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A Reddit thread about an indie game announcement...

5 years ago2,988 words

I need to release Sindrel Song on Steam, and I'll be devoting this week to that exclusively rather than getting distracted with MARDEK or Belief or whatever like I have for the past few weeks. Since I don't have anyone to talk with during the process, but it helps to do so, I'm writing out my thoughts and observations in this post. Specifically, here are some observations and thoughts about a Reddit thread where an indie developer announced the completion of their new game...

A few days ago, I was checking Reddit's r/all, and saw ∞ this post ∞ from r/gaming, titled "After 2 years, today I achieved my dream of releasing my own game. I am so excited, nervous, and proud!" The post is just a gif with no writing. Notably, it had a ton of upvotes, comments, and awards.

I thought a couple of things from this. One was that reading the reaction to this would be a good way of preparing myself for feedback Sindrel Song might get. Another was that maybe I could try posting about that on Reddit myself, to see how that goes? If this got a response like this, maybe I could too?

I've been procrastinating actually reading the thread though; I've had it open in a tab for days. There was always something else to focus my attention on, and I suppose knowing that something needs to be done, and that it has the potential to provoke anxiety, leads to avoidance behaviour. While a lot of it's due to my ridiculous mental issues, you might be familiar with a similar feeling when you had assignments to do but just kept putting them off until just before the deadline. If there was no deadline, how long do you think it'd take you to actually get around to them?

Anyway, it feels weird quoting random internet people's comments (though I suppose that's what the previous post did as well), but some of them stood out to me and I want to do that here.

The top comment says:



I saw that comment a few days ago, and it gave me hope. I've heard stories about the Reddit mob's supportive kindness, more than about them tearing anyone down, and I wondered whether me posting about making a game about mental illness while recovering from brain cancer surgery might attract that kind of support and help draw eyes to the game. Reddit seems generally supportive of mental struggles, or at least that's the impression I've got.

But looking into it deeper reveals the darker minds who'd rather jab and doubt than praise and hug. There's always going to be some. There are some on this little blog, obscure as it is.

Some of them assumed (or rather spoke with conviction) that this post must have been paid for by the developer, that they're buying views and reviews and that's just the way it always goes. ∞ Astroturfing ∞. The developer replied and said the idea was ridiculous. I hope they're telling the truth there.

Here's an exchange I found amusing:



Haha. I think that the fact that I've made everything myself in Sindrel Song is remarkable. Usually games "made by one person!" have someone else do the music or maybe the graphics (which to me seems like it's entirely wrong to say one person did it all); someone else made this one's soundtrack. The only thing I can't do is the marketing, obviously, because of my CRIPPLING ISSUES which I suppose balance the scales against the skills.

A lot of people seem not to appreciate the weight of that accomplishment though because they don't understand what goes into making a game, or the difficulty involved in any of those skills because they've never tried them themselves. That's come up on this blog for sure, and it's in this Reddit thread too, though others are correcting their ignorance, apparently.

A common theme I'm seeing is "reminds me of [another game reminiscent of this one]". That's only natural, of course. People have done that on this blog too. I wonder what Sindrel Song might be compared to.

The further down I go in the thread, the more negativity I see from people deriding it as an 'ad', or as the same type of game they've seen many times before. I've browsed Reddit a bit over the past year or so, but never r/gaming, so I don't know what's posted there usually. Maybe posts like this one aren't uncommon?

Here's an exchange:



I wonder what it's like to be someone like that. Completely blind to others' lives and struggles in one sense, but apparently unable to ignore them in another. Oh dear, once a month, someone's trying to promote something they've poured a lot of time and heart into in the hope others might get something positive out of it? How could anyone endure such an onslaught??

This sentiment seems to be repeating and drowning out any positivity the further I go down. Criticism, too, about it being too generic or lazily-designed or whatever else (unlike the countless military shooters out there, of course).

As I continue to scroll, I see more and more posts just saying "looks bad", or, comically, "Congrats on releasing a game. That's not an easy task. That being said, this doesn't look good".

After pushing through a thick clump of negative dismissal and frustration at how "this is turning into an ad sub" etc, there are some short positive comments saying it 'looks good', or 'I'll buying this right away!'. So that's something? They seem to go against the hive mind though and aren't upvoted (or, if other comments are to be believed, they're just paid-for bot comments).

Or more accurately, I get the feeling of a difference between 'hardcore regulars' and 'drop-in casuals', kind of like people in a pub or a bar or something. The regulars complain sourly about this or that happening repeatedly, while the rest don't linger there long enough to even notice or care. Often it's their first and only time there. I suppose all community places end up like this. It was the case on Fig Hunter, back in the day. The regulars, of course, form a dense clump of resistance to certain ideas everyone else might welcome or ignore. They feel they should have the say about what goes in their chosen environment, but the fact is they're just a (loud) minority.

Several people also mention that they want it on consoles because they can't play on PC. There are more and more of these the more that I read. I've been thinking once I release on Steam, I'll reach 'most people' who play games, but is it just going to lead to comments like this? "Looks cool, can't wait until it comes out on my Apple Watch and my talking toilet's LCD screen, so I can play it while birthing chocolate children!"

There are also a lot of comments saying "Löng return"; is this a meme I'm unaware of? Or are they just getting that from the styling of the title? Weird how many people said it. I'm assuming umlauted letters are the meme, applied to this specific case in this way.

...And there are 900 more comments that might very well be more of these "looks good, can't wait to play!" ones. Or "can't play it until it comes out on Switch/PS4". I can't sit here all day reading them though.

I'll probably play this game myself, just because I'm curious to compare to other indie games, but it's much more difficult playing any that are very similar to - but better than - what I'm trying to do myself (I'm thinking of you, Undertale... I'll muster up the courage one day, I hope).

Notably, it's self-published on Steam. There are 22 reviews currently, all positive. I don't know how many sales it's got, though. Someone linked to ∞ steamspy ∞ when the Sonny remake came up, which revealed the rough number of players (between 50 and 100k for that), but this game's not coming up in search results as far as I can tell. It's only been out for a few days.



So there are a few things that I got out of going through this:

Posting about indie games with accompanying 'sob stories' seems to be a common thing on r/gaming. This irritates certain kinds of people - presumably regulars - who don't like the sub being overrun with 'ads' (I suppose they'd rather just have reposted memes?).

Posts like this have the potential to attract a lot of comments and attention to the game. From what I can tell, the negative comments seem to come quickly and spark discussion, while the more positive, interested ones trickle in over time and tend not to spark any discussion. I've noticed a similar thing on this blog, where the few malcontents pounce on the post within a few hours, with more positive comments sometimes taking more time to manifest.

The negative commenters didn't actually buy the game and as such couldn't leave bad reviews, in this case at least. So the positive reviews all came from people who at least had the interest to take the plunge. Some were from people who got the game for free, as seems to usually be the case.

It's hard to say how much this kind of Reddit attention would convert into actual sales, though. I wonder if this was profitable.



I recently learned the word 'anodyne' from someone using it on Reddit. I even used it in a reply to a comment on this blog because I'm such a clever intellectual. It sounds a bit pretentious, but it's also a word I wish I knew sooner because it's quite useful when considering things like this.


anodyne - adjective - not likely to provoke dissent or offense; inoffensive, often deliberately so.


I feel that this game is anodyne. This isn't a bad thing. I get the impression that it's devoid of anything surprising or controversial, that the only issues to be found would be with the graphics or the gameplay. There's a 'story', but I can't imagine there's anything mentally challenging about it. I'm assuming there's no dialogue. Descriptions of it seem to be written to appeal to people who want something easy and breezy. Dismissals regard it as lacking anything unique.

I recently mentioned that I'd started playing the mobile game Pokemon Masters. That's interesting because it puts a whole lot of focus on the human characters, giving them all a lot of dialogue and making half the gameplay sections just 'story' bits where you watch a handful of them just talk among one another at length. A somewhat odd choice, for a Pokemon game, and a mobile one at that; it's got way more dialogue and character than any other Pokemon game that I've played before (and they've approached character expression in a similar technical way to how I've been trying to, with poses and facial expressions that change with each dialogue balloon, though on a much more professional level of course). There's a lot about it that I appreciate.

But because Pokemon's trying to target a general, young audience, and it can't risk being offensive, it, too, ends up being anodyne. All the characters are roughly the same; a whole lot of them are bouncy, happy young women, and pretty much all of them have a personality based around loving and being kind to Pokemon and wanting to be the best trainer or whatever. Individual differences take the form of mad libs style hobbies (he's a rock climber, she owns a jewellery store), or singular personal quirks that get repeated endlessly (apparently Barry jokes about 'fining' people). It's understandable why it's done; you couldn't exactly get away with having a character who has an uncomfortable sexual attraction to Pokemon but wishes they didn't, for example, or one who'd used a Pokemon to kill another in a battle as a child and now they're haunted by the trauma of that. But of course it's less interesting because they couldn't take any risks. Dialogue's the thing I love most in games, but I find it more of a chore than anything in this because I already know what they're going to say in advance and there are never any surprising or novel thoughts.

I think that one of the strengths of indie development is that you can take those risks, which wouldn't exactly be safe for someone with a professional reputation to uphold or demographics to successfully appease.

I wouldn't say that Sindrel Song is the most controversial, offensive thing in the world, but I do wonder whether some of what it explores might be less anodyne than things like this game. That's not necessarily a good thing, or a bad one; it's just a thing, and I wonder whether because of that, feedback on it might be harsher or more divided.

Or maybe I'm wrong and it's no less bland than anything else? I obviously see it differently to other people as the one who made it.

This is something that I've been wondering about for a while, though. If a game has no dialogue, then chances of potentially upsetting people are very low, unless there are gameplay faults. But packing a game with lots of dialogue, especially dialogue which at times takes itself seriously, or which explores and even jokes about darker things, means there's a lot of room for emotions being conflicted or hurt.

That's a bit of a tangent, but I suppose I compare my game to this, and wonder how much of the reaction to this I can extrapolate to my own game. I think Sindrel Song is less generic, but the potentially disagreeable characterisation might lead to more of a mixed response.

Or maybe people will just won't enjoy the difficulty and it'll get criticism for that reason? We'll see!!



I meant to explore more than just this one Reddit thread in this post, but I suppose I got carried away, which is so rare for me. Normally I'm so succinct. There's more that I need to look into, but just looking into this has been an exercise in breaking down mental barriers. I need to keep reminding myself that the fear tends to dissipate almost as soon as I've broken through the barrier... I just take forever to take that first step. Just like how the hardest part about doing homework - or any kind of work - can be getting started. And that's especially difficult if there's nobody else setting a deadline or giving you orders.

I might post in Reddit about Sindrel Song anyway; it can't hurt, can it? Can it?? Not for a while though, probably. The response this got is making me wonder whether to self-publish... but I'm still so uncertain about that, since there are pros and cons of both going with or without a publisher. That's the biggest question I need to tackle next... To embrace freedom and go it alone, or try to negotiate a business partnership in a way I find incredibly uncomfortable?

This developer already had a full-time job and made this game on the side, so money wasn't an issue for them. It's more of an issue for me though.

So hmm. I'm thinking about it. I'll probably keep posting about it.

Actually, some of you have mentioned other developers' blogs before. Do they tend to write about the details of the release process in a way that might be valuable for me to read? Or is it something that generally goes on behind the scenes, never really spoken of? I wonder if the Sonny guy (Krin?) had a good experience working with Armor Games.