This article was meant to be finalized and published in May, but it will likely become clear upon reading the events within why that didn't happen. Regardless, I figure it's a good time-capsule of the absolute state of things at the time of writing, so other than finishing up the ending, I've kept it mostly as-is. I hope you enjoy the read!
Hey, welcome back! It's been three months since my friend Brian and I quit our jobs and threw everything into making our first commercial video game, Stardust Frontier. And it's been two months since my first article about the project which you should definitelyreadfirst if you haven't. But, I know people never actually follow links when they're told, so here's an obligatory elevator pitch anyways:
Stardust Frontier is an eight-player roguelike party game where two teams control giant mechs, stampede through alien planets, and face off against each other by playing micro-games on their phones!
Which, if that doesn't sell you, you're legally considered anti-fun.
But yeah, we've been working on the project full time for the last three months, or realistically a little less than that because of the interruptions we've both had to deal with in-between. Life is unpredictable! But in that time, our game has blossomed from looking like this:
Into something which resembles an actual game!
Our Experiences at GDC
Last we left off, Brian and I were just preparing to go to our first GDC together, hoping it would give us some more insight into the professional game development space. And insight it delivered. It's crazy how you can just walk up to any random person in a space like that, and they'll all have something interesting and unique to talk about. By the end of our four days there, we had more than two dozen cards of cool folks we met to take home with us, and those were just the ones we ended up keeping! We also had an opportunity to reconnect with many of the people we'd met at PAX last September, which we were both super grateful for.
I think, for me, my biggest takeaway from meeting all these folks was how much more I felt like I belonged. Going to PAX and stumbling our way into the events that we ended up in, Brian and I both felt a bit like outsiders. I've had over six years of experience in hobbyist game development, not including my years of experience as a professional developer, and Brian's had similar as well, but when you just end up in a place you never expected to, with dozens of people around that feel like they're all further along than you in what you want to be doing, it's easy to feel like you're missing something. But now that we're a couple months into our own project, going to GDC just felt so different. It felt like we had a purpose, a reason to be there that justified our own presence. We weren't just there as hopefuls yet to prove ourselves, we were there really throwing ourselves into it with everything we've got.
But the weirdest part about it all was the perspective shift to the other side. Now that we were there as actual devs, now that we were also throwing ourselves into the entrepreneurial ring, I realized how absolutely ridiculous it would be to judge someone that hadn't taken that leap yet. We met several people in the same place as we had been, still collecting their plans or their resources before they jumped into the deep end, and we weren't sitting around judging them for not fitting in. All we saw were cool people with exciting ideas, passion, and ambition.
But self reflection aside, we also learned some really useful things there as well! We went to an excellent talk by Chris Zukowski of How To Market A Game about how to set up a Steam Page to benefit the most from demos and playtests, and the entire thing was a whirlwind of information. I have no idea how that guy talks so fast while still conveying information so clearly. Then, we went to a talk from the League of Legends folks about how they horizontally scale their server infrastructure. Afterward, we got to hear the developers of Dwarf Fortress and Caves of Qud talk about surviving in perpetual early access, and while that's certainly not something we're aiming for, it still had a lot of really useful information about managing and sustaining an audience. And we went to a couple of sponsored Discord talks which were honestly way more interesting than I had expected, which opened us up to the possibility of releasing our game as a Discord Activity as well as a paid Steam release, which we're still actively considering as a potential avenue.
Other than that, we got to go to a live video game metal show, ride in robot cars, get shown around the not awful parts of San Francisco after the convention ended, and I got to drive us home for 13 hours straight as we scooted all the way back from California to Canada before crashing out at the ferry terminal listening to Primadonna Girl. So fun times!
Returning to Reality
After getting back to the [real world](See: Canada), we started working on developing the game again. We knew we had a deadline for the 10th of June to produce a playable demo to submit to the Seattle Indies Expo (SIX). It's been a pretty big goal for us to expo there, as that's the event that started our journey with this project, and we knew we wanted to be in Seattle the next time it was running as real indie developers. We weren't too concerned about that though, we knew the things that we had to get done, and we were confident we could realize them in the timeframe, so when we returned, we just continued chipping away at things at our regular pace.
For the first month, my focus was somewhat diverted from development due to needing to finish my Bachelor's in Computer Science, and I'm happy to say that I successfully completed my last project a few weeks ago! Honestly, finishing school while also trying to work full time on this project has, more than anything else, exemplified exactly why I never want to be in academia again. I'm a creator, not a researcher, and while I love that there are people out there who want to do that, that is certainly not me. Just let me create things - that's all I want!
I still got a fair bit done on the project though, despite the academic twist. For my Honours Study, I created an open-source cross-browser motion control library in JavaScript, which hasn't really existed before to my knowledge, and I definitely shamelessly proposed that project so that I could turn my schoolwork into something useful for Stardust Frontier. Since the game's inception, I've been really interested in integrating motion controls into the micro-games, but the APIs available are super fragmented depending on the platform, which makes developing experiences like that extremely difficult. But with my library, I was able to standardize accelerometer and gyroscope readings, and create three proof-of-concept games that utilized device motion successfully on all target platforms! The library is publicly available, so definitely give it a look if you're interested!
Brian spent a lot of his time during the month refining his pixel-art technique and forming a more concrete vision for the aesthetic of the game, and we're both really happy with the results. In the last article, we had a few "sneak-peeks" of art that was being worked on, and now that we're on the other side I feel we can post-humorously say that the main reason we didn't show the full images is because Brian was... pretty unsatisfied with the outcomes.
But in the last month he's developed his skills a ton, and now we have some really excellent art that we're both more than happy to share. Something that Brian's been especially excited about is that we're designing all of the mech parts to be interchangeable, so as you progress through the game, you can swap out your mech's arms, legs, and torso. It's really cool, and it's also really possible to end up with an awful chimaera creature as you go.
From my perspective, it's been really great watching Brian's skills grow. This is his first time jumping into original pixel art spritework like this, and while there was definitely a learning curve, it's been really awesome seeing him confidently grind out designs and assets now that he's gotten familiar with it. I'm really loving the identity and feel of the game now, and I'm excited to see how it develops further as we get more creatures, environments, and mechs into it.
That got us to around the third week of April. As I said, we were taking it pretty casually, just working at a nice, calm pace, because everything was on schedule. No cause for alarm. That was until I decided to check on the SIX website one night, to confirm the submission date.
But I didn't confirm the submission date.
In fact, I un-confirmed the submission date.
...
ThesubmissiondatewasMay4th.
Welp, we fucked up
Yeah... so it turned out that instead of the submission being due in six weeks, it was due in two. I think that qualifies as an "oh fuck" moment. The moment I saw the due date, I was like "well, we're screwed," and I sent a message to Brian saying that we may as well just give up on getting into SIX.
But then, I went to sleep, and as sleep tends to do, I woke up with a little more clarity. I looked at our calendar, and we did have a good stretch of 13 days until the due date, and we didn't really have anything else going on in that time... So I messaged Brian again before he even woke up, and I just said "what if we did it anyways?" The worst that could happen is that they say no, right? And that is how we ended up no-lifeing the last two weeks of our existence.
After taking that day to recoup, as we'd both had super busy weekends before finding out that our time was cut into a third, we got together and went through our entire project tracking board, ruthlessly slashing anything that [wasn't absolutely necessary for a playable demo.](Including some stuff that kinda was.) After the purge, we had a board of a couple-dozen critical tasks, followed by even more "should haves" that we both knew we likely wouldn't have time for. And so we started grinding out work like we never had before. You know the concept of work-life balance? Yeah, I used to, too. That was before we basically spent every waking hour of our lives for two weeks straight (including weekends, of course) shoveling code and art into the system so that we'd have something even remotely respectable to submit.
Ultimately, a lot did end up on the cutting room floor. We had to scrap Shops and Event nodes, and any more complex strategy was left at the door as well. We had enemies, and they hit you. Sometimes they hit you more if you played poorly. And you can hit them too! Based on... some... heuristic somewhere. Honestly, that vagueness was the biggest plague that has affected our game since its birth. You just do things sometimes, and there's very little indication why, or how, or even when they occur. But with the simplicity of the combat system as it was at the time, that served us fine enough, and we ended up with effectively a mech-flavored minigame endurance run until the enemy happened to die, which felt like enough for SIX.
As time wound invariably onwards, and 12 days became 6, then 3, then 1, we continued to chip away at our todo list. But it also grew itself in a twisted, irregular fashion, as bugs beget bugs, half-implemented features contributed to a whole host of other necessary tweaks, and we remembered just how janky certain systems were that we'd gotten all too used to. But the one thing we couldn't change was the deadline, and it was beginning to look like we wouldn't make it after all.
Those days were the hardest, still pushing ourselves well into burnout territory, but without even the cold comfort that we'd make the deadline. It began to feel like we were fighting for nothing, that we were driving ourselves to exhaustion without even a goal at the end. But we kept on, because if there was any chance that we could submit on time, we had to. For the sake of the project; for the sake of our dreams.
Those final few days had the most ruthless cuts. Every time we got to a new task on the todo board, there was about a 40% chance that it would be worked on, and a 60% chance that it would be canned. But incredibly, mercifully, the gap between where we were and where we needed to be finally began to close. And on the FinalDay to submit, we found ourselves with only three or four items left to complete.
It felt like I'd died and went to heaven when those last todos went smoothly, when Brian and I both finished our final items by noon that day. For a moment, we almost considered un-scrapping some of the features we'd shelved, to see what else we could get done, but after seeing the death mirrored in each other's eyes, we decided that it could wait. Because despite the crippled, half-realized state the project was in, we were proud of it. And we thought it had an honest, genuine chance of being accepted. And we really wanted to sleep. So with a small humorous disclaimer on the title screen admitting that we thought we had 3x the time to get this ready that we did, we deployed and hit the submit button. And then we promptly fell onto the couch and died.
Yeah, crunch really sucks, doesn't it?
I've never worked at a professional video game studio before, but I'm well enough aware of how they operate, from the ample news stories and employee accounts of unethical work environments. And I want to be clear, what we went through those two weeks wasn't anything compared to a room of hundreds of developers having to do that for months on end to get the next COD out on time; I don't want to diminish anyone's suffering by implying that we went through what they did. But I do think we got a taste. A little, minuscule taste of how bad it could be. And it was hideous.
One of the mantras that Brian has held to, being the organizational lead of our team, is that he doesn't want to push anyone that works with us, contractor, employee, or otherwise, to a state like that. If we can't make a game while respecting people's lives, we shouldn't make a game at all. And after we finished our little miniature crunch, I think both of our resolves were strengthened even further on that front. It's possible to make a game without running yourself to the ground, but you have to be on top of everything to make sure you're on track.
But the crunch did teach us something valuable. It taught us the extent of our capabilities. Seeing how much we were able to do filled us with confidence, and seeing what we weren't supplemented that confidence with realism. I think we both have a far better understanding of our capabilities, both when we're pushed to our limits, and when we're not, which is invaluable to know as project leads. And hey, we probably got about a month of work done in 12 days, so that's definitely worth something! The project is looking a lot more like a game now, next up is fixing those ugly, awful minigames!
But it paid off!
A few weeks later, we got a response back from SIX! We'd been anxiously awaiting communication of any kind, as the idea of putting in all that work only to have it not even be accepted was incredibly devastating, and neither of us really wanted to deal with that right then. But! We didn't have to! The organizers said they'd be happy to have us, and we got sent a whole bunch of really encouraging feedback from their judges to chew on.
wait what's that next header saying, what irony? oh no
The great irony of it all
Soooooo, submitting to SIX wasn't our only goal. There was also a parallel Expo running at the same time, called PAX Rising. Although we preferred SIX from personal experience, we weren't blind to the fact that PAX was a much larger venue that's much more trafficked, and we knew that we should be there if we could. We just didn't see it as a possibility, given their bar for quality would've undoubtedly been even higher than SIX's, and neither of us really wanted to crunch for another full month to get the game up to a high-enough quality to maybe be accepted.
But then we started thinking.
Rising wasn't the reason why we wanted to expo at PAX. PAX was the reason we wanted to expo at PAX. The venue itself is what's valuable, not being in the cluster of booths with the Rising folks. And, the more we thought about it, the more we realized we had a space issue. Our game is a party game. The final version will accept anywhere from 1-8 players, but our current build worked best with 4. And then there'd be the two of us, manning the booth and making sure everything went well, and hopefully a small audience building up to check out the game when the current players were done. The desks at SIX and the standing-booths at Rising didn't seem like a very good environment to corral that many people. No, what did seem like a good environment was a booth.
But surely if we didn't think that we'd qualify for Rising, we wouldn't have a chance of getting a whole booth to our name, right? Well, that's what we both thought, but we were ignoring the most important factor: money. Yeah, Rising is basically free, whereas a booth at PAX costs money to reserve, which means it's a lot less competition and a lot more just-put-up-the-cash. As an aside, I don't know if our NDA with them allows me to say exactly how much it was, but it was actually a lot cheaper than either of us would've thought. But anyways, once we realized that we could just apply to get a booth, we sent off an email, and within days we got a reply. It was a go.
Sorry SIX, Brian and I both really wanted to go, but we're PAX Expoers now.
What have we gotten ourselves into?
Check back soon to hear our experiences at PAX, and to see snapshots of our latest prototype!
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Bluesky
