Hey all!
I heard about this community through a german tech channel I follow and the whole concept sounded promising. I thought joining can't hurt and here I am! I still need some time to get used to everything.
My recent journey
I'm a solo game developer from Germany and released a game on Steam last year under the pseudonym Fumiko Game Studio, now called Fumiko Games.
With Steam Direct and the direction Steam took in the past years being a general pain in the ass for developers, it has become wildly difficult and risky to release a game on it. I was one of the last greenlight titles to launch on the platform, but visibility on Steam was already a joke just before Steam Direct launched. If you think about joining the tribe I would highly suggest testing the waters with something simple before throwing a game you love in there. There are currently around 20 new games on Steam every day and most of them are going to fail miserably. The trend isn't looking good.
I have tried to channel failure into motivation and try to get my game out of obscurity and every step counts. I have sold a few hundred copies and received very positive feedback on my creation. That's something, isn't it? However, if you thought that Steam would actually make up for the flood of games by having good algorithms to show good games to the right people you are probably mistaken. It's all about how much you sell and without visibility, you'll not sell anything. Sales are the only times where you get to experience a bit of a bump, but it's always for a limited amount of time and drops just as the sale ends.
My goal is to keep making games as long as I can afford it, despite all the hurdles in the way. I have worked in Q&A and Web Development before but my heart beats for game development. I wanted to become a gamedev since I was 12 and I'm not going to give up that easily.
What am I using?
I am doing all my work from home, working with my desktop PC that hopefully doesn't break on me. I am using a lot of open source software to create the games I am making:
- Blender for 3D
- GIMP & Krita for 2D
- Audacity for Sound Editing
- OBS for recording
- VIM for coding (although I am currently experimenting with VSCode and VIM bindings)
- Mantis for Bugtracking (an amazing piece of software I tell you)
- Scribus for PDFs
- LibreOffice for Concepts
I'm developing my games on Linux with Unity3D, which is available as an unofficial alpha version but works great! I have tried to get going with Godot, but even though the engine really appealed to me, some things were missing for me. Mostly because being a game developer with 100% open source does not always work out when it comes to consoles.
The Future
I am now some weeks away from launching Fumiko! on Xbox One, which has been a lucky shot in the first place. When I was still trying to figure out how to get at least some sales for the game on Steam, someone from ID@Xbox sent me a mail and got my game into the program. The past months have been me porting the game over and I finally finished it. To be honest, this was one of the most challenging development tasks I have ever experienced. Having lost all hope on Steam as a platform caring about its developers, all my hope rests on the shoulders of the Xbox One. I've never been a big fan of Microsoft, but this opportunity is really something and they really seem to care.
If you're planning to get your game on a console, it can be a necessity to go without open source for a while and work with the proprietary tools the console manufacturer gives you. I hope this changes somewhere in the future, but it's not something I would count on without a manufacturer who is willing to make his SDKs public. You need to be a partner to gain access and they might not be available for the OS you're developing on or the engine you're working with. I can only suggest helping Godot with its implementation as much as you can so that at least parts of the process can be open source. But maybe only we partners can actually assist them, so the problem remains complex by design.
Other things I'm doing
You can check out my work on https://www.fumiko-game.com and I have uploaded the Official Trailer for Fumiko! on d.tube. I am trying to get going with Twitch at the moment, but I have heard that the steemit network also supports live streaming, so I might want to try that. :)
If things are going well with Fumiko!, I'll be working on Infectious Void next. I have created this for LudumDare#40 and you can learn more about it on the website.
It'll be a metroidvaniasouls-something with a rather depressive undertone where I'm going to draw my favorite inspirations from Dark Souls and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrows. Not that it'll be anywhere as good, but these games have influenced me a lot and I want to see where that journey would take me. I want the streams to act like some kind of a developer diary to get people participate as early as possible.
That's it for this post. If you happen to drop by, ask me anything! I'm new here and I want to get to know you all.
Best Regards,
Odrez