A blog about breaking my own rules of business, breaking my own rules of game development, but also creating my best game in ten years without people knowing about it
Since I started Orangepixel I had one very strict rule: create fun, fast and good games, quickly release, and move on to the next. This method has brought me to where I am now: ten years of being a full-time indie developer.
Sadly, times have changed, and so have I. Where my quick and fun games with a beginning,an extremely challenging mid, and a quick end were great time-wasters in all those years, they are not cutting it these days. Oh sure, that type of game is still doing great and has a huge audience, but for me personally? it’s not enough anymore.
I raised my own bars with the releases of Gunslugs, Heroes of Loot and Gunslugs 2. I have a hard time doing quick games and releasing it for the same price as those three games I created. Groundskeeper 2 was one of the last “quickies” that I created, and even that took me longer than I originally planned.. and now I try to somewhat hide it from my other achievements.. even tho the game is freaking good once you get into it.
Space Grunts (www.spacegrunts.com) is breaking all my own rules:
It’s NOT a fast paced arcade game for short bursts of gameplay, no it’s a huge turn-based rogue-like with many different layers and depth.
It’s also not quickly created based on old engines, nope I wrote a web of code from scratch, and that’s just for the level-generation to generate interesting levels with a large amount of flexibility.
I had to figure out how to build stuff like inventory systems, new interface designs, upgrades, and so much more. Hell, I even had to figure out how turn-based games actually play and flow! I never play them.. what do I know!?
Space Grunts has been in development since January/February this year, and I should have wrapped up the work sometime last September.. it’s now November and I plan to push the 25th update tomorrow which is the biggest update yet with a large amount of new consumables, features, improvements, sound effects, graphical changes, and more. Most likely it’s not going to be the last update either.. there is still more stuff I want to add!
So basically this game will be either my biggest hit, or my biggest financial drain in 10 years time. I can only hope it comes close to the success I had/have with Heroes of Loot, because anything less will basically mean I lost money on this.
So far the press has been uninteresting, unresponsive, uncaring as to my game. I tried various PR messages, different trailers, different contact persons.. not a single one responded. The smaller youtubers and websites are poking me, but I can’t help but feel they are poking any developer just for a freebie.
However, right now the Early Access version has 15 positive reviews (and any developer will tell you the amount of people leaving a review is like 1 in 20) , but no negative ones.
Some Youtubers are playing the game and loving it, but they are small and I have more subscribers on my own channel, so they won’t really reach that many new eyeballs either (with just 15-100 views in a week).
Now don’t read this article with a depressing voice tho! I’m not done with the game, and that means I can also continue to tweak the PR stuff. I still have time to reach the press and it’s very possible some people are put off from the Early Access label on the game. So when I release in January 2016 on PC, and February on Mobile, people might be warmed up for the game.
I feel it in every fiber that this is my best game ever, I’m still putting in a few hours a week even tho I’m working on the game fulltime for almost a year. This game is good, doesn’t get boring quickly and needs to find an audience!
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