What I Learnt from Making My First Game

You can't try to force everyone to play your game

I don't know when I became vaguely insufferable when it came to my game. It definitely wasn't at the start when I was working on it quietly and wasn't sure that I really had anything particularly exciting. It wasn't at the end, when a friend of mine that agreed to test it on Steam didn't even load the app up before telling me it was 'really excellent', which is a great compliment and should be taken as such but isn't all that useful for trying to get a sense of how good your game might be directly before launch.

However, I found that people weren't as excited about the game that I was making as I was, which made a lot of sense and stopped me going on about it enthusiastically to anyone that would listen, but, also, playing a pre-release game is actually hard work, and you shouldn't expect your buddies to do it for free.

Of course, if they want a copy, hand it over. Free feedback is the best.



Even a text adventure has bugs

One time, I spent three hours trying to work out why a passage was broken, discovering after I painfully went through the entire text and the text of the passages that link into it that I'd missed a single comma, breaking everything on the page.

I've never been a fantastic proof-reader, despite my profession, and when you're playing with code even a minor typo can have cataclysmic effects. If everything breaks, that's actually preferable to several of the bugs you might get by missing a single detail, often leading to problems that are nearly impossible to notice and fix until you launch.



No one cares about your game unless it's good and you're lucky

Not your buddies, not your friends, and not even the press. I initially launched my game on Itch.io and dutifully sent out a fairly decent press release, aping the style of the hundreds of press releases I'd received over the years. I discussed the press release and got a press list from a friend who also straddles the line between game developer and journalist, although her games are, admittedly, much better and aren't entirely text based.

I thought I had something noteworthy, but not a single member of the press responded. This comes largely because I had a self-inflated sense of how well my indie game would actually do. I'd heard of the indie success stories and naively assumed my game was good enough to get noticed.

I was wrong, mostly through my arrogance, but it's given me interesting information to take forwards. When I launched on Itch.io, 500 people downloaded my pay-what-you-want game; only six people paid for it. I made £42, which wasn't bad for 18 months of work.