has come to pass, which means it’s time to update with the 2025 Dev’s Games Financials Report and show you how much money my games made (and how much I lost) this year!

Why do this?

When I first started publishing and selling my own indie games, I found it nearly impossible to find publically available data about how much money games were making at roughly my scale (one person making games by themself with zero financial backing).

Often most of the reports one would find were larger teams of a handful of people, working alongside publishers, maybe with grant funding…but nothing about people who were sort of just doing solo dev and selling their work from nothing. This made it very difficult for me starting out to get an idea of how much people in my situation were actually making or even just the types of numbers I should be expecting - which in turn made it more difficult for me to formulate action plans around my productions and what to expect when working on my games. So now that I have a few games published, I think it’s worthwhile to share this type of rough information for people who were like me and might be looking for similar reference points.

I think it’s also generally good practice to demystify financials around indie dev and just talk about crap like this!

Like honestly, there’s no reason why these types of numbers should be considered taboo to speak about or hard to find in the first place, and I think business deals end up with a negative effect of sealing people off from sharing this information altogether. Since the reality is that very few people actually make money in this industry - let alone enough to survive sustainably at any scale - we should be sharing this type of stuff all over.

Everybody feels like a failure despite the fact we’re all pretty much failing. 🥹

The Disclaimers and Preamble

• Given how volitile and unreliable indie game development is as a practice (especially financially), do not treat these numbers as a reliable metric of any kind. Treat this as just another data point you could use to compare and contrast against other data points, not any sort of exhaustive reference of what a dev of my scope and scale will necessarily make.

• Numbers will be in both Canadian Dollars and US Dollars, and marked as such. Steam figures are in USD and my business numbers are in CDN. They are also rounded, for my sanity.

• Most of these numbers will be based on Steam Sales Reports, as the greatest volume of my actual sales are done via Steam. There will be some noise due my wonderful (read: terrible) filtering of my contract profits in here too.

• I am not including Itch.io figures. This is largely because many of my games on Itch.io are distributed via Charity Bundles, so numbers of downloads vs. sales vs. views there are all over the map these days. There’s probably noise of maybe ~1-10 copies of games total that are via Itch.io per year in addition to this, but my games are incredibly low-volume over there in terms of actual sales, so I consider it a negligible amount in the scheme of things.

• There is no Owner’s Draw from these profits; my working policy around my self-publishing is that all the money made from my games goes back into making my games. I only draw from these in the event of an unforeseen financial emergency (which fortunately has yet to happen). I tend to pay contractors based on flat rates (vs. hourly/salary) and scale up my payouts if the work turns out to be more time consuming than expected, meaning I’m not expected to suddenly front payments with money I’m not positive I already have. This is also why my expenses will seem rather high in comparison to my profits, because the money made here is intended to go back into my future indie titles and not pay for any external life expenses.

• Per above, I spent the latter part of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 not working on any projects (and thus, saving money), and only midway through this year did I ramp up production on my upcoming game S.K.R.U.B. Squad. I’ve been spending very aggressively on and have a number of wonderful contractors helping me with it, but it’s easily the most I’ve spent on a project to-date and I typically operate much more lean than this; you’ll see that reflected in these numbers too.

The 2025 Dev’s Games Financial Report

Overview

Because numbers mean little without scope and context, here’s a brief overview about myself and business that is feeding into these numbers (for those who might not already know me).

My Steam Dev Page

Years In-Industry: 2016-Present

Years of Self Publishing Games: 2020-Present

Starting Budget on first title (in 2020): $1000 CDN

Games Published (Via Steam): 4

Gross Game Sales Profits (2025): +$5,394 CDN

Gross Expenses (2025): -$4,908 CDN

Bank Fees (Transfer fees, bank fees): $99.01 CDN

Software (Engine Plugins, Software Hosting, Assets): $1,086.01 CDN

Contractor Fees: $3,454.46 CDN

Convention Fees: $149.82 CDN

Office Supplies: $105.65 CDN

Misc. Fees: $13.73 CDN

Net Profit: +$486 CDN

Per-Game Breakdown

Bombing!!: A Graffiti Sandbox (May, 2021 - $6.99 USD)

Units

Units Sold (2025): 363 Units

Units Sold (Lifetime): 2,821 Units

2025 Profits: $1,226 USD

Average Price at Sale: $3 USD

Wishlists

Wishlists Balance (2025): 140

Wishlists (Total): 2,755

Lofty Quest (March, 2022 - $3.99 USD)

Units

Units Sold (2025): 15 Units

Units Sold (Lifetime): 142 Units

Sales

2025 Profits: $29 USD

Average Price at Sale: N/A (didn’t meet sales theshold for this info)

Wishlists

Wishlists Balance (2025): 7

Wishlists (Total): 547

Bombing!! 2: A Graffiti Paradise (June, 2023 - $19.99 USD)

Units

Units Sold (2025): 182 Units

Units Sold (Lifetime): 670 Units

Sales

2025 Profits: $2,568 USD

Average Price at Sale: $7 USD

Wishlists

Wishlists Balance (2025): -17

Wishlists (Total): 4,649

Centauri Dark (July, 2024 - $4.99 USD)

Units

Units Sold (2025): 46 Units

Units Sold (Lifetime): 90 Units

Sales

2025 Profits: $171 USD

Average Price at Sale: N/A (didn’t meet sales theshold for this info)

Wishlists

Wishlists Balance (2025): 50

Wishlists (Total): 657

S.K.R.U.B. Squad (Upcoming [November 2025 Announcement] - Unannounced Price)

Units

Units Sold (2025): N/A

Units Sold (Lifetime): N/A

Sales

2025 Profits:N/A

Average Price at Sale: N/A

Wishlists

Wishlists Balance (2025): 169

Wishlists (Total): 169

Takeaways for me

• Bombing!! 1 still sells very well, but at a low price point and often on sale at 50% off. It also has a very high refund rate (largely by achievement scammers), which doesn’t help. It sells in volume, but I don’t consider it to be a very healthy or sustainable product representative of how I want my works to be positioned.
• Bombing!! 2 continues to be the most profitable game. I think largely because I priced it high and so it sells high even when on sale. It has also been bundled with Bombing!! 1 and the Bombing!! franchise generally is my largest seller.
• Centauri Dark and Lofty Quest are duds. I already knew this was the case, but every year I check and realize yes, they don’t sell well at all. 😅 I’ve largely given up hope on ever making expenses back on those.
• SKRUB Suad’s announcement is not the worst! At 169 Wishlists since its announcement last month! This isn’t a huge number by any means, but based on me just spamming my social media, it’s sizeable enough that it gives me hope it might do well. Comparatively, one month before launch Centauri Dark had only 69 wishlists, while Lofty Quest had only 32. I’m hopeful it’ll do better than them, at least!
• I should slow spending on SKRUB Squad a bit. While I have some money from previous years in my account still, I’ve spent quite aggressively and I should dial that back so as to not overextend myself (which might be tough considering I have launch coming up but we’ll see how that goes).

I hope these

numbers give you a little bit of clarity as to what a developer of my size and situation might expect to make over the course of a year! I think all in all this was a fairly standard year for me business-wise, outside of my SKRUB Squad spending.

The early part of 2025 consisted of me recovering from burnout after struggling to ship Centauri Dark and focusing on some contracts in order to sustain myself elsewhere. Once I started to get my spark back when that wrapped up, SKRUB Squad really helped me pull myself out of that rut in the latter half of the year and focus on a project again. All in all despite a few ups and downs for myself personally, not a bad year for the ol’ indie studio of mine.

Anyway, thanks for reading! I look forward to seeing each and every one of you in the new year. 🙂

Ok, bye!

the internet (and the world at large) is becoming a pretty shit place, and arguably has been for a while.

Economies are slowly in a death knell as AI tries to invade every pocket of the world it doesn’t need to be in, every subscription service on the planet has plateaued in profit and is gradually decreasing its value while increasing its prices, and governments have started incorporating biometric data in security features - ostensibly as a means to ‘protect children’ - which actually endanger the privacy of basically everyone who is forced to use them.

I remember a few years ago I had a conversation with a friend who worked as a programmer on games in the mobile space for a long time. I asked him about what it was like making data-driven mobile games, and he told me the amount of data they collected on people - even just for playing a game on a phone - was insane.

Conversely I’ve also talked to people who work in games and tech - who should ostensibly know better than to trust tech - act surprised when I tell them I disable the collection of ad data on my mobile apps. What they’ve said stuck with me: “Well they’re already collecting my data anyway, so why bother”.

To be frank, I’m far from keen on the idea of just letting corporations do whatever they want with little parts of me - epecially not in an era where they’re collecting your face data, photos, videos and the like to allow other people to generate content from. I also think “well they’re doing it anyway why stop them” is perhaps the laziest and most defeatist approach to combatting capitalist overreach - if I can stop a multi-billion dollar corporation from knowing that I’m on the market for couch cushions then I am going to!

I’m now going to tell you about what I’ve learned you can do - and have done - to both protect your home network, as well as how you can improve your quality of life by re-using an old device.

Also note I just do this as a hobby and am bound to get small details wrong, so if you’re a massive tech-head, sorry if this isn’t 100% accurate. ;)

Also also note: this isn’t me saying “go do illegal stuff online!!!”, I’m simply outlining ways to make your business stay your business and keep it out of the hands of tech companies who don’t need to be involved in your business. :)

I’ll start with something that I think everyone - no matter what you do on the internet or how tech-savvy you are - should do.

Turn Off Services You Don’t Need

This one is easy - so much so that there’s no point in not doing it.

Go to your device: phone, computer or whatever, and look in the options and account settings of apps you use. Anywhere you see it ask about data collection, or storing your information, or gathering your data or analytics info…just turn it off! Now do this on every device you own!

Location Services, for example, is my big one I always keep off. I don’t need to allow my phone to collect location data from me all the time. There’s…really no reason for this in a lot of cases, because unless you’re doing something location-based, your phone doesn’t need to know you’re at home, or at work, or sitting in your backyard. THe only exception for me might be when I’m driving around or get lost somewhere, but generally I keep that off wherever possible.

And this is a great practice to keep going forward; whenever a device prompts you to allow it to access something, stop and ask yourself if it really needs it, or if you can just tell it no and be fine. It’s understandable something like Google Maps would need to access location data, but does Instagram, Facebook or your phone’s camera need that information? Not really!

They’ll still find ways to gather info outside of this but in many cases this is a good, simple first line of defence you can do.

Coupled with the next step, it’s very good too:

USE A Virtual Private Network (VPN)

The first thing that felt like a no-brainer was setting our personal network up on a VPN.

A VPN basically routes your internet traffic from a device through a privately-owned server and then to the provider. While it doesn’t sound like much, this change can affect a lot of what you do online.

For example, you live in Calgary, Alberta and you click a link to enter a website. Google will use your internet’s IP address and log that information. It might be used to send you targetted ads, or as demographic data for informing that site’s owner where you live, or matching you with nearby services you don’t want or aren’t interested in. Ultimately Google (and the site owner) now know roughly where you live, and might choose to do something with that information.

It’s not necessarily implicitly bad this is collected, but it can be used in malicious and annoying ways (and in the cases of tech companies, often is). For example, this is one of the first (and sometimes only) things that are checked when requiring you to Face ID to access a website - they will see if you’re in a location that it’s blocked in and will force you to ID to enter. In some countries, traffic to certain sites is even blocked completely, so you may not even be able to access certain websites you’d want to access. Even here in Canada, social media companies like Meta block news sites from being displayed to avoid having to pay as a result of the Online News Act.

If your device is on a VPN - since you’re routing through a different server in a different part of the world - you can functionally say “Actually no, I’m not a user in Calgary, I’m a user in Mexico City, Mexico”. It will then process your traffic the same, but through a spoofed location that might afford regular privileges. In some cases it may even afford more protection, as some countries in places like Europe have even stronger protections for internet users.

VPNs can be installed on devices and turned on and off in an instant. Some have browser extensions that apply it only to your browser activity, while some apply to your entire computer. In the case of our own home VPN, I have it installed on our router so it actually applies by default to every device that joins our home network, which means visitors also have their data protected (at least for a time). It works on our phones, work PCs, laptops, and even our Internet of Things devices like our networked laundry machine, making it harder for our devices to leak our locations to the sites we use.

It’s not foolproof however, and the added protection comes with a few potential risks:

• Some sites and services may still find ways around VPNs and use other methods of gathering data (such as your phone’s location services) which is why it’s important to turn them off too.
• Since VPN servers are shared, some servers may have been used by bad actors in the past, so some sites have blocked known VPN servers from accessing them. From my experience however, this is very infrequent (and honestly mostly applies to Reddit). It’s easy to work around, as you just need to switch to a new VPN server (which takes like, ten seconds).
• At the end of the day, a VPN company operating in a country may still need to answer to someone. There have been instances of VPN companies reporting use to local governments, though this is typically rare and depends a lot on an individual company’s policies and processes, so researching a company helps mitigate this risk.

There are some public VPNs that allow you to use for free, however in my experience they’re a little less reliable and may be likely to use your information themselves. Funny enough, one advantage to paying for a VPN service is that VPN companies generally have an interest in fighting to keep your information secure because it’s how they make money!

A good place to start finding a VPN to sign up for yourself is looking into a VPN comparison chart to find a service you’re comfortable with and in your price range. Something like this might help; I use ProtonVPN, they have frequent deals and with pricing it comes out to just a few dollars a month. We’ve been on it for two years and haven’t been disappointed with it yet.

Anyway,

Ok Bye!

All things considered, it’s a pretty well-made video game that I think I enjoy - and that’s saying something considering I hate PvP games.

I’m simultaneously too competitive for my own good, don’t perform well under pressure, and hate gambling on things, which makes me a pretty bad combination of player to really enjoy a PvPvE extraction shooter where you basically bet your loadout on loot.

However, I enjoy the atmosphere and worldbuilding in the game and the emgernt social interactions of the gameplay. Given how anyone you meet in that game can freely turn around and shoot you in the back of the head when you’re not looking, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how kind and wholesome people have been while I wander around shooting robots and looking for scarce resources.

Sure a few people have murdered me in cold blood, but by and large everyone I’ve met on there have been pretty chill people who just want to have a fun time.

But this isn’t about that.

I actually held off on playing it for about a month or so because I heard there was some controversy about them using AI in the game. It doesn’t help that in an interview their C.E.O. reinforced their use of AI, claiming:

First of all, I think it’s important to assume that every game company is now using AI. But if everyone is working with the same or similar technologies, the real question becomes: how do you survive? I believe it’s important to choose a strategy that increases your competitiveness.

It is, of course, perhaps the most “C.E.O. of a game development studio” thing one can say given the current economic climate where investors are all looking at AI as being the money-maker.

But having now played a bit of the game I think it’s terribly interesting just how little of the game screams “we needed AI to make this”.

I should preface this with a disclaimer

I am really not much of an Anti-AI Hardliner. I actually think there are many applicable uses of AI, and it’s quite easy to come up with use cases for them that make workers more productive and don’t run people out of jobs, destory their workflows, nor overwrite their creative intentions with absolute crap.

That said, I also believe in most every cases with how AI has forced its way into the forefront via giant datacenters destroying the environment, the enshittification of the internet, the undermining of people jobs…I think it all has less to do with AI as a tool, and has everything to do with how capitalism has chosen to wield it as an agent of maximizing profit at any cost.

I think the tool is probably useful in specific niches, but also completely destructive in the hands of people who want to wring profit out of the world by any means necessary.

With that being said…

The AI use in Arc Raiders

is actually very subtle at times, and frankly can be easy to miss if you’re not paying attention.

Nexon has claimed it’s largely used in animation, which I think is pretty fair given how common techniques like procedural models are used for things like in-betweening in those types of pipelines.

However, I think the most obvious area they used voice acting was apparently in the generation of voices:

"As [you] stated, [it's] the same as The Finals, we use that text-to-speech model. That is, we hire and contract voice actors for it - it's part of their contract that we use it [AI] for this purpose, and that allows us to do things like our ping system, where it's capable of saying every single item name, every single location name, and compass directions. That's how we can get that without needing to have someone come in every time we create a new item for the game."

(Now, I will say that I suspect they generated voices for more than just these lines as a lot of the dialog in the game’s cutscenes and interstitial moments feel incredibly robotic and lifeless, but I’m going to focus primarily on the pinging system here.)

At a glance I thought the explanation made sense - at least at first. If you can just generate the audio for an item in the game it certainly makes it easier and more agile to be able to implement new ones. Rather than requiring voice actors to record a line for each object, you can get those lines faster and, to that end, get them in the game with less work. Ostensibly, this was in the contract the voice actors signed, so they did so knowing their voices would be used to this end.

However, what I soon realized is that the workflow they’re describing - from a design standpoint - hardly feels like a mark of efficiency, but rather one of inefficency.

It all falls apart

when you look at how this feature actually plays out in the game:

It’s undeniably a silly novelty to hear your character say goofy things like “I have a prickly pear” or “I have a comfy pillow”.

But…on a design level, AI use here is solving a scalability problem that most games of like genre don’t have, because they simply design solutions for it. In fact, the way Arc Raiders uses AI is in some ways creating more work that other studios don’t even have to do in the first place!

When I think of a ping system from other online games, it’s bog standard to have a character simply say something to the effect of “Look at this!” with some text of the object on screen, or even have item text just pop up in the world chat if you really need to call an object out in your inventory.

MMOs have solved this problem years ago by simply having a text pop-up to display the item (and frankly there’s no reason to believe Arc Raiders doesn’t have a console of some kind built into its engine):

Even a similar Game as a Service title Fortnite designed around this issue by just…making an icon representing the object pop-up in the world!

After all, the point of a ping system is typically to simply make point a user aware of something for a brief moment - it doesn’t need to 100% inform them of the name of the name of the subject in question via in-world dialog; they player will see what it is on their own while playing intuitively.

So in this case, Arc Raiders seems to have overcomplicated their design around item pinging by having the item be read aloud, and then used AI to solve the problem they had engineered themselves.

This begs the question…

does this really feel easier to design it this way?

This sort of system in any other production would be “let’s keep these voice actors around for callbacks”, which is…so, so far from being a monumental task. It’s literally “oh we need to make callouts for the new enemy/item we added. Let’s call Susan and get her in here next week to say ‘I have a prickly pear’”. It’s not really that big an issue if you already have voice actors and an audio team on your payroll.

Which they certainly must have, because even with an AI voice someone still hase to generate it, implement it, QC it, and so on. It’s all work someone has to do and get paid for anyway (work which is also error prone as you’re left re-generating files to get better takes). You’re saving what is almost imperceptible levels of time and effort just to avoid paying a voice actor.

I’ve seen all sorts of arguments - unsurprisingly from fans of the game - saying various things like “well Embark is a small studio!” or “it’s a cost-saving measure!”.

I think it’s also fair to say that voice actors really aren’t that expensive to work with. In fact, most of the effort is getting them on the project in the first place - but generally things like pickups and the like are trivial once you have them integrated into the pipeline (which, again, they had to do in order to create models from their voices in the first place).

And according to Wikipedia, Embark Studios has approximately 350 employees. That’s not a small studio by any stretch of the imagination! Nor do I think it’s reasonable to claim that a studio which already hired a suite of voice actors to record voices for their game doesn’t have the money to continue paying them, especially after releasing two Live Service online multiplayer titles in the span of just a year (the other being The Finals).

And - again to emphasize - they already did the work of seeking, signing and paying voice actors to get into the booths and create voice models out of them! If they wanted to save money, I imagine they would have instead simply designed a system in a way that was more accomodating for scale.

These scalability issues are not problems that are unique to a game like Arc Raiders, nor are they problems that remain unsolved by the wider industry at large.

So what I’m feeling here

is that I think this is - unsurprisingly - a whole lot of excuses to find use of AI in a place it really doesn’t need to be. It feels like a case of someone up top saying “we should put AI in this”, and the designers enacting that demand.

And we’re seeing a lot of weird, useless direct integrations of AI in games these days - probably as a result of the market bubble being built as companies buy into the hype and fight to find exuses to adopt it into their workflow. I’m sure by simply saying “we’ve integrated AI in our game :]” serves Nexon a useful talking point to investors seeking to capitalize on the AI trend while it’s still hot.

While I think this is far from the most egregious use of AI, it just feels so obvious to me that a decision like this speaks largely to a design failure that also undercut voice actors, rather than any kind of innovative application of a tech already desperately struggling to find a useful place in games. 🤷

Ok Bye!

this article by forcing you to read something that someone else said in an article one time. It’s some game designer who works at a company called Nintendo:

“I always look for designers who aren’t super-passionate game fans,” Mr. Miyamoto said. “I make it a point to ensure they’re not just a gamer, but that they have a lot of different interests and skill sets.” Some of the company’s current stars had no experience playing video games when they were hired."

I also want to - importantly - note that this wasn’t an original observation by him, and it is in fact something of conventional wisdom in the field. I had actually heard this years before this article was published by an awesome game designer named Cindy Poremba. To paraphrase her, she said something to the effect of ‘the best designers are ones who either play every type of game under the sun, or don’t play any games at all’.

I think this wisdom is conventional for a reason!

The thing about designing games is that it’s simply impossible to do in a vacuum. For better or worse, everyone has a unique and personal lexicon of design thinking they are pulling from whenever they approach a design challenge. That is to say, everyone will approach the problem and solve it differently.

I’ve found this to broadly be true, and that the most effective designers fall into the two camps of Informed Designer and Ignorant Designer.

The Informed Designer who plays tons of video games of every type will, of course, have a vast working knowledge of the possibility space that games afford. They might know when a health system could be taken from a shooter or a strategy game, or have a working knowledge of various unique styles of inventory systems throughout many games. Obviously solving a design problem is just one piece of the puzzle, but this style of designer will have more varied references to pull from and will have more tools in their belt to make something unique and informed by a wider culture of other games and their own approaches.

You might (rightfully) assume that this would mean a person who has little to no knowledge of games would be at a disadvantage. However, they actually have an important advantage we tend not to think of: Ignorance.

The Ignorant Designer who barely touches games is less likely to meet them with any pre-existing assumptions about how games “should” work. They won’t assume what a game “should” do, how a mechanic “should” work, or how a problem “should” be solved. In a sense they’re actually more free to take experimental approaches to design, conjure up unique ideas to solve problems not often seen in games, and generally have a more open mind when it comes to solving problems.

And I’m a huge opponent of pulling from genre because I think leaning too much on genre is something that can really stop you from getting weird and interesting with things.

I see this all the time in students or junior designers especially; they encounter a problem and immediately decide upon a solution for how it should be solved. When I ask them why they approached it that way, they answer “well, that’s how [other video game that their project is referencing] works”.

I see this a lot in indie games too, where a creator will obviously be inspired by a certain game or genre and attempt to chase a style and genre of said game, but will do it so by-the-letter they fail to make their creation their own game in the process of doing so.

And I think that line of problem solving is just really limiting creatively!

Anyway I could talk all day about how I dislike leaning on genre, but I want to stop burying the lede so I’ll get to my reflection now:

I noticed recently

that when I make my own games I have a tendency to simultaneously adopt these two very opposite, yet complimentary, approaches. And I find they work well together!

On one hand I try to Ignorant Design when it comes to the direction of my games; I often decide to make games of genres I have virtually no experience with - and often ones that I have zero interest in playing at all.

On the other hand, I try to embody the Informed Designer when it comes to approaching tangible design problems, because the first thing I do when encountering these is to reference those similar games and genres to see how they solve their problems.

In this way, Ignorance is helpful when you’re using it to establish and chase your game’s direction, but staying Informative is important when designing your game.

First, the Ignorant Designer

I tend to use as the person who dictates the creativity and direction of my game. It’s the Kojima that lives in your head who might really want your game to have a music sequence in the middle of it for no good reason, or the Suda51 who says your game should just have a cheerleader protagonist who kills zombies because why not?

This Ignorance is powerful because - just like I mentioned above - you can go wild with your approaches and don’t need to worry about staying on the implied track that games of your genre do.

While I practice street art, Bombing!!: A Graffiti Sandbox was a game I made despite not really playing any artsy painting games myself. In fact I don’t really even like playing games where you make art in, because my thought when doing so is always “man, I’d rather just be actually drawing”. That said, the idea of building a game where you can paint anything sounded like a fun problem to tackle from a developer/design perspective, which is largely what motivated me to do so.

Same goes for my current game in development as of writing: S.K.R.U.B. Squad. While it’s a game all about cleaning, I actually don’t like cleaning games at all! I think they’re just too slow for my brain. The only thing close to this I’ve played for any extended period of time is House Flipper, and even then it was only for a handful of hours. Mostly, I made S.K.R.U.B. Squad because I saw gameplay of a game like that and went “I could make one of those”. And so I did!

When I resolve to make games like this I will do my best to avoid having the well of my mind tainted by ideas about what my game should be; to that end, I avoid using references from other games or informing myself by them at all when it comes to building the direction of my games.

In fact, I set very strict boundaries for myself: “While making this game, I am not going to touch or play these types of games at all”.

The Informed Designer on the other hand,

is the one who uses their vast experience of design knowledge to stops your Ignorant Designer from getting too wild with it.

They sweep in to solve problems, troubleshoot issues, and think about the game as the player would. Because while making the wild, radiant and untethered fantasy of my dreams is well and good, I also make games that I expect an end-user to play - and usually, that end user doesn’t have the same lofty ideas I have (nor will they have the patience to put up with them).

The end user will also, notably, be more familiar with similar genres and games than even I am.

When the Ignorant Designer invariably runs head-first into creating a design problem, the Informed Designer recognizes it as a User Experience issue and not simply a creative one. That’s when I’ll start dipping my toes into my references to understand what their approaches are, because there’s an inherent power to pulling from genre where it’s needed to get people understanding the core of your game easily.

So how do you stay Ignorant about genre, while working on a game in a genre?

The magical part of this approach to direction is that - just like anyone who actively practices being ignorant on a day-to-day basis - it’s a simple, effortless endeavour.

They say “assuming makes an ‘ass out of u and me’.

So go crazy and make an ass out of yourself! Make assumptions! A lot of them! Get messy for a while!

Assume that your first thought about a game or style of game is true. Believe that the way you think your genre works must, in fact, be how these games work. Assume your first approach is the right one, or that the feature probably works a certain way in all these types of games. Don’t bother looking at a reference for it or sanity check yourself at first. You’re probably right. Write it down, move on, and come back to it later when something gets flagged in playtesting.

Don’t worry about if your idea for the game is correct, or accurate, or intuitive, or even logical - let the Informed Designer step in later on that if they need to. What matters for building your game’s direction creatively, is you’re trying something that feels like it probably could be how it works.

In some cases you might be correct in your assumptions - and that’s great! But often you will find yourself to be wrong.

However I think in this case being wrong about your assumptions - whether productive or not - has at the very least pushed you into making something that is different, and in many ways I think that’s far more valuable than making something perfectly reflective of the genre you’re working in.

Yes, you may have accidentally made a user-unfriendly mess you have to now iterate on, or made a feature that feels out of place, but in the process you’ve likely pulled your game in a unique direction you may not necessarily have been implemented as such if you were designing for your genre, rather than challenging it.

In some ways, I think this approach to building direction can be similar to the approach of mixing different genres together to create something new…but I think the difference is that approach involves knowing multiple genres well and having the wherewithal and design chops to blend them conciously.

However, by staying ignorant to your genre you often end up making new and unique modifications or alterations to an experience in a way that actively challenges your own assumptions unconciously - and I think that’s pretty cool!

An important footnote

It should be noted that I think almost none of this applies to working on larger teams where you are reponsible for guiding the ebb and flow of a project, it’s production, or delivering something on a tight timeline.

I think Directors are, ironically, some of the most notoriously wishy-washy folks on the planet (sorry to any directors who are reading this!), and while I think it’s still important to adopt an Ignorant Design approach to push your project against the grain, it’s not worth practicing at a headache to a team or risk to your production.

In fact, it’s my experience that most directors are perhaps too good at the Ignorant Design part of this process, and actually quite bad at the Informed Design part of this process.

So maybe learning to work from reference and grounding your ideas could prove more useful if you’re working in a greater team context 😉

Ok Bye!

This is my first post on this new site, which I put together using Github Pages, a Jekyll template called Minimal Mistakes, and a whole lot of patience. Honestly it’s kinda here as a test post, but I figured I’d write a bit about the rationale behind this whole thing.

So why a new site now?

I’ve been thinking about how I wanted a place to post long-form thoughts about subjects (probably mostly about media, art, and video games) for a while now. First I was exploring Neocities as a possibility, but frankly I found it to be a little too janky to be sustainable as a website I actually use for any period of time. It’s fun for making a little hobby site, but the idea of fighting the raw HTML to put my professional work on there in a way that could be easily displayed was…way too much effort.

I was also thinking of figuring out how to entirely self-host this site myself…but that is until I learned Github Pages is free, and that self-hosting your own site is not only unreliable but also potentially leaves your network open to attacks and the like. I figured I can start here and work out self-hosting later if I really want to.

We’ve also been going through some financial issues lately and been needing to tighten our belts, and I realized I was paying $450 a year for Squarespace, which is WILD. I was paying it annually so it kept slipping under my radar as being a huge expense, and every time I would get charged for it I would go “I need to figure out how to move away from this” and then inevitably get so busy that I would straight-up forget to do it. Then the next year would come around and I’d get hit with a huge bill again.

$450 CDN a month was as much as my gym membership costs, and I actually use that! What’s more is that I only ever updated my Squarespace when I started on a new job or project for my portfolio (which, frankly, is very rare these days given the state of the games industry and how infrequently work comes across my table). So it was really not worth $450 a year for a site that just sits around all day and I had to move on.

I wasn’t sure about Github and rolling my own solutions with Jekyll initially because I wanted a lot from this site; I wanted a Portfolio space, a space to blog, a space to think, a space to host images, a space to mess around webdev with. Conventional wisdom dictated I should use a Wordpress, but I also didn’t want it to just feel like a boring wordpress blog or anything; I want to MESS with it a little, you know?

But on a whim after exploring my options and deciding to finally throw together a repo for it, I realized it actually wasn’t too hard to do myself with Minimal Mistakes, and as I type this I have rebuilt my entire Squarespace site (and more!) in just 8 hours. Not bad, I’d say it was worth $40 a month. 😏

So what will you find here?

As I mentioned, probably long-form thoughts about media, art, and video games! Some days I feel like I just need to journal or word vomit things out, and social media sites leave so little room for things like nuance or really in-depth explorations of stuff. Who am I kidding, I’ll probably still be posting, but I do really enjoy longform writing and I want a place I can put that stuff out to the world reliably again (even if no one pays attention to it).

I also want to talk more about things like my thoughts on art (in my own illustration and otherwise), as well as have a place to post my work and direct employers towards. For a long time I’ve kept different parts of myself divided in different corners of the internet, and I’d like to carve a space where I can bring them all together again (for better or for worse).

Anyway, I’ve never really created my own site before and all this was quite a learning process. I’ve dabbled in HTML and CSS but there’s a lot of things I still don’t know or don’t fully understand, but even just putting this together has taught me so much. I’ve already learned (alongside my various other tech projects) that I hate any process that makes me open a terminal or command line things via Git, so in the very least doing webdev doesn’t feel like it’s the job for me. 🥲

But, alas, on that note, I should really stop working on this for now. I told myself today would be my day off this week, and here I am doing a ton of work anyway- go figure.

Ok Bye!