Alora Fane

Here's an interesting video by a dev who's been working on the same game (sort of) for five years (do you think I'm slow??), who gets a lot of attention on his well-made Youtube videos, though surprisingly that doesn't seem to translate to Twitter followers, which makes me wonder how well attention on any social media translates to actual sales in the end.

From the title - "How NOT to make an indie game" - I assumed he'd talk about working for years on something and failing financially in the end, and was trying to make at least something out of it by doing a potentially-viral postmortem, but instead he talked about a game he's worked on for years... but hasn't actually finished yet, so there's no way to gauge its success.

Interestingly, I've actually come across this game in my attempts to follow indie devs on Twitter, to gauge the also-currently-in-production competition and see what's working or not. ∞ His Twitter account ∞ currently has 439 followers, and his tweets seem to get around 10-20 likes, usually. (I have 546 followers and get around 20-30 likes per tweet usually. From what I've seen, decently successful indie devs have around 2000-4000 followers but don't usually get many more likes than this?)

When I first found that game and the associated Twitter account, honestly I felt sorry for him, seeing it as one of the many doomed-to-failure quirky projects which was going to cause its developer a lot of pain (Atonal Dreams is probably similar, really, so I'm looking forward to that).

But that video has ~75k views. A lot of his update videos have 1-3k views, and he's had a couple of viral hits at 445k and 257k views. Seems the ones with the most hits talk about other games or general tips or experiences rather than his specific game, though.

He seems to be particularly good at making videos! They're well-produced, and entertaining to watch. He also mentions in the one that I linked to that he is or was in the process of getting a programming-based degree, which I find interesting since his art quality seems unusually high (so enviably neat and tidy and stylised!) to the point where I assumed he'd been working with a specialist artist. Interesting where people choose to specialise.

I've considered making videos instead of blog posts (which get a few hundred views if I'm lucky) to report on my development progress, and I wonder if they'd get more attention if I did. (Technically I do post to Youtube, as I did yesterday, but they're not really produced videos, and are lucky to get 200 views.)

But I also wonder to what extent getting youtube attention would even translate to sales. Obviously they're not translating to Twitter followers in a big way, though maybe he doesn't care about Twitter anyway if he's already getting that much Youtube attention?

He has a demo out, though it's not possible for anyone except the owners to see the number of wishlists, unfortunately.

As for the content of that video, I wanted to mention it because some people probably think I'm being quite slow with Atonal Dreams since it's taking days to finish some things rather than minutes. This person's spent five years on his first game! Things really do take an enormously long time. Makes me feel less bad about spending six months on Sindrel Song...

He talks about the importance of making a prototype which is fun to play before starting on detailing it. I think this is more important when you're trying to do something completely novel, whereas if you're just doing something like he suggests - making "[Familiar game] but with [unique aspect]" - as I feel I kind of am with Atonal Dreams, then I don't think it's as important. I suppose I'm seeing the Atonal Dreams demo - which is hopefully close now - as serving that purpose. Notably though, I did feel that Sindrel Song was fun in its earliest form, before adding the actual content, though perhaps I should have shown it to more people and been more open to making drastic changes. As if it's trivial to just find all those hypothetical people though! I wonder how many people this guy found, and how he found them.

Also, he talks about how in the beginning, he was trying to cram in an assortment of desired features with little consideration for how they harmonise, and he kept changing his mind about everything... but it sounds like he's still doing a similar thing even in the second complete revision. Cramming in whatever comes to mind, making a huge game with an enormous world and a ton of details etc. Maybe this is something that people like to make and to play, but it's something that I'm trying to avoid myself. I'm trying to keep Atonal Dreams straight to the point as much as I can (even that takes a long time though).

(There's something else I wanted to talk about which is related to that, but I'll write another post about it instead.)

Anyway, I wanted to share this partly because it's valuable for me to look at these things myself, but also to give some of you who think I'm being slow something to directly compare to.

Personally I think his game looks interesting and amazingly well-produced for a first game, and I'll likely play it when I can, just because I've become at least a little bit invested now. Maybe I should play the demo, actually. But I'll be particularly curious to see how long it takes to finish after spending this long on it, and how much money it'll make if he's getting that many views on Youtube but so few on Twitter.

I also admire his patience if he could stick with one project for as long as he has!

1 COMMENTS

purplerabbits148~4Y

It's been a while since I last commented. Getting tied down by life and attempting to make my own game before Uni's start back up. o/

I know games like Owlboy and Cuphead have taken over 5 years of development time. Owlboy took 10 years, wheras Cuphead had a long development cycle for having hand drawn animations for everything.

It's hard to saw which platform would lead to the most sales. I think most people take a shotgun approach and announce things on every platform in the hopes that it'll translate to some form of sales.

I know that if a game gets viral on youtube, like Five Nights at Freddies, that'll be a boost in attention on the game. I mean look at Scott now he's made a franchise.

Though virality is a double edge sword. YandereDev got a lot of attention for his game, Yandere Simulator, and it's been in development for over 6 years and counting. And the biggest update he has now is that the 1st rival of 10 is now avaliable in the "demo". I use quotes because it's more a build than an actual demo. He did benefit from going viral when youtubers like Markiplier and Pewdiepie played the early access version of the game.But no matter how much attention he got, it really doesnt matter if he is incompetent at making a game. (Seriously looking at screenshots from the early builds and the "demo" there's so little change, aside from all the easter eggs and non essentials. There wasnt even a fuctioning save button while there's so much effort to put the ability to change the style and colour of the Main character.)

Not sure how to transition from the above but here we go xD
It's interesting to see where the priority is for the development of different games. Whether it's the game loop, story, or aestetic of a game, I think it depends on what you are doing. For example Square Enix's way of making games tend to start with the overall look and feel of the game. One game, The World Ends with You, has a beautiful aesthetic and an interesting mechanic for playing. Though not all games in Square Enix's library would be as well recieved because even though the game is pretty there's subpar substance.

For games like visual novels, (do you consider them games?), Theres not much to do as a typical game , so the focus really needs to be on the story it tells to make things fun. Though on a tangent, there is a category of visual novels where its just tragedy , like a story about a couple but then one partner catches an incjrable disease and the rest of the game follows their relationshio knowing there's only tragedy at the end, so its not "fun" in the typical sense, but captivating in story.

And another transition here xD
I'm interested in seeing how the dev you showcased will do in the future xD

Apologizes for the rambling, my sleep schedule is broken and it's 4 AM. I have a feeling I lost cohesiveness in what I meant to say xD

It's been a while since I last commented. Getting tied down by life and attempting to make my own game before Uni's start back up. \o/

I know games like Owlboy and Cuphead have taken over 5 years of development time. Owlboy took 10 years, wheras Cuphead had a long development cycle for having hand drawn animations for everything.

It's hard to saw which platform would lead to the most sales. I think most people take a shotgun approach and announce things on every platform in the hopes that it'll translate to some form of sales.

I know that if a game gets viral on youtube, like Five Nights at Freddies, that'll be a boost in attention on the game. I mean look at Scott now he's made a franchise.

Though virality is a double edge sword. YandereDev got a lot of attention for his game, Yandere Simulator, and it's been in development for over 6 years and counting. And the biggest update he has now is that the 1st rival of 10 is now avaliable in the "demo". I use quotes because it's more a build than an actual demo. He did benefit from going viral when youtubers like Markiplier and Pewdiepie played the early access version of the game.But no matter how much attention he got, it really doesnt matter if he is incompetent at making a game. (Seriously looking at screenshots from the early builds and the "demo" there's so little change, aside from all the easter eggs and non essentials. There wasnt even a fuctioning save button while there's so much effort to put the ability to change the style and colour of the Main character.)

Not sure how to transition from the above but here we go xD
It's interesting to see where the priority is for the development of different games. Whether it's the game loop, story, or aestetic of a game, I think it depends on what you are doing. For example Square Enix's way of making games tend to start with the overall look and feel of the game. One game, The World Ends with You, has a beautiful aesthetic and an interesting mechanic for playing. Though not all games in Square Enix's library would be as well recieved because even though the game is pretty there's subpar substance.

For games like visual novels, (do you consider them games?), Theres not much to do as a typical game , so the focus really needs to be on the story it tells to make things fun. Though on a tangent, there is a category of visual novels where its just tragedy , like a story about a couple but then one partner catches an incjrable disease and the rest of the game follows their relationshio knowing there's only tragedy at the end, so its not "fun" in the typical sense, but captivating in story.

And another transition here xD
I'm interested in seeing how the dev you showcased will do in the future xD

Apologizes for the rambling, my sleep schedule is broken and it's 4 AM. I have a feeling I lost cohesiveness in what I meant to say xD