it online and find someone else who updated the project to Visual Studio 2017. I don’t have Visual Studio 2017, and the earliest thing available online is Visual Studio 2019. I download it, get it set up, purely to compile and update the project, but it won’t let me compile for some reason, some kind of project settings error, so I say screw it and download VSCode, Microsoft’s solution for 2021. I open the project in VSCode, and it actually (after some tweaking) compiles!

I might have the master server again! I get it ready to bring it over to my Linux AWS instance(server), before I notice that there’s nothing in the project settings that will allow me to compile a linux application. I dig deep into the code and find this is a windows only master server solution.. I’m frustrated.

So I go and delete my linux AWS, and spin up a much more limited Windows instance. Now’s a good time to mention I’ve nevered used AWS, rarely need to do anything server related, and between studying to do it and fixing issues I run across, it takes me over a half day of work just to get the master server on… and… it can’t communicate across amazon’s firewall.

AWS starts the instance with some truly… restrictive settings, all of which I have to go and manually disable and add exceptions for my program. I’m doing this through AWS’s webconsole, because I can’t get remote viewer to work at all. It’s horrifically slow. But eventually I get it working and I can.. Kind of.. Sporadically interact with the master server. I have added support for a custom master server ip to the game, but it’s not designed for it, and it’s very clunky and tedious to use. But I get it working with this server.

A week later I finally have port forwarding permissions, so I no longer need any of this to playtest, and just host the game directly. What a waste of 3-5 days.

Finally, I made final tweaks, including adding a quit button at kevin’s request (who runs everything in fullscreen for whatever horrid reason), and the game is finally, functionally finished, and with the ability to use your own master server, or connect directly by IP, should theoretically be playable, at least until they delete TDP protocol. With my luck that’s probably happening next year, bet.

The Tag game is available for my patrons at Patreon. You can support me on Patreon here.

Thank you for reading this devlog. More soon!

[enembydev]

My Tag Game: Part 3

So I have slow cubes, tag guns, and some secret tricks for high level players, but it just didn’t feel like enough. I did a ton of playtests with my friends Kevin and Dakota, but once you got tagged, it just felt boring, like you’d played all there is to play. And worse, Kevin got really good at dodging my darts, so I ended up it more often than I ended up chased.

So how can I solve this? Being tagged isn’t fun. And the answer, my friend, is superpowers. I took a note from Dead By Daylight, which I’ve been playing tons of now that Deathgarden has been canceled, which gives each of its killers unique powers, adding tons of variety and intrigue to every match.

So I made unique powers. homing bullets, infinite jumps, no gravity, super speed, just tons of powers, and I made it so each time you’re tagged, you get a random power, so it becomes a lottery of getting the really fun stuff, or wanting to tag someone else so you can get rid of a power you don’t like very much.

See, but now I had a new problem. I playtested with my friend Steve’s group of dnd nerds, and surprisingly, unpredictably, ALL of them constantly wanted to be it. Now, every game we played had the tagged person running away, from mobs of other players trying to touch them and steal their super powers..

Which in my opinion, was honestly awesome, and I was tempted to just leave it. While I deliberated, I downloaded some asset packs off of the Unity store and created a small city for the players to play Tag in. It still felt a bit empty, so I added traps that players could trigger, which would temporarily move platforms, locking off areas, or carrying players to safety, unless the tagged person had the right power to beat the trap. To activate these traps, I just decided to use the slow cubes, since that seemed like a good trade off, and as I said earlier, I hate cutting content if I can put it to a new use.

I came up with a solution to the ‘chasing the killer’ problem (which also happens in dead by daylight, funnily enough), but before I added it, I spent a week or so just adding fixes to all the stuff I added, fixing a bug that made you larger everytime you entered a trap, fixing holes in the map, stuff like that, before I rolled out my new, hot, cool feature.

Party mode.

By entering a command into the game, any player could activate partymode, which would give every single player a superpower that they could use to escape whoever’s It. And, because I thought it would be funny, I made it so that superpower would be different everytime you used it.

The powers available were ‘now you see me’, which turned you invisible for a few seconds, which is typically enough to get a running head start, and ‘in plain sight’, which turned you into a slow cube, which worked surprisingly well as camouflage. The third, fateful power, was ‘the ol’ switcheroo’, which I had intended to make you switch places with another player, but in reality softlocked the game. I also found a bug which wouldn’t allow you to use chat commands if you kept a default username, which was interesting and I still haven’t figured out to fix.

I ended up having to remove ‘Ol’ Switcheroo’, mostly because it was really, really hard to implement correctly. The main issue was the fact that I needed to compile and launch a second client of the game everytime I tested a potential fix, and the other is the power still needed to be useful with inconsistent player count, which made it basically impossible to fix. I ended up just deleting it, in favor of the other two.

Where to with these two? Find out next week, with the (final), Part 4!

[enembydev]

My Tag Game: Part 2

I decided to keep things simple, I’d make a game of tag. It’s fairly simple, fun, and my childhood self, LOVED it. Plus, playing tag over the internet is probably preferable in a seemingly never ending pandemic.

So I coded in a tag mechanic, where one player would randomly become ‘it’, and they could walk over and touch other players to tag them. But as it turns out, doing these kind of collisions over the internet is really finicky, and I resolved to find another solution to tagging other players. The main issue is that it took time for the message that you’ve been tagged to arrive, so whoever tagged you would typically get tagged back almost immediately.

Of course, I decided to leave this in, not wanting to create more game mechanics already.

So I went and created a new game mechanic. I took the cube spawning logic I made earlier, and made it so players could spawn a cube directly in front of them. Then, I made it so touching the cube would force you to slow down. Then, I added a cooldown to the cube spawning, that was locked to each player.

Now, if you wanted to tag someone, you could now force them practically to a stop, allowing you to tag them and get away before screwy networked collisions tagged you back.

But it still didn’t feel.. Right. And worse, I figured out you could use the spawned cubes to triple jump. Another developer would probably try to fix that, but I love little tricks like this. I decided to leave it in. It’s a feature now.

So, if you can’t physically touch the player, how are you going to tag? Most people are probably screaming ‘add melee!’, but I personally really dislike melee in most games. It feels awful on a 2D screen. So I decided to borrow from another game idea I once had..

And I put in guns.

Not real guns, mind you, but essentially a throwable nerf dart. This is something I know how to do predictably, and it’s easy to make it a one time only shot, removing the tag back problem I had earlier. But I hate cutting something that could make the game more interesting, so I left physical tags in. You can still do it in the ‘finished’ game.

What's added next? Find out in Part 3, next week!

[enembydev]

My Tag Game: Part 1

See, it all started when I saw this multiplayer game template. I’d seen them before, but I’ve long been a little scared of making online multiplayer, ever since I tried to make a shooter tactics game with Photon, a cloud based multiplayer tool.

It was going to be called Grid, and it was a team based game, where each team is trying to control more of the map. The map was a section of squares, with a terminal in the center you could activate to control that room. So each team would attempt to activate as many rooms as possible which would earn you points until the time runs out.

But there was a problem with my plan.

See, I was pretty new to Unity, and since writing Unityscript (a programming language), was faster than C#, I made my games exclusively in it. The problem was that Photon was written in C#, and I didn’t know it then, but C# and Unityscripts can’t interact directly, and my less educated self spent over a month trying to figure it out.

So I gave up.

Ever since then, I’ve wanted to make an online game, but I still find it pretty intimidating, so I looked for premade projects I could reference to make something unique(Which is a great way to learn, by the way.) So I found that template.

And it was pretty neat, not gonna lie. All it was was essentially you’d walk around on this giant grass plane, and if another person connected, they could walk too, and it’d sync the movement on both of your computers. Pretty boring, right?

I agreed. My first thought was to try and spawn in a cube, just to be sure this template actually worked. And it did! I was able to spawn a cube, locally, which is when I started actually learning about networking. Let me explain it a little.

I’d compare it to yelling in a loud room. You can, of course, understand yourself, and easily communicate without anyone else hearing you. You usually have someone close by you can interact with, and communicating to them is very easy and fast. But to talk to everyone, you’d need to yell, and there’s always the chance someone would misunderstand or be slow on the uptake, so you repeat yourself, or someone closer to them clarifies for you, till everyone understands.

So you could, for example, yell “I’m jumping!”, and eventually everyone would see that you, in fact, jumped. Not always directly, or necessarily at the exact moment you yelled, but they’d eventually get it. Especially when the ambulance arrived.

That’s how fuzzy sending information for multiplayer games can be. You have to account for slight timing differences, get anyone up to speed that wasn’t there earlier, and ensure the way your computer (your client), understands the situation is actually what happened for everyone else. It can get complicated, very fast, so what most people do, is they designate a ‘host’.

This host is typically the most active and quick responding ‘client’ in the game. They have the clearest ‘signal’ of events, and keep an eye on the state of the room, so each client can then ask the host what’s going on, whenever they don’t know.

This is… not what I did.

Another, riskier method, is peer-to-peer networking. I’m not talking about networking itself, just the way communication works in my game. How peer-to-peer works, is each individual client, reports on itself to everyone else. Any changing events for this player have to be sent by this player itself, which essentially means that only this player knows their own full state. The pitfall of this method is 1, it’s extremely easy to hack, and 2, Players can be unstable.

So if a player falls off the map, or dies, what happens if that player, for whatever reason, doesn’t acknowledge the event? Desync. The world that player lives in becomes different than everyone elses slightly, which can eventually break the simulation and ruin the game for everyone else, even if it’s unintentional.

This might seem really dumb, but for a tiny game like mine, it’s perfectly fine. The solution to all of these problems is just to play with people you trust and enjoy playing with. It saves me from needing to create ‘host’ logic, which is completely unnecessary for such a small game.

But enough of this learning crap, let’s talk about the game. Stay tuned next week for Part 2!

[enembydev]

Twine is friggin' awesome

You might not realize this about me, but I'm almost exclusively a Unity developer. However, Unity seems to be having worse and worse support in general these days, so it's about time to look into new tools. Why mention this in the preface?

Because I picked Unity initially for a reason. It had the lowest requirements of any 3D engine, had the widest platform support, and the workflow was excellent for a solo developer. Now... at least one of those is still true.. if you're very careful.

Now, what if I told you I knew of an engine that can run on almost anything that can display a webpage, that has an amazing workflow, and can even easily be packaged and sold commercially on dozens of modern platforms, and exports instantly.

Yeah. That's modern Twine.

Twine is typically thought of in the vein of Bitsy, which is a very easy engine typically used for story or experimental games of low complexity. Bitsy typically requires some art, can't really script, has poor to non-existent state animation and audio support (although if you use bitsy hacks you can do all of this).

You can do all of that natively and easily in twine. Twine, aka Twine 2, has scripting support, and a very easy and intuitive editor anyone can use without even looking at a tutorial. And there's tutorials abound. Nearly any mechanic you can think up has probably been scripted already and released online, which means even complete newbies can make hugely complex games in very short time frames.

Even better, anything you can do with html5, you can pretty much do inside twine. Twine even allows you to run pure javascript in your passages if necessary, and has a very easy popup that lets you modify css and styling.

I'd be surprised if no one has launched a AAA quality game with Twine yet, because you can put something together that's completely playable in your browser and fun inside, oh, 30 seconds? Of course, that's dependent on typing speed, and I can't expect everyone to have over 100wpm typing speeds.

Oh, and did I mention that you can even make Twine games on mobile? Oh! and did I mention I even have a pretty popular tutorial on the basics? wow thats so crazy

anyway you should really learn twine cause it's awesome and very convenient.

[enembydev]

Steam Product Reviews are broken.

At least, if you follow the rules Valve has set for developers.

See, did you know you're not allowed to ask within the game for steam reviews? You're also not allowed to give incentives for your users to leave reviews, and the only 'official' way steam gives you to entice reviewers is filled with games collectors who will just take a steam key and not even play the game, much less review it, despite that being the entire purpose of the platform.

But as a small indie, who can get less than a thousand players in the best of times, how are you supposed to get reviews? You aren't. Without the backing of a larger brand who can blacklist, a fanbase who can hypetrain, or a dedicated PR person who markets the game and helps get those reviews, you're left with just asking people. And people don't care about you, and they don't care about your games.

When I launched Death Game, I collected a small group who helped me test the game, and an even smaller group who promised to help me by wishlisting and reviewing the game come launch. I had 10 people who promised to review, and even after I explained to them that reviews would dictate the result of my last 4-5 months of work, to date, I have received 4 english reviews of Death Game+. Of those, only one of those reviews wasn't a steam key review (steam keys are ignored for review analytics, and dont help sell the game), and the ONLY store customer review was just a copy paste of a friend's review, one I didn't even ask to review, but as a fellow developer, understood its importance.

In other words, of the 10 people I asked to review, 0 did. In fact, all of the negative reviews are people who either paid less than $0.12 for the game, or got it for free. This is a larger discussion about perceived value, which I've already written a post on, so I'll move on.

I tried curator connect, giving out over 30 copies of the game. Of those copies, one returned a review, and it's not ideal anyway, since curator reviews are almost exclusively shown to their group, and I don't know anyone who is active in a curator group.

TL;DR? Don't even bother using Steam's services to help gain reviews. They all suck, unless you're big enough you don't need it anyway.

[enembydev]

Payment processing, or: Why I need to raise my prices going forward.

Hey, Enemby here. Let's talk about how much indies make.

and I'm specifically talking about an indie of my size, something lower than a "bottom feeder" as Jeff Vogel calls the model. I actually have it better than a lot of indies. I'm making money. Consistently? No. Enough to pay my bills? Also no. First off, let's talk about how much I've made on each platform I sell on:

Steam(2 titles): $139.30 (after steam's cut)

Itch.io(2 Paid titles : $286.40 (after optional 10% cut to Itch)

Various bundle sites(combined): $164.71 (after paypal fees)

On steam I actually lost money, since it cost $100 to launch each game and steam offered by far the worst support out of the three. It also has the worst cut, brought less customers to my game than I did, and a host of other problems.

But on Itch until recently, the only real option for payouts was paypal, who takes at least 3 cents of every transaction, as well as a payout fee, AND at times a percentage cut. In the months of december- january, I made $327.04 total. After Itch's cut? 294.4. After paypal? 286.40.

On each bundle payout, I'd lose about 3-5 dollars from transaction fees.

Basically, I'm losing around 35% of my payments over all platforms, mostly from paypal. Considering Death Game+ is 0.99, and Metori is 2.99, I'm making less than a dollar on each game purchase, except on Metori, which made about $60 total in direct sales. I spent almost 6 months on that game. And it still cost me $100 to release it, so I have actually PAID $40 to sell my game.

So clearly I've got some pricing problems. One of the biggest problems is Steam, which costs over 100% of my revenue per game and gives almost no value. Solution? Probably no more games will be released on steam.

But I also made a pretty clear (in hindsight) mistake, which is to price my games independently of their market value. At their current price, Death Game+ and Metori are competing in a market of asset flips and unfinished games, which implies that they lack quality. I think this is a big part of why both games didn't sell well. They're assumed to be made around a template, when I coded each game from scratch, and I custom made all the art.

So what pricing tier are my games? What should I price future games? The obvious answer is no less than $5. 5 is a typical price for a "budget" indie game, while more artisinal curated games of my caliber can go as high as $20. Now, I want as many people as possible to play my games, which makes me want to price them low. But I've also now been stung by pricing them too low, which implies I shouldn't go for $5.00, and instead go a little higher. So I think I should price my next game at $10.00. Provided I can still hit Funhaus' $1 per hour metric, I think it'll work out well!

E

[enembydev]

All the games I’ve made, ever. A long list.

This page will be updated as I go, since even this is not an exhaustive list.

Zorb - 2005-ish - Before I knew what DND was, I made a dungeons and dragons-like game with pen and paper. I also named it after a notable game from history, because kids aren’t very creative. I initially named it Zork, but I’ll call it Zorb from now on to avoid confusion. I’ve actually remade it for modern platforms, and you can play it here. This version is pretty accurate except inventory was done by drawing items on a small booklet in the actual game.

RPGGame - 2005 - I did name this game, but it’s been so long I no longer remember it. I had just read Eragon, and was learning Visual Basic 5, so I made an RPG in it. It was pretty simplistic. You had money you could make from fighting in the wilderness, which you could use to buy potions or armor to fight more effectively. You would essentially win randomly, since you’d never know what you’d be fighting. Zorb had very similar combat, just this game was actually programmed and playable without a GM.

ZombieGame - 2006-2009 - Shortly before Left 4 Dead came out, I was furiously planning a Zombie apocolypse co-op game. I would draw maps, theorize on mechanics, and just generally dream without doing much actual work. In execution, it was somewhere between Left 4 Dead and Tomb Raider. You’d be continually attacked by undead, while attempting to solve puzzles and move through large, extensive maps. Maybe one day I’ll make that game as a map pack for L4D2, but I doubt it. This game actually went through a bunch of phases, even getting prototyped in Love2D, MGB, C++ and Blitz3D over several years, but I have basically nothing to show for it, as the files were lost long ago.

Castle[MGB] - 2008 - I found MyGameBuilder, a web game maker for RPGs. In that month I made Castle, which was intended to be a fantasy adventure where you killed monsters and saved the princess, with your friend... Fred? I think? Anyway it wasn’t very good. These and all other MGB games I made might still be playable, but MGB has been sporadically online and active since about 2013, and they can only be played on the site.

Kill Fred[MGB] - 2008 - I made a series of minigames about killing Fred from Youtube. Kid me found him very annoying. Annoying enough to make a bunch of games about killing him.

Diddy Kong [MGB] - Late 2008 - One of my seminal games at MGB. It was an adventure game where Diddy Kong had gotten locked out of his house and his parents went missing. I actually convinced Jack95 to draw trees for the game! He was one of the best artists on the site.

TEAMCLASSIC [MGB] - May 16 2009 - One of the few I have a specific date for, because I have video footage of when I was invited. I joined an MGB team making MGB versions of classic arcade games, hoping some of their smarts might rub off on me. I actually learned a lot! and we made a pretty successful Pacman clone on the site.

Petland [MGB] - 2009 - A common trend at the time in MGB were these ‘pet games’ where you made games that were essentially tamogotchis, where you needed to feed and play with your pet or else they’d die. A really talented guy, named Dimento made a really good one called MyPet and I tried to copy it. Poorly. He got really mad about it which was totally fair to be honest.

Attack of The Zombie Horde [MGB] - 2009 - A sort of MMO-type game, where you had to scavenge supplies and grind so you could be powerful enough to beat the big boss zombie, who guarded the cure to the zombie virus. It had a save and login system, which was poorly though out and could be circumvented pretty easily. The art was pretty okay though, and I even had an Easter Egg in one of Uggy’s games. (A close friend at the time.) It also had a pet system, where you could get a pet which would help you in combat. It was pretty groundbreaking at the time.. but wasn’t original.

Fatality [MGB] - 2009 - So in MGB, it was near impossible to have a monster you could kill in melee without taking damage. But one of the smart guys on the Forum learned that if a character sprite was fully transparent.. then it could not get hit. Super excited by this idea, I made a fighting game which used this trick to let your character dodge attacks. I had a handful of characters, and even a music select system. It was a rip off of Mortal Kombat, basically.

Village [MGB] - Late 2009 - One year I was given Civilization as my birthday present, and it was so expensive I couldn’t get any other gifts for my birthday, and I didn’t even particularly like Civ! So I made my own version in MGB, a city builder where you needed to build and grow before barbarians arrived and wiped your whole village out.

Smiley’s Maze [MGB] - 2009 - After making Village, which took a few months, I wanted something easy. So I made Smiley, a spot-the-difference rage game, where if you guessed wrong, you had to start all over. It made a lot of people mad!

Stick War [MGB] - 2010 - Learning from the lesson of making Village and Smiley, I made StIck War, which was my take on the popular flash game Age of War, but in MGB of course. You would create units who would charge the enemy building and eventually destroy it, allowing you to move on to conquer the next city. It was planned to eventually have a global domination campaign, but I only ended up making a few levels.

Left 4 Dead 3(Fangame) [MGB] - 2011? I think? - So once I had gotten semi-decent at pixel art, I made a new game to commemorate it, and it was a Left 4 Dead fanagame. You played as Zoey, who was the only survivor left after The Sacrifice, trying to leave the town in No Mercy before the strangely intelligent Witch hunted her down. Never got finished, though.

SuperSmashMGB [MGB] - 2011 to 2014ish - MGB was dying from lack of updates, but Wish_Team promised there was a new engine, called OGB that was in development. Pretty much everyone agreed that they’d return when OGB came out, but I wanted one last game to commemorate my time learning there. So I, and a whole bunch of my friends made a Smash Bros clone, using only characters made here on MGB. It was one of the biggest projects ever on the site. Too bad we didn’t finish it. I did prototype it in other engines, but it ended up being too complicated to import the art from the MGB version.

^2 - 2012ish - After leaving MGB, I suddenly found myself needing to code again, so I learned Allegro, and tried really hard to make a game. But I spent so long making an engine for the game, I never really got to the actual game. And by the time I would have finished it, another game with the same name had already come out, so. The idea of it all was a shoot-em-up where you were protecting a city from aliens. Each day you’d scare them off, and each night you’d come home and learn what and who was lost in the fight. In hindsight, glad I never finished this one, It was gonna be a big downer.

MinecraftFlash - 2013ish - So I found, bought and played Minecraft, but indev ran terribly on my IBM 90s laptop. so I tried making my own 2D version in Adobe Flash, after Jimmy from MGB gave me a copy. It was never completed, but I nearly had a prototype when Terraria came out and was everything I wanted.

ShootingGame - 2014 - In 2014, I finally transitioned completely to Unity. I did that through the 7dfps that year, and I made a tiny shooting game with only a few enemies. I was planning to make more, but I found a bug where you could reload, jump on your magazine and fly by spamming reload. I had so much fun with that bug I forgot to make the actual game. It was pretty and kinda fun though. Later this idea would become S1CK.

Leap - early 2014 - Leap was a sort of cyberpunk racing game. I never really could lock down the art style or what it would be about, but it genuinely was really fun.

S1C or S1CK - 2014 to 2020 - I prototyped Scenario 1 Cyberpunk over 1 summer, and originally it was supposed to be a heist stealth game set in a parking garage. I wrote systems so you could use multiple weapons and switch between them, so basic AI and a single mission, but I also added sprint and jumping, and had so much fun playing with the movement I didn’t get to the actual game till quite a bit later. I worked on this game for nearly 5 years straight, but I had a lot of trouble getting testers, so I dropped it until I could get enough to make it how I envisioned.

GRID - 2015 Fresh with unearned confidence, I boldly announced I was going to make a multiplayer game. It was going to be a symmetrical multiplayer tactics game, where each team ‘claimed’ rooms to earn points and eventually win. However, I had a lot of trouble with undocumented incompatibility with UnityScript and C# and Unity, and could never figure it out at the time.

Backdoor - 2015 - My entry for 7dfps 2015, Backdoor was a hacking game where you broke out of prison. It was a pretty bad time for me, as I had to make the game offline completely and upload it online at school. It was also my first time adding an options menu in unity and it broke the whole game.

Lightbox - 2015 - Lightbox was my entry to the /r/indiedev Mix Tape Jam. It was a platformer stealth game made in about 5 days, and was my first time ever making money from my games! The entire jam had a donation jar which was split among everyone who participated. If I recall my share was less than a dollar, though. To this day, the logo I drew for the competition lives in the sidebar for the subreddit.

Rat Hole - October 2015 - Rat Hole was my first time making random levels and it gave me a lot of trouble. Of the 48 hours spent making it, probably 30 was just on the level generator, which I kept having simple off by one errors in the code. I almost didn’t upload this one, but I wanted to establish myself in the Utah community, so I posted it even though I didn’t like it. To my knowledge no one has been able to beat it.

Drone Game - January 2016 - This is a prototype I made around January 16th, 2016. I had just been part of an SMC (Speed-Modeling-Challenge) on drones, for which I modeled a US predator drone. I was very proud of my results in the competition, and started on a quick game to play with the model.

Death Game[Jam game] - Feb 2017 - I made this game in about two days for a gamejam held by the Fraudsters and Cheats at Home of Nerds. Long story. Later I remade it into a commercial product, but I’ll talk about that further down.

Walk of Shame - October 2018 - An experiment, where I tried to make a game exclusively while live, streaming on twitch. It went okay but I hated the design of the game. The idea was an endless runner, where you’re trying to pick up enough clothes on your way through the city to look presentable at a job interview. I never did finish it.

Death Game+ - April 2018 - I made this game completely in about two months, and it was my ‘experimental project’ to see the state of things on Steam. There was actually a free version because I felt uncomfortable charging for everything.. but it was so unpopular compared to the paid version I eventually discontinued it. I did the math after releasing this game, and determined if I released a game every month of similar quality I could almost make minimum wage while crunching dangerously and compromising my health.

A Day At Your Friends House - November 2018 - A simple narrative doodle to learn bitsy. A dry, empty experience of visiting a friend you’re no longer close with.

Tag - Feb 2019 - I made a small game of Tag, while learning how to make multiplayer games. I have almost no interest in making them, but thought I should learn the skill after trying and failing in 2015. It was based on Unity + Raknet, which has now been completely deprecated. However, it still works if you port forward and host peer to peer.

Metori - April 2019 - Metori was my fast follow project intended to test a theory I had of why Death Game+ had failed commercially. I thought that the reason was because Death Game was of so low quality, so I spent 4 months and made a game I was really proud of and learned a lot from. But it was ironically almost unanimously ignored, even by some of my close friends I recruited to help me test it.

CNBLT - July 2019 - I actually filmed myself making this game, which was a small Canabalt clone.

Flawk - September 2020 - A small tabletop roleplaying system intended to replace DND. I went full circle, and this can be considered the most professional and playable iteration of my first game.

One Page RPG - October 2020 - A very condensed attempt to fit the minimum mechanics of modern TTRPGS onto a business card.

Cemetery Hill - October 2020 - Another Utah Games Jam entry, that actually took home 3 category awards! A fairly basic horror game with scripted segments included driving and walking, with sound design inspired by the original Slender game.

Here’s the Kicker - October 2020 - July 2022 - In an increasing effort to shore up my gaps after being rejected on my 30th Games Industry job application, I decided I’d make a mobile game. It would be an endless kicker game, similar to early flash games like Toss The Turtle. I made it in modern Unity, instead of Unity5.0 like most other projects. This was both intentional and necessary to include Google’s AdMob functionality, and to maintain cross compatibility with web platforms, so I could also post it on PC/etc. However, I eventually decided I needed more research before releasing to ensure I could maximize the games potential on Google Play, so it was put on relative hiatus until I had learned enough to polish and finish it in june of 2022.

Garden Witch - November 2021 - I’ve tried to make it a rule to go to the Utah Games Jam every year and attempt to make a game, but with covid on the loose it’s been hard (and it’s been canceled several times), but I was finally able to attend and make a game I’m very proud of, that looks great, is fun to play, with good sound design.  By using a ton of third-party assets, I was able to make a very competitive, complete game in only 48 hours.

Zorb (Remake) - September 2021 - Partially as an experiment to see just how much is possible in twine, I remade the entirety of Zorb, playable as a short text adventure. Since I was trying to learn, I actually built it into a full RPG system including turn-based combat, upgrades and stats, as well as a basic system to meet and tame pets.

Battleship (Prototype) - Jan 2022 - Based on the successful and well-received design of Tag, I embarked on making another multiplayer game. It was eventually canceled, though, for tech reasons. I wanted to build it off of Raknet like Tag, but the modern equivalent of Raknet was completely incompatible and essentially doomed the project.

[enembydev]

So, I’m back, with a few quirks.

Hey! I've decided to take this name and blog back. There's a few reasons for this, but I think I should start by explaining why I left.

I was being stalked and harassed online.

I believe that's all dealt with now, and I'm therefore comfortable to work more openly again. However, I've learned some valuable lessons on communication, and more importantly privacy. So although this blog will not likely become active again, I will recontextualize its use.

I now do most of my business under my fledgling studio name, Fractured Mind, where I hope to also bring some friends in and make games together, eventually. But there's some messy business of what to do with my prior projects, and whether they should be brought under this new banner.

And I've decided to keep them seperate. Most of my projects before Fractured Mind will instead be attributed to me, personally, Enemby.

I believe that putting any of those projects under Fractured Mind, when they were made before the studio existed really muddies my prospects and makes me look suspicious in general, like some kind of gamedev fraudster.

By keeping a laundry list of my projects, I can keep track and gain benefits from my experiences, but without harming Fractured Mind.

So pretty soon I'm planning to update this blog with that very laundry list. I've done estimates in a google spreadsheet, and the amount of games I've made so far are in the high 40s somewhere.

More details on that soon I hope. In the meantime I'll work on getting Fractured Mind to be more consistent and reputable, while I keep being my old mess in the background.

Woo!

[enembydev]

I’ve finally done it

Hey. If you're reading this, it's a good thing. I've managed to reach my short term goals. Whatever I was doing, it's done now. And I can make the changes neccessary to have a good, happy life again.

The last few months have been difficult. Both in my real, "meatspace" life, and also online. As I've grown into a more well rounded person, I've made many mistakes, and I've shouldered responsibilities I couldn't handle. I am not a responsible person by nature, and not a careful one, either. I had hoped to combat fundamental flaws in my character by a sequences of rules, and ethics I would live by unconditionally. I changed aspects of my personality as I saw fit, and became someone I no longer recognized.

One by one, all of these rules fell away, either confronted by real situations or due to lack of issues to solve. I fell in love, deeper than perhaps I've ever felt, and broke my universe doing so. The breakdown of this 'relationship' saw me acting in ways I cannot accept, and learning fundamentals of my character that majorly change how I see the world and my place in it. The timing of all of these things, sucked, and for the first time in.. hell.. 10 years?

I found myself doubting my path forward, and at a clear and consistent loss at guessing what my future holds.

But I know now what I want to be. I see a path that I can really, truly support, emotionally and mentally. But I think the best way to do that is to wipe the slate clean.

This account, this brand, and the name, "Enemby" is going dark. I have a past that's trying to find me, and I'm terrified of the prospect of becoming that person again. Additionally, I've picked up so many hobbies and responsibilities as Enemby that I have basically no time for introspection. I can't convince myself or anyone else that I'm trying to be a better person without putting time into it.

If I ever use this name again, expect my presence to be temporary at best. Thank you for all of your support, and thank you for spending time with me over the years. Any of my close friends will know where to find me. ❤︎

-Enemby

[enembydev]

Community Copies on Itch.io

Hey, just a small update. On Itch.io it's very common among tabletop releases to add a "community copy", which is an optional free copy for specific users. That sounds like it could really be a mutually beneficial thing for myself and the community, so I went ahead and added it to my itch projects. I don't know if anyone will use it, but as least it makes me feel better about things.

Update to my last post: almost nothing has changed. Still working on some stuff that will hopefully improve the situation.

-E

[enembydev]

The Book of Failures: Death Game

 Despite making over 20 games (there's too many to count, really), I have never released a postmortem. It's time for that to change. I hope you can learn from my experience, and avoid my mistakes. If you’re looking for hard data, it’s at the bottom.

Before we begin, there's one thing it's important you understand. I knew Death Game would not be a financial success. The odds of me, an unknown dev, with little renown, and no usable industry contacts, breaking even on even the smallest game is next to impossible.

But I had some ideas on how to mitigate these problems. First, I was going to become a scavenger, scrounging up sales anyway I could. The big thing, I knew, was game bundles. Without being a success, I was unlikely to get a response from a big reseller like Humble Bundle (Yes, I have emailed them multiple times, and never even received a response. I even know one of the founders, which did not help.). So I intended to target smaller sellers, like IndieGala.

But to resell keys, I needed to be on steam. Steam, at the time, had just begun Steam Direct. Larger developers could release at any time for no price, but for someone like me? I needed a license, costing $100 USD. $100 is a hard number to match in profit for me. Another difficulty to overcome.

Death Game was a game I made from the HON Game Jam (that’s its own story) in two days. I thought it was a good candidate to see if making a commercial game was something that was even possible for someone like me. But it needed a lot more work before I would be happy releasing it.

Death Game took two months for me to make, and released both as a free version and a paid version. But.. to my knowledge, no one ever downloaded the free version, including looking at my analytics. Such is life at the bottom. Death Game (free) received about 30 views over its lifetime. Including the gamejam version, it received 131 views and 51 downloads, meaning I had a conversion rate of 38.93%. This isn’t bad for a free game, but I’ve had other projects that fared much better.

Of that two month development, one month was largely working on steamworks integration. I had never launched a game on steam before, so it took much longer than usual. The game launched on April 19th, 2018. I determined this launch date by obsessing over the “upcoming releases” on Steam, and picking the day which had the least releases, and that had no AAA titles coming out. I can’t compete with AAA, even pretend, so I didn’t try to. This day was inconvenient for me. I ended up staying up all night to click the release button on time, and pretty much immediately took a nap once it was done.

I actually ran a twitter ad for the game, and had pretty decent results from it! I also passively promoted the game by posting it in several discords I was part of, automating twitter posts at peak (and off-peak) times, and posting on other sites I knew had high engagement from prior experiences. The results were overwhelming for me. When I awoke, most of my friends were still talking about the game. Some of them were currently in the process of making levels to share!

...Unfortunately, that experience didn’t last. To this day, I am the only one who has released a custom level for my game. It’s an easy experience, you just need to upload a 5kb or so file that you can create in the game. I got the distinct impression many of my friends didn’t enjoy the game. And that’s okay.

I had given steam keys of the game to some close friends, and they played it and agreed to review it on steam. Of the 10 I sent it to, 3 people reviewed it. One friend, a fellow developer reviewed it on day one, hour one. Another, a friend/fan I’ve known for a long time, warned me that if he were to review it, he’d review it negatively. This was upsetting.. But I told him that I’d rather he review it honestly than to censor his thoughts. He wrote his review on day one as well. The last reviewer, and close friend I’ve known for over 6 years.. reviewed it... 9 months later.

Unfortunately, steam had updated the storefront to essentially ignore reviews from steam keys, essentially meaning I had no reviews. Additionally, the negative review I received was displayed prominently, and was weighed higher than the others, causing my game to have a near permanent negative review percentage. This bombed my analytics, and to this day I have brought more traffic to my steam page than steam has. More on that later.

(Something cute to break up the bad news.)

I had done my research, and knew it was time to check my email next. Anytime you release a game on steam, you will receive a large amount of emails, about any number of things. Business offers, promotions, key scammers, or fans. Obviously, I mostly got business offers and key scammers. Of the business offers, one was promising, and fit my needs. about 80% of the emails I received were people impersonating inactive streamers and trying to get steam keys for the game. I sent steam keys to some of the more reasonable ones, and ignored the rest.

The business offer was from a game bundle company, called GoGoBundle. They did bundles of cheap, disposable games for pennies on the dollar. As an example, you could get 23 games for about € 1.23 for all of them combined. This company did not seem the most... reputable, but I did my research and determined that they’d work.

In total, I did two bundles with them, and the amount I’d get back decreased each time. for the first, I received $113.59 through paypal. The second, $50.87. They contacted me about doing a third bundle, and then stopped returning my emails. This was particularly annoying as we had signed a contract requiring them to return any unused steam keys to me, which they never did. On Steam, I made $90 USD, but with taking Steam’s cut out, it was more like $70 USD. Since Steam requires at least $100 to send out a payment, I still have not received any money from steam.

In total, I made $234.46 USD from death game. This is barely over my costs to put it on steam, and values two months of work, and an additional two weeks later for updates, at $134.46 . If I was actually intending to pay my bills with this game, I would be homeless and starving. Thankfully, I made the obvious decision not to quit my day job. (Well, quit permanently, at least.). If we count my bills, I spend $600 total over the two months to make the game, plus the $100 to put it on steam. Effectively, Death Game cost me 465.54 to make. But hey, at least I can say I have a game on steam now.

Now, on to the data:

Over Death Game+’s lifetime, I had 900, 698 impressions, which basically means an icon for my game popped up in someone’s feed that many times. Of those impressions, I had a clickthrough rate of 6.87%, or just under 62,000 clicks. Of those 62,000, 42,000 came from external websites, meaning not steam. To summarize a lot of data, I, a solo dev with no resources, brought in more traffic to my page than Steam, a multibillion company did. And I paid them $100 to do it.

If you’d like more data, here’s unfiltered screenshots of my analytics.

So, in short, here’s what I learned:

-Whatever reach I have, it isn’t enough.

-If I am going to be able to consistently make games, I would need to make one a month at this level of success to stay alive.

-Steam key reviews are effectively worthless, unless they’re negative.

-That bundle company you worked with? Yeah, they’re going to be defunct by the time you release your next game.

-Outside deals are more reliable than steam sales.

-It’s okay to use outside sources for you assets, like music. If you don’t, you’re just raising the money you need to break even.

[enembydev]

Trying to find something I can help with

There's not a whole lot you can do positive from your bedroom computer. I have a few ideas, though.

I'm going to let the rest happen when they happen (No hints, kids!), but I have one I can do right now.

As of now, I'm licensing my entire body of work as Creative Commons 3.0 .

Unless otherwise stated on the release page, all of my games and their assets can be used. If you’re unsure of a project’s status, feel free to message me, and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Essentially, this means you can now use all of my personal work in your projects, even commercial ones, provided you credit me for the work.

This includes my music, most of which has never been put in a game, and any of my released art, which is in a pretty similar situation.

This won’t apply to anything new I release, unless otherwise stated.

[enembydev]

A dark conversation, but one that needs to be had.

When I was in junior high, I had a suicide scare. Circumstances I did not control compounded, and wore me down. I felt so alone. The reality of the matter was that I just didn't have access to a way to leave this world. Not without substantial resource gathering, not without an excess of time, not without tricking my family and friends to get what I wanted.

I told myself I survived through an effort of will. I told myself my story wasn't done. That I was a force that had yet to act upon the world, a character arc not completed. I had to prove to that same world, that I was more than the circumstances I was born into.

But I know the truth now. If we had a gun safe, or a stocked medicine cabinet, I would have done it. In my heart of hearts I know that the way I was thinking was illogical, a chemical imbalance compounded by outside pressures. The hard thing about that, is even if you know, it doesn't matter. Your mind is no longer your friend. Thoughts twist and contort until they're not recognizable.

I don't want to die. I didn't then and I don't now. But I can feel these same thoughts creeping up on me. I may be keeping my hands busy, but my mind is busy negotiating, trying to buy time. Losing wall after figurative wall.

I can't maintain this.

This year was genuinely the best year of my life. It showed me what I was missing. If you asked me who I was, or to describe myself before now, the subject of games was unavoidable. To remove the topic, to me, meant that there was nothing to talk about. Because I could not define who I was, without games. There was no more substance to me.

Of course, others saw different. For a while, at least. It forced me to realize what most people already had. A person is multi-faceted, with interests and abilities spanning a worlds worth of knowledge.

But I've spent this long thinking about only one thing.

Games, or rather, Game Development, is the only important thing.

It's not. Previously, I would have relative breakdowns and instant depressions when my work ceased. If I had to go to school, or my job every day, I would eventually crash, because I wasn't doing the one thing that mattered to me. This formed an imbalance, causing me to put more and more of "myself" or rather, the idea of myself into gamedev. My character, my thoughts, hell, my outside appearance changed, only to suit what I thought gamedev wanted me to be. I became someone I wasn't, through forced, painful behaviour corrections, the overseer of which was constant in my brain, telling me that my behaviour was not becoming of an industry professional. That if I swore, talked about sex, showed an interest in anything un-profitable, that no one would ever want me, or show an interest in me.

I have no sense of self. I am unable to answer a simple question.

Who am I?

The sad thing is the only reason I've realized this, the only reason I'm ready to throw the self I created away, is very predictable. I failed. I did everything right that I could have at the time, I researched and worked for literal years, and none of it mattered. No matter the person I became, I could never get what I want. I could never be a successful gamedev. Not without sensibilities, or resources I'll never have.

But what does this mean?

It means that games are likely not my future. Not something I can maintain. A past I may need to leave behind, for the sake of my mental health.

But more than that I need a reason to exist, and there's millions waiting for me. I need to have a positive effect on the world, so I can tell myself there's a reason to be here. I want to do things just because I want to, not because I decided 16 years ago it was the only choice.

(Yes, it has been that long.)

So, I don't know if I'll come back. I don't know if I'll be same when I do. I don't know if I'm even leaving. What I know for sure, is I need a change.

-E