A Walk in the Woods, or: Shindig and the Experiment of Human-Scale Development
Hello, friends!
Golly, it's been a while, hasn't it? We're not ashamed to admit that with the pandemic, consultancy work, and the winding path of production through setbacks, we fell into that classic indie dev trap: working so hard on All The Things that we simply didn't have time to sort out the blog, too. But here we are, and with big thoughts to spill all over the place, as usual.
Downsizing
We're a two-person team now, but we cut our teeth as cogs in the great games industry machine, lending our skills to huge processes on a global scale. We've touched games that have been played by literally millions of people, and worked on campaigns and broadcasts that have had millions of eyes on them. We've put words into the mouths of giants. But while a lot of incredible, creative achievements come your way working for a big company, it's never your art: it's always their art you're making. That's the deal.
When we started saving to leave our corporate jobs and set up our own studio, we already knew what we wanted our company philosophy to be:
To work at, and respect, human-scale development.
We wanted our first games to be entirely made by just the two of us, at the speed two dedicated professionals (who are new to hands-on dev) can realistically work: a truly human scale that bears in mind the humanity of the people learning and growing as they go. We also wanted our games to be respectful of our players on a human scale: to include, where we can, those who might not have felt welcome in games before, and also to respect the time and schedules of our players by making short, interesting games with heart. We hope to offer some gaming fun for folk who only have a few hours to spare, who want short stories they can enjoy in-full in an evening, or who just like little games because little games can be just as awesome as the big ones. And much like the multi-faceted nature of man, we wanted to make games in a variety of genres, but we had to pick one to start off with.
Working at the human scale (as an indie dev duo) offers a great deal of freedom to make the arty art you want, but timescales and resources become whatever you can afford or have access to (which isn't much), whatever you can personally complete in your waking hours (minus downtime), or whatever you can do with a smidge of determination. If you don't have the skills, you've gotta get them, work around them, or make do without.
On the upside, this frees you from the pressure to make a smash hit game like the big cheeses. Or rather, it does for us. We don't have investors to please, we don't have a board to appease, we don't even have a Kickstarter to make good on. We don't have to make a product with universal appeal that hits certain targets, because we don't need to pay our thousands-strong workforce. We don't need to make a game about Vikings. (Though we're not ruling it out.)
The beauty of the indie spectrum is that your game doesn't have to be
THE BEST GAME OF ALL TIME, or to
REVOLUTIONISE THE GENRE LIKE NEVER BEFORE, or to
ENGAGE FANS DEEPLY WITH AN EXCITING CONTENT ROLLOUT.
Sure, it could be all those wonderful things, but it could just as well be something that's an interesting curio instead.
A Walk In The Woods
A couple of years ago now, we were wandering in the woods and dreaming like we do. We're married, so dreaming out loud together is kind of a thing. We moseyed along, listening to the birds and talking about our new life as indie devs. Shortly we'd leave a place that wasn't our home any more, maybe for the last time.
That walk in the woods was the concrete beginning of Shindig, proper. We already had a bunch of the characters and places in our history, but the sun-dappled discussion of that day sparked the main premise:
What about a nice game where you help to throw a little party?
Not saving the world, no fancy-pants powers – just helping someone out, like people do. Taking things down to human-scale heroism, to match our human-scale production powers.
It seemed like a fitting place to begin. Nothing that hasn't been done before, of course – after all, nothing's ever new – but it was something that had never been done before by us.
If it was easy, everyone would do it
This debut title is tiny in the grand scheme of games, but a huge learning experience for us. Though we've been in the industry for decades, we've never made a game ourselves from scratch – we're neither of us coders, trained artists, or proper musicians. But sometimes you've just got to take a leap before you're "ready" (whatever that means) because a story has to be told, some characters need to be given voices, and you've got to use your fleeting time on this planet to do some good where you can. Even if folk will point, and laugh, and say your game's rubbish...which, let's face it, someone probably will.
Although Shindig's a fairly simple prospect (an adventure game crossed with a visual novel; light puzzle-solving within a linear story; takes 1-2 hours to play all-told) 'simple' doesn't necessarily mean 'easy to make'. We had a rough idea what we were getting ourselves in for, because we've done some dev roles before, but in case you're not yet aware
GAME DEVELOPMENT ISN'T EASY
There's a whole lot of stuff that doesn't work properly, and in ways you'd never expect, plus a lot of things that are more difficult than you might imagine. But, y'know, the good kind of difficult that we're still extremely fortunate to do as our jobs.
Shindig is (fingers crossed) in the last stages of dev now. We're content complete, and on the test 'n' fix, test 'n' fix rounds – to infinity, and beyond! – that herald the wind-down of this ‘small’ project. It's strange to look back at how far we've come, and to think how in the last year alone the two of us have:
Designed a huge, huge game, then de-scoped that to a "huge small" game - by design, before we started production. (It still feels enormous to us, and has taken a lot longer - and is a lot bigger - than we initially thought anyway.)
Finalised the puzzle design and structure to streamline the game flow.
Written the entire game script, which amounts to roughly 2,000 lines of dialogue.
Redrawn the layout of the island from our original felt-tip scribble...and made that into an unlockable map with fast travel system and a funky teleport sound. A process that sure took a while.
Drawn and animated around 20 animal characters, some of whom have adorable alternate costumes in certain scenes.
Drawn and populated about 20 different scenes/screens.
Though it took months of struggle, eventually got speech bubbles working how we wanted, and looking good. Which was a lot harder than anticipated.
Composed, encoded, orchestrated, mixed, and mastered the entire game soundtrack - complete with individual looping themes for each character, a theme to denote conflict, and versions of songs for unique cutscenes/hangouts.
Recorded all in-game sound effects from scratch: edited, exported, and all that jazz.
Created and animated an androgynous main character, and FINALLY got character customisation working so that the player could choose their style. We lost a lot of time to a couple of systems that didn't function correctly before we figured out how to make it work, but the third time was indeed the charm for character customisation. It’s a feature that probably won’t matter to a lot of people, but it matters to us.
Implemented all the puzzles/conversations and got them working. Tweaked a couple that didn't make sense if you explored the island in different orders.
Sat in a cramped cupboard to record vocals for several hours. One session had both of us pretzelled in the cupboard to hilarious effect – it's a good job we're married! With 20 characters voiced, it took weeks to edit and export all of the dialogue as individual lines for the engine to work with.
Re-recorded quite a bit of dialogue because the (several) takes we had of that line were compromised.
Got all the hangout scenes unlocking and working, so that the most important theme of our game (to us) has a deeper positioning within the gameplay somewhere, even if it is optional.
Did all the jiggery-pokery so players can choose from masculine(ish) or feminine(ish) for the protagonist's voice.
Got all the content in, and working.
I'll say that again: got all the content in and working.
Animated several cutscenes, some of which are set to music. (Why do we do this to ourselves? WHYYYYY!?)
Made a final scene so you can actually mooch around at the titular party for a little bit once you're done being a low-key hero.
Made our credits scene, which felt…odd.
Recorded, edited, and cut our first trailer, which is set to a remix of one of the in-game songs. (Why do we do this to ourselves? WHYYYYY!?)
Made a couple of ‘little’ radio station-type recordings, with more unique musical themes in there, including one that’s the theme tune to a made-up historical drama. (WHYYYYYY!? Because we think it's really funny, that's why.)
Made closed-caption-style descriptive overlays so that our hard-of-hearing players don't miss out on all our good, scene-setting nonsense.
Created itch.io and Steam pages. The latter of which required a fair bit more intensive creation than we had guessed it would.
Updated our own company website, and wrote (some) blog posts.
Had about 20 ideas for other games, but stayed on target with Shindig the whole dang time.
(This above here, that's the short version of what we got up to
on the game in the last year. Phew. No wonder we're tired.)
Making a game is a huge prospect, because you have to make every little bit of it – including the nitty-gritty stuff like menus, sound effects for buttons, mouse pointers, and animations the player might only see once for a cutscene. But the more content you put in, the more you have to test...which takes exponentially more time. Dancing around in the background throughout though, is The Fear.
The Fear
You might be familiar with The Fear: it's that little voice that pops up after your vertical slice, and at every dev milestone, asking:
"This is what this game is now...This is it. Does that feel right? Is it enough?"
At that point you can either turn to page 213 and re-scope, or turn to page 300 and accept that while your game cannot be all things to all men, it can exist in the real world as an imperfect, but actual, thing you made.
Shindig is an absolutely imperfect, but actual, thing we’ve nearly made – and the first stage of our experiment in human-scale production. We can't wait to show our little pile of jokes and heart to you, and we hope it won’t be too much longer ‘til we can.
Take care of yourselves friends, 'til next we meet.
Love always,
Imaginary Friends Games
