POST MORTEM NSFW: Take a chance on a small casual PC game

Hello everyone, my name is Dodick. I am the founder and the game designer of  GameChanger Studio. I wanted to share a post-mortem of our first published game for PC, NSFW – Not a Simulator for Working. NSFW is somewhat off compared to our firstly announced game “Ascender”. NSFW is casual and simple while Ascender is developed by using extensive data research (2015 data) and prepared to be a huge puzzle adventure and open world game with a minimum of 9 hours of gameplay. It is our unusual first attempt at going to Steam market but it is the game that saves our ass from being bankrupt.

NSFW ~ Not a Simulator for Working

More story regarding the condition of the studio and the post-mortem of our previous game Ascender is written by my colleague and can be read here. In this writing, I wanted to focus on how we decided on NSFW itself.

It is all started when we are at a point where our burn rate shows that we are in a near bankruptcy and our studio has a very low morale because we kept developing one game that we delay simply because it is not finished yet. My fellow founder Riris and I are thinking a way to get more money to finish Ascender and we clumsily decided that if we cannot make money from creating an original game (not outsource and client-based) than we may just shut down the studio. We decided to look up SteamSpy data (and also other sources) and found out an interesting fact (at least for us).

We look up casual games such as My Name is Mayo, Shower with Your Dad, Five Nights at Freddy’s and other similar game. We understand that on average the sales may not be as big as a high-profile game but we think it is pretty good for us who live in Indonesia. We take a look on what popular game in the genre, we also take a look at the price point (from launch to sales and even price drops) and the criteria that make them popular.

One thing is that the game needs to have is a quirk to the audience. This is also proven when I previously went to Casual Connect Asia (thanks to IndiePrize) and see a lot of indies that have the guts to go with a quirky approach to their game and become successful. The second is that we can develop the game faster than a bigger game that we are now developing. This is of course, obvious, you cannot compare the development time for a simple casual game and a big adventure A games. From our standpoint, instead of spending time developing one game with the whole team we can parallelly create 2-3 games and decided which one to pursue or polish after the audience or market react to it.

With both elements in mind, we decided to create an internal game jam which focuses on the term “weird” with light-casual as the genre and targeted for PC Audience. We have created three teams for the internal game jam. Each team decided on the theme that they are going to develop within 2 days and 1 night and we will finish a prototype within a week. The three games that are going to be developed are GRANGER – Graveyard Manager, Rush Rumble and of course NSFW – Not a Simulator For Working.

I am not going to discuss the detailed process of GRANGER and Rush Rumble because I am not the designer of the game and not really involved the development of the games in the beginning. I am going to focus on what my three teammates and I are going through until we finally decided to create NSFW. 

At first, we have really no idea what we are going to develop. Despite me and Riris is in one team and we both are the initiator of the GameJam, we really do not know what to develop. We discuss a lot of ideas with our teammates (Daru – visual artist & Handrey – musician), but we do not reach any conclusion on what to develop. We even decided to sleep on it (some of us are still tired from an event we have just visited) and somewhat thinking that we will create a game called Sleeping Simulator because of it. After resting, we remember an event where one of our fellow colleagues are being caught to store a porn video in the studio’s laptop. We even refer to that hilarious event as the “7^th May” event. This is what lead us to create NSFW.

Screenshot of the alpha version of NSFW

One other disadvantage of our team is a weak programmer, which is me (>.<). Two main programmers of GameChanger Studio are on the other team, so I have to decide whether to work extra hard or to work extra smart. Well, I decided the later. I decided to focus on creating the core gameplay and design it to be very simple yet impactful. The core game is to challenge the player to change their porn screen into work screen when there is someone passing by. The mechanic is also simple where we are just clicking the right mouse button to change the screen. We also implement binaural sound so that player will know whether there is someone who is coming from the left or the right side of the screen. One thing that we agree upon is that we are not going to use an obvious UI for the game, we are going to use whatever is in the office (especially computer screen) as the way for the player to get through the game.

Daru, our visual artist, proposed us to use pixel art for the game. The reason is simple, despite the game has a very naughty theme. We don’t want to go to the point where the game is a porn game. The game will only use parody and references to a type of porn that is popular on the internet. There will be no b**bs or d**ks shown in the game. We believe that pixel art will give a cartoony and parody feel to the game just as we had hoped.

The background story of the game is created by Riris. We wanted to set the game to be in South-East Asia but we don’t really want to use Indonesia, so we chose Singapore as the base because it is quite a modern country. We will use e-mail as the basis of the story delivery simply because the game is set in the office and we have directed the game to have a seamless user interface that is being part of the game itself.

Our sound designer, Handrey, is also working hard on developing the sound effect (especially the moaning >.< ) he also has a lot of extensive research on type music that is being played during a sex scene. He does deliver a surprisingly convincing background music and he’s also the one that gives us the idea of using the binaural sound that also affects the overall gameplay experience.

Presenting our games to fellow developers

After developing the prototype, we show it in front of our friend that is also a fellow developer along with Rush Rumble and GRANGER – Graveyard Manager. We are hoping to get input regarding our games. We originally design the game to have more things outside of porn such as reading 9gag or opening facebook, but we are suggested to have a full-on experience in watching porn so that the game has more impact on the audience in which that we also agree.

After that we are preparing ourselves to Steam Greenlight for all the game we developed in GameJam and let the Steam audience decide which one is worthy to be pass through the greenlight process. I do still have a problem with the game which the lack of story feels of the game. I thought it was because I personally do have some history of being addicted to watching porn when I was young. It has become a problem to me and affects my friendship at school and colleague. It was not until I am working that I can truly manage it. I talk about it with my teammates and decided to put a story mode in the game. We put it subtly and only show the conclusion at the end of the story mode. The story mode is very short and we use it only as an introduction to the gameplay before players are playing the simulator mode.

We got featured on IndieDB

We publish all of the game simultaneously in Steam Greenlight and releasing the fairly limited alpha version on IndieDB, GameJolt and Itch.io so that we can spread the word about our game directly to the player. For this approach, we are not using any press release or contacting any media because we wanted to know whether the game will truly viral or not. The process from GameJam to Steam Greenlight probably took around 1 month, and we only took 1 week off from Ascender and on the other weeks, we split our focus on both developing our GameJam’s game and Ascender. Of course, after that, we are back to use all of our focus on Ascender.

The result is surprising, we do not expect that we have a lot of yes votes even though we have a mixed reaction in the comment section. We have expected that most people will destroy the game because of its simplicity and the theme that we used. On august, within 13 days, we had our game to be greenlit. Since we are still in the process of finishing a feature in Ascender so we decided not to finish the game yet until the next few weeks. Surprisingly, our decision lead us to a missed opportunity because suddenly our friend Risky told us that a major youtuber, Markiplier, are playing NSFW and the game even become more viral than before.

We decided to turn up our gear and does not want to lose the viral effect. We finish and polish the game within the next 2 weeks after the video played by Markiplier and finally release NSFW on 28^th October 2016. We understand that it is risky to release it on the Halloween sale, but we still think that the viral effect is still there so we decided to just release it anyway.

Bringing NSFW to GamePrime 2016, a huge gaming event in Indonesia.

We sold the game for around 3000 copies and it truly helps us not only on finishing Ascender but also on deciding the direction that we as a studio will move on. The sales may not be as big as we had hoped, but we are truly grateful because it helped us on gaining income to finish our game Ascender. This is also a personal moment for me because we kept failing to have a selling game in mobile and it validates our move to Steam or PC market. We also found many opportunities that we cannot mention in this blog. We also have just started a greenlight campaign for our game OMG ~ One Mighty Guardian. Not everything is fine and dandy, we are still waiting for more information regarding Steam Direct as it’s also the deciding factor of our future strategy on approaching the market.