My Wife and I Made an Indie Game and it Made Millions!

it's true my now wife and I quit our jobs like crazy people and went fulltime on an indie game for five years spending both our entire life savings and then some ran out of money moved in with my grandma bet the entire farm and eventually shipped a game it changed our lives forever it's been 5 years and it's made Millions this is the story I landed my first game Studio job in 2010 and ever since then I knew that one day I'd want to make my own game I always assumed it would take a lot of money and that no publisher was likely to hand it to me to try so I saved religiously assuming I'd have to hire a team to build something substantial I thought it was going to take a very long time to build up the funds but my Outlook changed in 2013 when I saw a number of Indies creating impressive products Solo or near solo I'd been working on what would become eade at home in the Wei hours for months and was making good progress my inspiration burned so hot I was finding it hard to get to bed which resulted in severe lack of sleep some people can manage to work on their indie project while holding a regular job but I've always had a very single project mind and struggle with multiple projects I knew I could only keep doing one I had to choose between continuing with my cushy job in AAA games or going Indie with years of savings stockpiled in December of 2013 I quit my job at Sucker Punch Productions as an environment artist to go full-time on East Shade I knew I could pinch pennies to make the savings last and with no children or mortgage my tolerance for risky Financial moves was high the first year of East Shay development was a very special time in my life imagine a moment of pure inspiration the feverish kind that burns so hot it gives you Goosebumps or maybe that only happens to me I felt that burning inspiration every day the inspiration wanes slightly each year and eventually gave gave way to Commitment which as it turns out becomes easy to hold when you're 3 years in and have invested your life savings in the last year when I had sight of the finish line neither commitment nor inspiration seemed required as the thrill of finishing and releasing the moment I'd been fantasizing about for so long was all I needed to keep swimming I started e shade alone but fortunately I didn't have to finish Alone by the second year my partner jacine was making major contributions in design writing UI art and in-game illustrations by the fourth year she was working on the project full-time and doing Quest markup mapping and testing most of the game's Hallmark mechanics were of her conception and design including the painting mechanic itself as well as the inspiration mechanic in addition to her high level art chops she has grown into the best game designer I know and it's safe to say the game would have been wholly unrecognizable without her Beyond Myself and Jacqueline our composer the amazing Phoenix Glen dinning had been working closely with us from the start we also had a character artist Daniel meru who is an army unto himself and single-handedly modeled all the outfits and characters toward the end of production we hired two Quest scriptors and a programmer to help us Implement quests and get the game across the Finish Line finally we worked with a number of additional contractors including voice actors translators do games who handled our console ports as well as our publicist extraordinaire Charlene LeBron of player 2 [Music] PR throughout e shade's history there were few moments of Eureka design I'd always known I'd wanted to make a game that was a place a strong sense of place is my favorite thing a video game can give and it is and will always be the main design pillar of any game I have authority in designing and I knew I wanted it to be a nice place where you could feel cozy and safe in the beginning the idea was to make the game's core Loop through survival mechanics we had hunger coldness energy and the idea was to build progression with finding things to help these depleting bars we had come to our first major design dilemma the constantly depleting Bars were entirely at odds with how we wanted the game to feel they penalized the player for doing the very thing we wanted the game to be about which is going slow and feeling that sense of place we needed a new core Loop the painting mechanic was born from trying to think of a way to reward the kind of thing we wanted the player to do in E shade which is to go slow and smell the roses one fateful day about a year into develop jacn came up with the idea that the player could be a painter and create quests around the player capturing certain objects places colors times of day or a combination of those this would work in perfect harmony with wandering and smelling the Roses because the slower the player went and the more they let the sense of place wash over them the better they would do at these quests it was genius that was the first Eureka moment in our design Journey the next Eureka moment came about 4 years into development and although it's a less prominent feature to me was even more momentous it was the type of idea that doesn't make new work but rather solves existing problems it was the inspiration mechanic the idea was that creating paintings would cost inspiration and new experiences in the game world would give you inspiration so drinking tea reading a new book discovering a new location relaxing in a hot spring hearing a tale from a Storyteller listening to Street Music basically exactly the Cozy stuff we wanted the player to be enjoying would all reward your player character with inspiration this totally closed the game Loop created a Harmony between theme and mechanics and gave us an easy way to tie all the auxiliary actions into the core Loop it was again Jaclyn's genius it was amazing that such a tiny and easy to implement feature could have such a profound impact on the game and that it came so late in development yet fit like a glove it made me realize the true power of a good idea ideas that come in the form of more content where the cost of production resources are a dime a dozen I have hundreds of ideas of that nature lying around but an idea that solves problems is [Music] precious for as long as we've been working on eade itself we've also been working on its promotion I don't think there's any one or two things that are the Magic Bullets because every game has different avenues that work for it and indeed the marketing effort is the sum of its parts I'll try to give a rough outline of the things we did for shade number one we created very polished marketing assets so that's two trailers over 20 gifts and over 50 screenshots two we hired a PR Company uh called player 2 PR who handled press releases journalist Outreach strategizing on release timing and planning and key distribution during big moments in our campaign number three we picked our timing for our trailer releases our release date announcement and our actual release the most important one very carefully trying to stay clear of other news and releases okay number four I was very active on Twitter and I kind of still am I participated in screenshots Saturday and I interact a lot of course I think Twitter's relevance is sort of dying just seems like the level of interactions and Views um at least I've been getting have just been plummeting ever since Elon Musk took over everything just has sort of changed on that website it's part of the reason why I'm trying to focus more on YouTube now as our main marketing channel okay number five I've written a number of articles that have done well on gamasutra and 80. lv and other Game Dev ites six I often stream development on Twitch and still do I was doing that pretty religiously during the eade development and I always did like a pitch call to action of like you know hey check out our game on Steam go wish list it and I still do number seven we got into the Indie Mega booth at Pax West and we also showed at GDC in a special Unity Booth we managed to get into which uh the impact is kind of overestimated I think of going to conventions but in our case we did end up getting some pretty important coverage particularly from GDC we ended up getting a Kotaku preview from that which was really big for us and and bumped our wish lists quite a bit and number eight I did a number of interviews with small and medium websites and a few large ones and a lot of those were lined up by our PR [Music] firm the tale of East shad's launch day is an odd one the tale begins as many epic Tales do with some backstory in the final year of our 5-year development we were beginning to run out of money with both Jaclyn and I working full-time on the game we managed to stretch our savings quite far but eventually the well was running dry my mother and grandmother who lived together very graciously offered that we come and live with them bless their hearts this helped us tremendously and ensured we had enough reserves for the final launch costs like localization my grandmother's house is a bit rural but the internet is fast and continuing development there was never a problem but on launch week something truly rare happened it's it snowed a lot in fact it was the third biggest snowstorm in the Seattle area in the last 100 years the day before launch we lost power no problem right just pack up the computer and drive as far as you need to to find power and internet the problem was there was about 1 mile of private road to leave my grandmother's house with over a foot of snow just about any car was hopeless and no snow plow was coming we considered our options the first thing we tried was driving over the snow we made it about 20 ft before losing traction and starting to drift sideways toward a ravine fortunately this was still in the driveway so we could just leave it there next we started shoveling a path now anyone who has shoveled snow probably is finding that notion quite laughable because shoveling a mile of snow by hand is really not feasible it only took a few feet of shoveled road to understand that running out of ideas we considered Gathering our things and Hiking out to the main road and summoning a family member to pick us up but among other logistical issues that are too tedious for this story the roads were in no state for anyone to be driving on snow isn't a huge problem in places that are prepared for it but in the Seattle area even a little snow is basically the apocalypse and we had a foot of it in the end we decided we'd wait and pray for the power to return before 7:00 a. m.

the next day our scheduled launch time we did have a build I had uploaded a week prior that was in somewhat of a launchable state over the phone I was able to get my brother in a neighboring City with power logged into steam and the partner site ready to hit the launch button if power didn't return to us in time it was a dark moment for me it wasn't so much that I was worried things would go badly without the most up-to-date build though I was worried about that or that people wouldn't be understanding of the slightly delayed updates due to our snowstorm situation but just that I had been dreaming about launch day for 5 years I'd always envisioned being able to watch it all unfold from my own workstation with my own internet I found myself on the eve of our launch not even excited excited about the big day but rather just praying through gritted teeth that the power would return at 4:30 a. m. just 2 and half hours before our launch time the power returned I uploaded the latest build with the force of a thousand well-lit rooms and by The Guiding Light of electricity I went into the kitchen for a pre-launch snack there on the counter I found this while I was trying to jump start cars and shovel snow the night before jacine had secretly made an eastshade Pie by candle of uncooked oats peanut butter and honey she had made the only thing she could come up with without an oven or burner I cried like a baby in all the madness I hadn't thought to do anything to make the day special or memorable I was too worried about the power to savor the momentousness of the occasion when I saw the eade pie she had thought to make it finally felt like a special day even now if I think about that pie I tear [Music] up as far as as the launch day itself it went pretty smoothly All Things Considered we did have one absurd bug with the Russian localization which we fixed within a few hours a few days earlier we caught that some of the text Fields were overflowing in Russian so I scaled the Russian font down globally to 90% on my ultra quick verification test everything looked Dandy but if I had kept playing for another minute I would have seen a ridiculous problem I was doing 90% of the current font size the result was that the font shrank a tiny bit each time the textt field was repopulated until you get something like this for months I was getting bug reports of that because all the torrent sites instantly uploaded the 1.