Welcome back, gentle reader. This blog entry is the second part of of a three-part series. You can find the first part here. Today, I shall continue the story.

When we had made a project plan for our development and had gotten permission from the higher authority, we were ready to start working on our game. We had absolutely no idea about the massive task we were about to take on. We had only worked on some very small games before, and most of them were left unfinished. This was in no way a sensible project to take on for one full-time artist and one part-time programmer. In my head, this would be nothing less than an epic role-playing game. Never mind that neither of us had ever made a project like this before. I did have a nagging feeling that there were going to be some problems, but I decided to ignore all of my internal warning bells and move ahead with our plans.

I have been doing art for most of my life but I do not think I have still found my personal style. I like to go on little sidetracks and adventures. I have done digital illustration and concept art, vector art, 3D modelling and traditional painting. I don’t think I am strong in any particular art style or technique. However, I was certain that pixel art would be the best choice for game graphics. It would be fast and easy and I loved the nostalgic feel of it.

Eventually I found out that I was not very good at making pixel art. It took me about a year of making graphics for Daughter of Crone before I started to see where my issues were. Things were dark, shapeless and lacked contrast. Everything looked a little bit flat. I could not figure out how to work with tilemaps or how to design interesting levels. I struggled a lot with keeping the style consistent.

The project management and planning part of our little game was also a little bit lacking. There was hardly any structure. We did not have a proper Game Design Document. We had a project plan with a schedule but it was merely a vague outline. I had a digital Kanban board that I filled out sporadically but would forget to update for weeks at a time. I have always found it difficult to plan things, to keep them structured and organized. And game development is full of simultaneous processes. Tiny tasks that need to be completed in order to advance the bigger tasks – all the while you are trying to keep your eyes on the big picture and not to get lost or sidetracked. It is very easy to feel lost and overwhelmed.

I also did no market research of any kind before we started developing our game. I knew nothing about business or marketing. Me and my partner mainly wanted to make the kind of game that both of us would enjoy playing. If the game would be good enough, it would “market itself”. Besides the occasional social media post, we did not put much effort towards the marketing of our game. We never gained much of a following during our first year. Not that it mattered anyway – we had nowhere to direct the traffic from our social media. No Steam page, no proper website or a mailing list, nothing. Apparently, things like that are very important. You see, there’s this thing called a marketing funnel and… We did not have that. There was not even a marketing teaspoon.

We had originally thought that we would be able to make the whole game in a year. We had started the project in February 2022. By December 2022 we released our game demo to Itch.io. It did not create much of a buzz online, but at least our friends liked it. I also got a decent grade at school that I felt I did not entirely deserve but I was pretty relieved to get.

Because of my own, very unrealistic expectations, I was rather bummed out about the whole thing. What we had managed to make was nowhere near my original vision. It might have been wise to take a step back at this point and move on to a project that had a more realistic scope. Work on something smaller that would be more manageable.

Unfortunately, the game had become something of a sick obsession for me. I could not give up at this point. I was not happy with the prototype. We decided to keep on working. We would finish the game in another year. Or so we thought…

This devlog series will be concluded next week.

Erkenmormel