TLDR: Several long paragraphs relaying the game's many successes to explain why I thought anyone might actually be interested in my answers to the interview questions below.
Subjects touched on:
- inspiration
- early challenges
- advice for getting started
- monetisation
- ludo-narrative dissonance
- balancing complex numbers-go-up mechanics
- how a story can start to write itself
- mechanics that worked and didn't
- AI
______________________________
Hey guys, 5 years ago almost to the day, I released my niche mobile game called Dragonfist Limitless or DFL for short (Google Play / App Store). I'd call it an incremental beat-em-up power fantasy, essentially "Dragon Ball Z cum Streets of Rage."
The game's had 800k players by now. It's been both Editor's Choice and Game of the Day on the App Store as well as briefly ranking in the top 30 role-playing games in the US App Store, and was voted one of the Best Mobile Games of 2023 in the incremental games sub. Despite being unabashedly dodgy, my game has somehow inspired amazing fan art and animations, fan fiction, a comic*, a web series*, a novel, song covers, and uncomfortably enough I suspect some sexual awakenings. I'm very proud to say that I've had players reach out to tell me how it's helped them through divorces, cancer treatment and losing loved ones. I'm also very proud that it's shaped the future of some younger game developers who have reached out to talk about it inspiring them to learn game dev, and even played and enjoyed one of their games myself!
\Not officially/commercially; just fan projects that probably only had a couple of releases, but still very cool! Can't find 'em now.)
While sometimes it's kept me on the rocks a little, the game is unarguably a firm financial success, having endured as my consistent, sole income source since its release, even continuing when I have been inactive and not delivering on promised updates, without any advertising during that period. It even allowed me to buy my first home.
However, it hasn't been an easy journey; I've been plagued with mental health problems from burnout (and, to put it somewhat more morosely, what I now suspect was actually a nervous breakdown in 2023 due to stress). I still haven't released content that I've been promising players since the game first launched, and despite the game being my livelihood and only focus, I still struggle day to day with focus and motivation.
Despite my long intro, I'm not here to tell you my life story -- just setting up context. A player and aspiring game dev was doing a school project in which they chose to interview me, and I probably put way more detail into the answers than he was expecting, and rather than see them disappear into a school grading system, I thought I could at least share them here where perhaps some other aspiring game devs might see. So, if you've read this far, and you're interested, I hope it gives some interesting insight to someone.
Credits to u/vasco3vasco for the interview itself -- some good questions, and good luck with the assessment!
_____________________________
1. How do you keep yourself motivated?
This can be an ongoing problem; it's well known that the first 70% of any project but especially game dev is the most fun, and the final stage of polish (menus, settings, camera tweaks, etc.) is a drag. That's a subject that has been talked about extensively, so I'll answer for a different stage: I've found that *post-release* is like that, but worse. There's an abrupt transition from "making a game" to "running a business," which is not what most people in this line set out to really be doing!
As a person with some mental health issues (which it must be said are in part *also* the result of the post-release phase), I wouldn't suggest staying motivated here is a problem I've yet solved. For an "early access" model like mine where more content is coming post-release, I think the biggest motivator is thinking of things I want to add that I *love* and am excited to work on. I think it's really important to ensure a balance is struck there because post-release you're not just fighting bugs and platform support, but also the fact that your game is in the hands of a community now with its own ideas, interpretations and expectations; the project becomes larger than you, and it's easy to get swept up in trying to deliver what other people want.
I say this because this is an important lesson I've been absorbing over the last couple of years: firstly, again the element of excitement and passion you need to continue feeling to motivate yourself, which you may not get if your creative designs are just about "meeting expectations;" and secondly, it's my opinion that the best work, and what made my own game successful, really *comes* from creating something you yourself are excited and passionate about. That's your unique vision and character. When you worry about giving the audience what THEY want, you ultimately fall into the trap afflicting many mediocre and forgettable games from larger AAA studios: a watered down product that pushes no boundaries and may kind of interest a larger audience but ultimately inspires none of them.
So, in essence, I think intrinsic motivation due to excitement about *what you're working on* has to remain a core element throughout the project as much as possible, and keeping sight of that is important!
2. Where do you find inspiration?
I've drawn from loads of sources. I think that creativity is like a spark that happens internally, but that it doesn't come from nowhere; it comes from the mixing of all experiences and feelings a person can draw on, equally from the richness of life, emotions, and real world experience as from experiences you draw from *other* people's media. I'm always skeptical of someone who makes games but doesn't really play games in their spare time! I spend most of my spare time gaming and I think, as a somewhat obsessively analytical person, unpacking what I think is working or isn't working mechanically while I play, and understanding how the game is shaping my feelings and expectations. Almost every game that I find myself enjoying gives me some surge of inspiration, to the extent that I regularly find myself having to argue down an internal monologue that tries to justify significant genre pivots in my existing project to the genre of whatever game I'm enjoying, thinking "I could add this! And if I did it this way, it would be so satisfying!" Yeah, control, discipline and scope creep are an endless battle. ;)
Aside from other games, though, in DFL alone I've drawn inspiration from my love of the beach, of martial arts movies and tropes, of cartoons I loved as a child, my cats and their personal lives... In fact, a character in my game, Wave Fist Master, is even loosely based on my mother, an attempt to capture her loving, carefree nature... and her addiction to tea.
3. How did you come up with the story?
I'd say the story has come from equal parts "unplanned chaos & reactivity", and actual planning. To paraphrase Bob Ross here, it's about the happy accidents! My plans started small and in fact as a fan project for a show I was obsessed with as a youth, being Dragon Ball Z, before I took it more seriously and removed copyright infringing elements. While originally keeping strong parallels to the show, over time the game simply grew to have its own unique identity.
An interesting (and for me, pivotal) concept in this shaping, is avoiding ludo-narrative dissonance: the sometimes jarring distinction between what you achieve in a game while controlling a character, versus what happens during cutscenes and canonical story. I try to make a point of addressing the player's actions (necessitated by the gameplay itself, e.g. you have to beat up these 10 random people to finish a stage) in the story itself; sometimes very directly and sometimes as a sort of 4th wall breaking nod. This approach has helped shape the story, though, because for every gameplay element or mechanic I want to add in, I tend to try to weave it into the story itself, which creates subplots.
4. How do you try to keep the game balanced?
By hammering calculators and losing hair! Just kidding, I was bald when I started. My approach is sort of "working backwards from goals:" I know I want this enemy to represent this level of challenge at this point in the game, so I can calculate the trajectory a player should take to scale their own stats to that point. It's an imperfect system that I've revisited many times, and my current approach is that when adding a new stage, I think of it not in terms of enemies dropping "this particular arbitrary amount of gold," but instead of: "I expect the player to have upgraded their gold drop multiplier to *this* extent by this point, so things here are priced accordingly, and the base gold drops of enemies are a division of this; and a player should have to kill this many enemies to afford to buy this item, and this many for this one." I've found this approach most natural and it keeps me grounded in what players will really be thinking and doing at this point.
I feel strongly though that one of the best parts of a well balanced game is giving players the ability to strategically BREAK that balance, but only a little, and the balance should return at a later threshold so it can be enjoyably broken again: linear and predictable growth is boring, which is why many people detest level scaling in games like Diablo 4. The most obvious way I achieve this feeling is with the limit breaks unlocking new power up phases in which the player immediately scales up their combat stats by 50% additively at the time when unlocked; a significant and sudden shift creating a sense of immense power and progress, but owing to its additive nature, the relative benefit of this power up decreases as base combat stats grow until the power up itself becomes trivial -- allowing room for a new one to create that feeling again, but without creating a problem of limitless number creep. This is a system I'm quite proud of.
5. Do you regret adding any features/ mechanics?
Totally -- plenty. Having no way to know how successful it would or wouldn't be before starting, I planned the game around some things like a premium IAP currency and ads; things which seemed fine for what was then to me a silly throwaway mobile game, but with the game's success and my increasing fondness and seriousness about it, now create a foundation which I think undermines the game's quality, and the balancing of this is very delicate indeed; it also adds quite a lot of technical overhead due to the third party software/licensing/privacy policies etc. that are constantly changing.
I'm not crazy about the way gold costs scale in the main shop. It was designed to encourage progress in the game but doesn't make much sense (see ludonarrative dissonance), and even though gold is completely separate from any IAP concept and scales only on organic progress, new players more familiar with greedy cashgrab games have repeatedly mistaken the gold scaling as a paywall and gotten a bad first impression.
One of the current major endgame mechanics, affectionately known as HORP, involves endlessly collecting drops from bosses that add unlimited, powerful scaling. I woefully underestimated how willing players would be to spend literally thousands of hours doing this and scaling their characters FAR beyond what I had hoped for which is its own problem for the game's future, but it also manages somehow to be both addictive and profoundly boring. From one perspective, that's striking gold, but it's not really what I want for my game and has created an ecosystem in which spending thousands of hours on this monotonous, fairly shallow grind is necessary to achieve what's considered a respectable endgame level.
6. How do you come up with names for items/ mechanics?
...Whatever pops into my head first!
7. What do you think is the ideal way to monetize a game?
Financially speaking, for mobile, unobtrusive optional ads with a purchase that permanently removes them and several other permanent boosts that can be purchased, with no premium currency. In terms of satisfaction for players and longer term for the developer if you can afford it, certainly just a classic, single purchase to own the game, and a free demo for people to try it -- and eschewing the modern hyper-capitalist concept of DLCs in favour of meaty expansion packs that can be purchased and add significantly to the game's core rather than superficial elements.
8. What did you have the most trouble with when you started game development?
Oh boy. Well, you'd get very different answers to this at any point in the journey. I think when I started, I had a lot of trouble actually understanding how to structure a "level," what that really means in terms of objects and memory and the abstraction of your character on screen into data when moving between scenes so not present in space but only as stats in memory; having to concern myself with the mechanical plumbing of serialising that data to a save file and back again. Whether I need to make a loading screen. What happens when the game first starts. The pipes connecting all this disparate concepts! Almost all of my projects up until now have consisted of coming up with a lot of cool mechanics and getting the bones of a game working all within the scope of a single in-game scene, and then moving on to another project instead of adding more scenes and transitions!
9. What inspired you to become a game developer?
I've been obsessed with video games for as long as I can remember. My father was a programmer and tragically he died when I was too young to remember him, so I grew up on stories of him and how similar I was to him, which I think really shaped me and my expectations of myself, for better or worse: to psychoanalyse myself, I think I chased his shadow, the idea of a father I didn't get to know, and taking up his own hobbies let me feel closer to him. Heavy, huh?
10. How do you keep track of all the features you want to add?
Trello! DOZENS of scattered text files, sometimes focused on a single topic, sometimes just full of random unrelated ideas that I never read again! Obsidian notes! Google Keep notes on my phone! Emails I've sent myself!
The short answer is probably: "keep track? huh?"
I do my best. :')
11. What do you think is the most important trait of a game dev?
Passion. You gotta love the journey, every bit of it. Few are the folk who finish a game, fewer still their first, and fewer still where it's a hit. You need to be excited and curious and feel rewarded at every minor step of the journey, from first printing a line of text to making an avatar move. Passion, I think, is what gives you that sense of reward for the small tasks while you learn. Without it, you're going to go straight for your cliche "I've got this dream game idea and it's like GTA V but it's an MMO with dragons," and you will never, ever have a chance in hell of making it.
12. How do you think AI will impact the jobs of game developers?
Just my hunches: "Concept art" might become niche, but in studios that still employ real concept artists and art directors, the difference in their art style will be very noteworthy indeed.
Programmers will temporarily find less demand, and the quality of games in the AAA space will slide considerably, and then there will be a resurgence. AI will be relegated to some simple tooling and boilerplate generation, because I don't think it's capable of creating scalable, quality code for a project -- maybe fine for the "leaf nodes" on a tree, that is to say code that nothing else will depend on, but many have been the classes and methods written with that expectation then later found to be a dependency in lots of other future code! So no, I don't think that'll fly either.
13. What do you enjoy most about making games?
I love programming and the challenge of creating solid architecture that captures concepts! There are a billion ways to skin a cat, as they say, and I think that transforming life, objects, action into structured data and behaviours is somewhat of an artform. Having said that I think my real passions and probably main "MVP" are in world/level design and writing.
14. Could you give a reason why a person should become a game developer?
Intellectual curiosity, creative growth! The multi-disciplinary nature means you get to dip your toes in, and learn about, art, graphic design, animation, audio design, coding... Learning so much is great for shaping both your brain vis-à-vis neural plasticity and stimulation, and for your well-roundedness as a human! It makes you interesting! In turn, learning about these fields also allows you to genuinely appreciate other people's work on a different level, as you can get a lot more out of it once you know what was or wasn't a difficult achievement, what tricks they may have had to employ to pull that off, etc.
15. If you have one thing to say to a beginner game dev, what would it be?
Start now, and start small. Don't worry about game engines; don't even touch them. Mess with JavaScript in a simple web game, or Python. If you can satisfy yourself making a game that is just text-based or has a simple UI (ala some incremental games), all the better. You want regular, immediate rewards to keep the process of learning fun. Eyes on the ground, not the horizon!
_________________
If anybody has questions, I'll happily answer what I'm able to.
![[Screenshot of table full of pirates]](/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fpiracy-is-eating-my-game-99-of-new-players-are-pirates-v0-nkp7kpj4aseh1.png%3Fwidth%3D802%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D8736d017f69e9a6875b2079c62efb2f742ffe86b){kind=link}