Thinking Out Loud about 2020

Making a new IP from scratch is very harrowing. 

First, you have to dream  up a new world, new rules, new lore, and develop your characters and motivations for playing the game. That's the kind of work that goes into writing a new novel or movie script. If you're a published author or just trying to be, you know how difficult that process can become.

Next, you have to develop the code base and branch off of what you hope is an existing game engine, so you don't have to build an engine by reinventing 5000 different wheels, all of which have been done before by better coders and engineers than you. That is software engineering. Any software engineer knows how difficult it can be taking an app through the SCRUM battlefield up to a release ready application on the market.

Then you have to add a layer of art to this new game IP. This requires you experiment and develop a visual look that is distinct and succinct, not so much work that single assets take a lifetime, but not so cheap that no one wants to look at it. It's both static and animated props and characters. Anyone who has ever drawn a comic book, painted a photorealistic canvas, sculpted clay figured, or built a house, knows how difficult these myriad careers are -- and for your new IP, you have to master what is effectively the latest most cutting edge of marketing looks, capture the imagination and zeitgeist of your times, rekindle nostalgia for the past, and bring something new to the table all at the same time. 

Any one of those tasks, historically, was someone's lifetime masterpiece. 

If you're a solo developer, you will be doing all of it alone. 

Look back at the list:

That's a Masters of Fine Arts Degree.

A Masters in Software and Computer Engineering.

A Masters in Creative Writing.

Multiple sub disciplines of character animation and cloth animation and static props and landscape design.

Multiple sub disciplines of coding for computer graphics, coding for Artificial Intelligence, coding for User Interface, coding software architecture, optimization, etc.

Multiple sub disciplines in writing for character dialogue, writing fiction, writing marketing materials, business plans, sales pitches, team logistics, technical documentation, accounting, legal writing, etc. 

You basically have to become a dozen people, and if one of those jobs isn't up to par with the rest, your game has some critical flaw between inception and delivery to the user's final total experience after purchase.

In 2020 we face the highest consumer expectations at the lowest cost, competing against giants with multi-billion dollar budgets who quite literally give their AAA games away for free on occasion. 

How does an Indie dev, be it solo or just one or five people, compete with that?

Well, that's what I wanted to learn making Fallout: New California. 

Even though it was "just a mod," within an established IP with a working engine and many art assets already deployed in the engine, I still had to go through the paces and learn how to do all this stuff in an organized, efficient manner. 

With Project Morningstar the training wheels have come off. Using Unity is all new software to me. I've deployed assets to Unity for jobs, but never been responsible for a full game in it before. I wanted to use Unreal Engine, which I'm much more comfortable working with, but my coding partner and everyone I talk to about the project in a serious way, wants to use Unity. 

I spent all of 2019 just documenting why someone would want to play this new game. That's all I did. Experiment with art styles, write the lore of this world (which had about 4-6 years of active writing and imagination behind it, inspired way back in childhood,) and documenting how this experience would be coded in the architecture. 

Morningstar is a game made of procedurally generated maps, characters, and emergent quests.

That means every new game you meet a radically new cast of characters, radically new locations, and a totally different narrative experience depending on how you choose to play. 

I can't predict with total certainty how each player will fare their first time. They may spawn on an empty map with no resources and it's a hot desert with no way to get very far (hard mode, spawning in the desert.) Or they may be gifted amazing quality gear right out of the gate and survive til the end game with minimal losses. They may also have a family and friends, or be a solo survivalist. They may save the world or totally ignore the main quest and survive the apocalypse of this alien world as one of the faceless denizens just trying to get by.  I have to plan the systems to cooperate in such a way that even a total disaster, is still fun to play.

That core tech risk is a Dynamic Wants & Needs System which I call PENTA, which gives the AI characters a name, a general occupation, a personality which is more or less aggressive, more or less charismatic, more or less brave, more or less perceptive, and more or less intelligent; then gives them Hunger, Fatigue, Relationships with People, Relationships with Factions, Security, and Wealth concerns. 

Supporting this highly sophisticated Emergent Narrative Generator is a minimalist art style which features no character animation or fancy stuff like that, just an 8 directional spite with animated weapons and tools floating around their legless, limbless bodies, in a top down isometric landscape. 

I believe in this game. 

Mount & Blade, RimWorld, StarSector, Kenshi, Disco Elysium -- these games all rely on a market of players who want to explore a world in their own way without having a narrative foist on them. Fallout taught me that the best story is the story the player tells, not one you as a developer told them. It's the story that emerges between the player's ears as the game gives them feedback to the mechanics they are playing with. 

Convincing people to work on something before it exists is all about engendering that same level of faith, confidence, and inspiration. 

I have to be my own Tony Robins to my team and motivate them to do good work. And at the beginning, I decided to switch on hard mode by having a baby and building a house, all while being at zero dollars in my bank account, after years of being at or near zero dollars by the first of every month. 

Finding the capital to fund faith is the number one way to make people feel confident and inspired (or at least fake it.)

All of this means that making a game is likely a crazy decision, motivated by what must look like insanity to someone with a stable income and savings. I'm offering an uncertain bet on a guy whose last project was for free. (Impressive, won multiple awards and blew up the press for weeks, but made no money. )

I have to prove that we can do it again, this time making a profit.

That is a lot of disciplines all in one place. :p

So to be a game developer in this situation, you need to be a special kind of crazy backed up with a special kind of total determination and dedication. 

I’m feeling more confident than ever now that Kent and I are working together. I’d still prefer it if we lived in the same city and had a physical space to operate out of (a more people to work with) but until I can afford to pay them that’s out of the question. Online development it is (for now.)

Hopefully, with any luck, 2020 should be the year a small tech demo emerges and we secure funding. 

I have two people I can pitch that tech demo to who will give us money when we have something to show. Those are guaranteed wins. But we need to present a damn good front. 

I’m dedicating the next 6 months to that tech demo.

I’m also having a baby and building a house in that time! But, it’s something I believe is worth doing and doing with total dedication. 

I’ll produce and sell STAVE cards in the meantime, and see if I can also get a publisher for that. Which should help matters a bit. It’d be awesome if I could just delegate that finished product to someone in my team to sell, but that’s not feasible right now, no one I know is interested or has time. Gotta do that myself too.

So that’s my task list for this year:

Sell STAVE.

Build a house.

Have a baby.

Develop Morning Star Tech Demo and Pitch to Investor.

Start major development and the 3 year dev plan by September 2020 with a fully paid team. 

Launch Kickstarter  by the end of year.

Launch 1.0 by 2022.

Really glad my Patrons are here for this. I couldn’t do this without some income, even if it’s just 40$ every month right now.

Cheers guys