The first Lower World Story public demo is out now!
Discussing the past and future of (blogging about) my tactical RPG project
That’s right, the first public demo for the game I’ve been working on since last year is out now on itch! If you haven’t seen it before I highly recommend at least checking out the store page before reading the rest of this post.
There’s a video on that page where (after a masterfully edited action-packed trailer) I talk a bit about the past and future of this project’s development. That video marks the end of my plans to vlog the game’s development (mostly, I might still make the occasional announcement video here and there), and I figured, what better way to break in this blog than to pedantically expand on whatever I was saying there!
When I started making those videos my thinking was something along the lines of “Video Games are cool but you can’t really regularly put out a really great, polished product the same way you can with other kinds of internet content (unless you only make tiny prototypes), which makes it difficult for an unknown developer with very little artistic skill to garner attention online. But if I make regular devlogs I can develop the game I want to and produce regular content for my (future) adoring fans, not to mention leverage the youtube algorithm. And look at all these other developers on youtube making it work, this is totally doable! Most likely I won’t reach quite that level of success, but I’m sure it’s worth trying out.” Now, after a year of actually making devlogs, my thinking hasn’t actually changed too much, it’s just (not unexpectedly) developed quite a few caveats that I’ll be getting into.
First though I want to say I definitely don’t regret making those videos, that last part about it being worth it turned out to be entirely true. I’m now way more comfortable in professional editing software, I know what my strengths as a video producer are, I know I can produce a decent video if I ever need to (as well as about how long it’ll take), and, most importantly, it helped me land my first job as a game programmer by being something in my portfolio that really put my sense of humor and adaptability on display (which, turns out, is pretty important in tight-knit indie development environments).
So then, why switch over to text based blogging? Well… ever notice notice how popular youtube game devs (except for Jonas Tyroller) tend to either produce very small games or seem to get stuck working on the same project forever? Turns out making good youtube videos is just as hard as making any other kind of art (shocker), and doing it regularly is almost a full time job. As fun as those videos were to make, putting out even just one of decent quality per month would have left me with upsettingly little time to actually develop my game. Maybe if I was really into making youtube videos as an end, the same way I’m into making games, I would have been faster and happier working on them, but a lot of the time I just felt like they were slowing me down when it came to the stuff I actually cared about. So here we are. I figure I can still achieve most of the marketing value (and dopaminergic gratification) that I wanted out of those videos for a fraction of the effort just by focusing more on substack and twitter, and people on substack will probably be more interested in the kind of game I’m making than the average youtube viewer anyway. Plus, this way I can explore a whole bunch of other ideas that I really didn’t care enough about to turn into full videos. If you’re interested, you can-
…yeah that.