「RISINGSUPERBLOG」

Foreword – Patching Things Up

I recently had the opportunity to put the finishing touches on a new version of my game, Garden Guardian! Recently released on PC (and soon on Switch), version 1.3.2 fixes a bunch of tiny stuff that honestly almost nobody will ever notice (you can check out the patch notes here, if you’d like). I play Garden Guardian every so often now that it’s on Switch and I’d slowly mounted a list of personal polish issues and complaints with my own game, with no developer to complain to but myself. They never warn you about this bit in game dev school!

Unfortunately, while I can patch the PC version whenever I want, the Switch version is another issue.

The main problem for me is that I don’t actually have a Switch dev kit- my buddy and publishing partner, Fred, lets me remotely use his from the US. Let me be the first to tell you, making a game for a console without actually having a unit around to test it is about as tough as it sounds. There’s a lot of trial and error, and with the huge time difference between him and Tokyo, the waiting game is a big factor too. Not a super great feeling to wake up to yesterday’s work not booting at all. There’s lots of time lost on stuff that could probably be finished in a matter of hours, if I actually had a kit on hand. It’s a pain, but my particular circumstances are such that getting a kit would be complicated.

Nonetheless, we got it done! About a week or so of work spread over three weeks has gotten me a fabulous new update for Garden Guardian, with a smidge of new content and a fresh coat of polish for bugs that absolutely nobody except myself ever reported. I’m happy that some longstanding annoyances are fixed, though also unhappy that hours of trial and error led me to give up on one particular annoying issue. I won’t tell you what it is, though, or else you’ll forever be annoyed by it as well.

All that work was time well spent in my eyes- it was really motivating to work on a game wholeheartedly, to really just throw myself into a comforting project and make it better with relative ease. Confirming that I haven’t forgotten how to walk the walk made me feel more confident in myself, and it’s given me a positive morale boost on the tiny new project I’m working on. It was worth it for me! I feel happy about it. Mostly! Look at this one terrible bug I fixed- the UI was scaling wrong! How could I not feel good?

Well, the thing I don’t feel happy about- and I’m not trying to guilt anyone here- is that this game’s sales are so, so dead. The satisfaction of the project provides a comforting buffer against the average unit sales in a given week- usually zero, infrequently one or two. Following a few tweets advertising the update on PC, the patch was greeted with a warm welcome at four sales at 50% off. I’m not trying to cry fowl or anything, selling games is tough, and I’m grateful that my game can do anything. Nobody owes me their time or money, of course! The economics of the situation are just… really rough, to say the least.

First and foremost, the game has thankfully broken even. I think it’s done around 1,500 sales overall? Not as bad as it could have been! That said, I’ll share some numbers with you and you can hash out how well-paid I was at the end of the day.

The game was initially sold for USD $3.99 until version 1.3.0 alongside the Switch version, when it was raised to USD $4.99 because the economics were so awful. The launch pricing was just straight up a mistake, bred from some surveys I did and finding that people were telling me they’d only be interested at CAD $2.99 or lower. Even though I priced higher than that in the end, I shouldn’t have put so much stock into the opinions of people who were mostly just not that interested in the game when they played it. Upon reflection, I feel strongly that they were more likely politely telling me the number that miiight tip them over if they really had to buy it, but hey. Anyways, selling at USD $3.99 was tough because there’s really no space to put it on a deep sale. at 50% off, you’re already pulling in under $2.00 before the fees come in! USD $4.99 isn’t life changing, but it’s given me a bit more space.

So say we sell a unit at USD $4.99. Start by knocking off 30% for Valve/Nintendo’s cut, add on some little fees here and there (such as credit card transaction fees), account for the tree planting we donate money to pay for (CAD $0.10-$0.20 per unit) and you’ll have ballpark of where we’re at per full price unit. Our expenses for the game were only around CAD $3,700.00, so you can probably see that we’re far from drowning in profits. Personally, I only make 46% of the game’s revenue (because everyone who works on a project deserves royalties), so with all that said I think I’ve personally collected comfortably under CAD $1,000 on the game after hundreds of hours of work. That’s rough, and we still got pretty lucky. Many, many indie debut games do far worse than this in unit and dollar sales.

Regardless of the finance, we knew working on another project after Garden Guardian was in the cards. I’m lucky enough to have the financial opportunity to try again for a little while, but man, it can be demoralizing to consider the brass tacks of the situation. All that work for such a small return. It’s enough to make you want to give up!

I’m not, though, I’m really trying! 2024 was a tough year for me in game development. I tossed aside a bunch of prototypes for games at various early stages of completion because they just weren’t fully clicking in one way or another, and the trouble with doing that is that you start getting good at it. You develop your ability to prematurely assess problems, stopping points, and limitations (financial, technical, or otherwise). Cancelling projects becomes easy in the face of both developmental uncertainty, and negative financial certainty.

There’s a clarity and comfort in wiping the slate periodically that becomes tough to overcome again, because you know how hard you had to work for a game as small as Garden Guardian. You understand how much it hurt for it to not land as well as you’d hoped. Trying again- signing yourself up for another year of unpaid work on a passion project with a small addressable audience- that’s scary!

One day I’ll write a proper deep dive postmortem on Garden Guardian. A lot of stuff went right, but there were a few small but significant points of failure that hurt it. It doesn’t really look flashy, for starters. Heck, it looks so unremarkable at a glance that Nintendo rejected my applications for direct dev kit access three times (this is why I had to get published by my friend’s company). I understand why people look at the game and their eyes glaze over a bit. It’s a game for a specific subset of freaks, but the art is arguably not freaky enough. I do like the way it looks, but it’s hard to escape the thought that if we had made the game more eye-catching, more explosive, or more abrasive, maybe that would have made a big difference. I mean like a completely different art direction, by the way, not just a grimdark version of the game we shipped. These are the sort of thoughts that can keep me up at night!

Anyways, things are actually pretty okay right now for game development. My buddy Phil and I are working on a teeny tiny game that jokingly began as an intervention on my regular project cancellation. It’s such a small game, that a part of me is afraid to show it off and release it. It’s so toylike in its simplicity and so shallow in its content that I feel like it’s destined for an even worse fate than Garden Guardian (which was quite polished, and if I may toot my own horn, was a very, very good Game & Watch game). But I must persist! Finishing and releasing this game is the best possible thing I can do right now, and I hope I’ll have it released in the next few months.

This isn’t a sales pitch, but let me tell you a bit about it. You play as this girl, and someone throws watermelons to her, and you cut them. That’s… uh… that’s what it is. I honestly don’t even think it’s a very good game, but finishing something is more important than that right now!

The project started after Phil retweeted this cute illustration he drew in 2016, and I decided “yeah, you know what, that’s the right scope for me right now” and also “yeah she’s definitely cutting watermelons”. He certainly hadn’t determined that it was watermelon juice in the picture, so I’m glad he accepted my reimagining of his illustration so easily. He’s a fun dude.

I have, at least, developed ideas about what the game will be about beyond slicing. I think at the core, it’s a game about making the art that you can make today, and the importance of doing that. The main character is intended to practice her art- watermelon sculptures- and show off her results. Part of the idea is that success or failure, the important bit is that she just makes the next piece, and she doesn’t beat herself up even if she knows it’s not her best work. I know it’s a bit self serving, but it’s something I feel good about putting to paper. I feel like all of us deserve a pat on the shoulder reminding you that the art you make, whether unremarkable or not, is actually an important stepping stone on the path ahead. I hope, just like the main character hopes, that you’ll like our watermelon art.

Anyways, though few people ask about what my next game will be, I felt like I’d feel good putting out some info to keep myself committed to finishing it. Please be gentle to fact that everything in that image is a placeholder, name included (lol). The only thing I can promise is that it’ll be a cute little toy of a game, and against my better busness sense, it’ll be extremely cheap to match. We probably won’t make any money off of it, but it’s the next stone on my path. For me, the only way to stray from the path is to stop completely, so I just have to keep laying those stones.

I hope you do, too. ❤

-Liam

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February 2024 Articles

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