I am restarting this blog with a small game dev life update! I’m so happy it’s getting to be springtime, and the (slightly) warmer weather makes me feel a little more motivated on my various creative projects. One difficult aspect of solo game development is the lack of outside pressure/goals. Everything is self-determined and while that can be incredibly freeing, sometimes the lack of external structure gets me. Here’s hoping that committing myself to blog updates will remedy that.
On Hearth’s Pantheon
Hearth’s Pantheon is my fairly big JRPG project that I’ve been working on (on and off) since about 2020, or a little before. I began it using the Monogame framework because I wanted to learn to code at the same time, and since I knew absolutely nothing, I didn’t want to use a more complex engine. My reasoning was that if there was an error, I wanted to be sure it was a programming error arising from my ignorance, not an engine quirk (by the way, I stand by that reasoning if you are a beginning game developer and programmer-- I got very comfortable with C#, too). However, it does turn out that doing things the Monogame way takes a long time, so I switched to GameMaker and went ~lightning speed~
So, what’s it about? It’s about four misfit kids who must help a bunch of amnesiac ghosts who have taken over Hearth Island. The gameplay is a mixture of walk-and-talk adventure and turn-based battle. By battling, you restore their memories little by little, and learn about the ancient past of Hearth Island. You restore Big Memories by battling and healing the Guardians of Hearth Island-- the titular “pantheon” of dying deities. Reveal the past to solve problems in the present-- and future! Themes include: sense of place! ecological restoration! life and renewal after disaster!
As of 2023, I have about two hours of gameplay, up to the first boss/Guardian battle. All of that is included in my somewhat-buggy demo, that you can download on itch.io. Unfortunately, since late last year the game is on hiatus, which I really hope will ultimately be temporary. I still love the game and the characters and the story, but there are several bottlenecks that kind of all converged at the same time.
First of all, there’s the size of the game. I *thought* I was making a reasonably sized game for a solo dev, but that may not be the case. Again, I started this project (and concocted the story and-- importantly-- number of Guardians) years ago when I didn’t have much experience in planning a big project. I have ten bosses/Guardians planned for the final game, all of which are important to the story. Since the demo only takes us to the first boss and that alone amounted to two (plus) hours of gameplay, well, you see the issue…. I was prepared to make a twenty hour game, but QA and debugging really caught up to me in making the demo. It was just me and husband losing our minds playing the same portion of the demo over and over and over. It was a herculean and tedious and time-consuming task, and I just don’t know how to scale that up. To be fair, I suppose a lot of the systems won’t need to be endlessly tested now that I have the demo as a microcosm of the entire game. But still it scares me to put the hundreds of hours of effort into completing this story only to run into this bottleneck of work. I don’t have the resources to hire a QA person, and with crowdfunding what it is these days, I don’t see how I can get that money. I tried and, sadly, failed to find a publisher that would help with these sorts of things. And yes, as a solodev, the game is entirely in my control, so of course I could shorten the game/adjust the story/whatever. But that would be an exercise in humility, and I’m not quite ready to do that.
Second, the size of the game also plays into its “marketing”. Back in 2022 and early 2023, I was posting regularly to Twitter, as the only social media I really used. Video is not appealing to me, so Twitter as the only popular text-based platform was appealing in that way. And, lots of game devs, publishers, streamers, and gamers used the platform. I honestly didn’t like it, and I wasn’t terribly good at it, but I stuck with it even though I had an embarrassing small number of followers. Then there was the Elon Musk takeover and a lot of people left, the algorithm changed, and the site started to attract a certain unsavory audience. Once the app name changed to “X,” I decided to delete my account on the grounds that I wouldn’t sign up for “X” if it were a brand new platform, even if all the best people were on there. Did this hurt me? Probably yes. But with the paltry returns I was getting from Twitter in the first place, it didn’t seem like too large of a sacrifice to maintain my integrity regarding internet presence and app usage. I tried TikTok for a minute, but felt gross and deleted that too. And now there’s all this talk of a ban, so TikTok may not remain the king of indie game marketing for long.
Thus, the marketing avenues available for tiny solo devs are dwindling and changing as we speak, so the thought of putting in, again, hundreds of hours of effort to complete my game, only to have zero avenues to show to anyone… that doesn’t feel so hot either.
That leaves us with the option of shelving the project for now. I like this option because it opens up my time for new projects, because I like and miss game dev. I haven’t been doing it as regularly because I’m so distraught about Hearth’s Pantheon. I want to write stories that exist in an interactive world, I want to create the art and music, and I want to program it all because I like all of those aspects of “computer” games.
As for the future of Hearth’s Pantheon, I love the story and characters very much, so I will definitely be returning to this project in one way or another. I will probably have to rethink pretty much everything about this game, and that’ll take time, but hopefully someday Hearth’s Pantheon will be a consummate playable experience.
Onto New Projects
Thus, I have decided to make a smaller, more manageable game that may be only semi-commercial. I have half a mind to release it only on itch.io and other, more user-controlled platforms. I’m going to do the things that make me enjoy game dev, and that means doing everything pretty much against rational advice. I’m going to program it in C because I’ve always wanted to learn C, and I rlike the idea of doing retro game programming. I like the idea of making my own engine and not being beholden to corporate game engines. It’ll be a small adventure game with rich characters and themes because that what gets me motivated. I don’t have much on it yet, but this is where I’m headed for now.
So that’s my wall-o’-text for now. I feel good about making these decisions, and they were certainly hard-won. I’m excited to play more on this website and update anyone who’s interested in some non-traditional game development!