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Rethinking Divine Dreams?

5 years ago - Edited 5 years ago1,843 words

I love my ideas for Divine Dreams, but making enough money from them is such a daunting prospect that maybe I should rethink what I'm trying to do.

Normally I'd write a post about my progress with this at the end of the week, but I feel quite... shaken, uncertain, about it all at the moment, or more specifically about ever making any money from it, so I want to write about it for the hope of catharsis if nothing else.

The task I gave myself this week was to finish revising the characters and story plans. Here's an idea I had for how to handle weapons and the music thing I talked about last weekend:



Dayvha's weapons would be a pair of resonars, which are slender crystal swords, rapier-like, which when rubbed against one another produce musical tones. He uses two, meaning that his basic attack is a double attack (which seems fun for the player), and he can play them like a fiddle (which is associated with the devil) to create music. You'd be able to equip two at once, separately, which I'd like as a player too.

Since the miasma is given form by subconscious emotion, music could be a good medium for this. It doesn't affect the miasma directly, sonically, but rather it's just a means by which conscious minds can make themselves feel particular emotions. Spellcasters, then, would largely or even exclusively be musicians. This means that 3 of the 9 main characters I'd previously planned to have instruments (two pictured here) would just be using those instruments to cast spells. It's kind of like a magic wand, but in that case it's mostly just "it's a conduit for magic because magic", whereas here I feel the music-swells-emotions thing is relatable with real experience.

I also like the term 'resonar', from 'resonate', which has meanings relating to both music and emotion.

I also wondered about the term 'spelody' or 'spellody' (spell + melody) for magic, and perhaps they could have a rhythmic input for their reactions, kind of like the normal physical reactions but with multiple points to hit (with the same button each time). Maybe the spell would actually have a hit/damage effect for every note; it seems viscerally appealing in a gameplay sense, and it'd mean I could use essentially the same mechanics for the dual hits of Dayvha's resonars.



I get lost in and enjoy planning like that. Coming up with this big world with deep lore, intriguing characters... I have a couple of design documents, one with around 200 pages of stream-of-consciousness notes, the other a more formal laying-out of ideas from those notes in a final plan for the series. My main task at the moment is to decide on the plot for that final document.

But as I mentioned previously, I feel shaken, by a bunch of factors I suppose. It's hard to concentrate, and I don't even know if this is what I should be doing.

MARDEK generated a few thousand dollars on Steam, but as grateful as I am of that, it's just not enough to pay the bills for any significant amount of time. I know it's an old port and everything, so it's quite impressive considering that, especially since I did no advertising, but still, it's so bleak. It'd be a very different situation if I'd got $100k for it or something, but obviously that's not been the case.

I'd been hoping that with Divine Dreams, there might be mounting interest in the chapters. Perhaps the first would get a fairly mediocre response, but in time I could build up to something great with the third. This is what happened with MARDEK.

However, someone commented on the previous post with a link to ∞ this article ∞, which talks about the unique challenges of promoting an episodic game. Most notably, it seems that the buzz really dies down after the first installment, even for huge games with enormous teams behind them.

I'm thankful that this person commented about this, since it's something I need to think about now rather than wasting months and facing it more harshly anyway. At least I'm at the point now where potential changes could be made.

I'd also talked about the money woes on Twitter, and someone seemed really offended by it because - in their eyes - it made me seem unappreciative of their enthusiasm when they bought MARDEK as soon as the option was available. I tweeted again about the possibly-taboo nature of being so open about my earnings - I share it for the same reason I share the rest of the journey, but I can understand the discomfort it might bring - and the hashtag #GameDevPaidMe was mentioned as a case where a lot of people in this line of work were being encouraged to be more open about their income. I thought it'd be a bunch of indies talking about how they've managed to scrape by, or not.

Instead what I saw were a lot of tweets by people talking about their professional roles in big, proper games dev teams with yearly salaries like 60k or 115k for being a 'Lead Programmer' or 'Contributing Artist' or whatever.

It made me feel really sick, knowing that this is the kind of money probably a whole lot of people fairly casually make... Some of you reading probably have salaries like that. It spurred lots of thoughts about how other people's life events have been so much luckier than mine such that they had both the mental and practical skills and the right opportunities for these paths to manifest for them. Lots of dwelling on my own lack of luck. I've just ended up with crippling mental issues and literal brain cancer, living in a little town where old people come to die, and I just don't feel capable of managing a more typical career path. Jumping off a cliff registers to my demons as a much more accessible and less painful path for me.

But this isn't a personal post, so I'll leave it at that.



I do wonder what to do about Divine Dreams though. It'd be terrible if I planned this three-Chapter series, only for the first to be a Sindrel-Song-scale flop and the others to do even worse because they'll essentially require the first one to make any sense.

One option might be to instead tell separate stories using essentially the same engine but without dependencies on previous installments. But the characters and story I've spent all year planning are so intertwined, and so large, that I can't see how I could extract some pieces either to make some smaller stories or to reduce the scale of this one so it could be released in one go.

Perhaps if I were to release "Divine Dreams", "Divine Dreams II", and "Divine Dreams III", as sequels, rather than calling it an episodic series from the start, it might feel different, register differently in people's minds... especially since each part would be (presumably?) a lot longer than the length of episodes in other episodic games (which I've not actually played, though I assume they're brief, like 1-2 hours or something?). Each of these three Chapters would be a length somewhere in between MARDEK 2 and MARDEK 3. Narratively, they're more like three Star Wars episodes than, say, an episodic series like The Mandalorian.

Or maybe even if it wouldn't reach some wide, barely-caring audience visible in PR stats, it might attract enough of a devoted - if small - following to fund development of additional chapters on Patreon and/or Kickstarter?

Or what if I wrote separate stories about individual characters, or pairs of characters, and brought them together eventually in some Avengers-style teamup if things went well? Or if they didn't, I wouldn't need to.

I don't know... It'll be a years-long commitment, and if the first is a flop, what then? Do I keep trying to make the other two anyway, hoping for the best? Abandon it, like so many other things?



Alternatively, I could try making something else, like a 3D adaptation of Alora Fane: Creation, that game I made a few years ago which lets players create their own adventures... But it all just feels like going in circles.

I don't know... I love the creative work and I know at least some people would love seeing an epic-scale Divine Dreams. It's just so frustrating how many people you have to reach in order to make it financially viable. It's not the case for all those other people who earn tens of thousands per year but only really have to worry about impressing their superior(s) and coworkers. Small, relatively comfortable worlds. I wish I could make enough money by appealing to a few hundred people at most, making something we can all really love... It's such a shame that's not possible because of how little each individual pays.

I don't know. I'm so depressed by this. I've been tracking my moods like a maniac for many months now, on a 7-point scale from abysmal to ecstatic, and this is the first time since I started recording that I've used the lowest number on that scale. I haven't felt this bad in ages, and it's all because my damn mental issues making promoting my work so difficult. I think I can make interesting things! What I struggle to make is enough people interested in them.

Perhaps I should just take a couple of weeks off doing any development, just... reading other indie devs' stories, playing their games, something like that... I've come this far with the games thing that it feels like such a waste to give it up, but there's obviously a lot I don't know because I just avoid so much. I've talked about breaking out of my shell so many times now, but due to the severity of my mental issues, it's always baby steps at best. I was talking about all this months ago... but maybe those baby steps do add up?

I suppose it's this crushing comparison that I fear most, by the way. Seeing how well other people are doing brings out severe hopelessness and revives the (thankfully long-dormant) suicidal ideation, which obviously isn't good. It's not something that could be fixed with drugs or therapy either; I need accomplishments, security, for that.

Anyway, sorry if this post is more personal even though it's not pushed away to that purple blog section fewer people are interested in reading. If I do make a major change to my direction, though, obviously that's very important for Divine Dreams.

To be clear, I'd be entirely happy to work on Divine Dreams for the next few years. The issue is entirely with earning enough money from it to actually do that. Either way I intend to do something with the engine and assets I've already made.