One More Workbench: Playing Indie Dev Jenga

I’ve been working with small indie devs for over half a decade now, and I swear it’s like watching the world’s most stressful game of Jenga. First you’ve got your role hats: developer, coder, marketing guru, PR person, customer service rep, etc. (to infinity), all while simultaneously building this fucking tower of game features.

Inventory system? That’s a block. AI behaviors? Block! World building, story, gameplay loop, vehicle mechanics, combat systems – block after block after block. And the whole time you’re probably thinking, “Just one more feature and this thing will be perfect.” (Or, one more workbench!)

This piece actually started as a half-formed rant in Issue #2 of the newsletter. If you want the early cuts (plus news and stories I don’t post anywhere else), tune in there!

Rooted is creeping its way through development, chugging through Alpha 2, I think. (I’m kinda eyeballing it, but since I can’t share anything, meh.) They released a small news blurb detailing how they onboarded to their development team, yadda yadda. Nestled in there, though, was an interesting piece of info: to fund the studio’s growth, they “…launched a side project developed in just four months (a genuine challenge!) called Backrooms: Extractions on Steam.”

A little further down the page, they mentioned “Beyond its financial impact, this side project allows us to test features in a smaller-scale environment before introducing them to Rooted. We iterate rapidly, collect valuable player feedback, refine and enhance features, ensuring quality before implementing them into our primary project.”

I’ve seen this crop up a ton lately, most recently with 3C Games- creator of the upcoming title WASTED Will Be Brutal, and who recently released a demo for another title, WASTED BLOODLINE.

As a player, it can look like a shiny distraction. But from the dev side? It could be a bunch of shit! (Some dumb, some not. Ish.)

Maybe the old “eyes bigger than your stomach” problem, or maybe it’s just straight-up scope creep (the classic “well, just one more system won’t hurt”) until it’s a bloated mess of benches and features. Oooor maybe it’s our monkey brain! You see a game doing well and it has A THING and suddenly you’re like, shit, we need A THING too, scrap the schedule. (Old THING would probably be zombies, and lately it’s like…trains.)

Or! Or! Skill ceilings. You bash your head against a roadblock, like AI combat, for six months, it won’t click, and instead of grinding through it, you say fuck it and pivot to a side project where you don’t need AI at all! And that’s not always terrible: I’m sure that we could probably dig around and find amazing small scope games that only came about because the dev was taking a break from something more involved. Or too hard. And I’m not saying that it’s not a useful way to learn the code/skillset in question, either. (That makes sense, right? Becca is the UE5 brain in our pairing.)

What else can it be, hmm. Quick cash infusion when you’re drowning is possible, though the vast majority of Steam games make garbage in terms of profit, so this may be a hit or miss thing. Also! If you already have folks invested in GAME A, it can torpedo shit to announce you’re going to work on GAME B for reasons. Speaking of the game community, maybe it’s just for quick thrills? Eventually, you get fucking tired of hearing “are we there yet,” “is it ready yet,” and not only do you get to say “IT’S COMING OUT NOW” but you also get that big dick developer energy that comes after a release (that doesn’t suck) where everyone flatters you in Discord and begs for keys.

I dunno. I guess the smart move (sometimes) is starting with a birdhouse and not a hand-carved chair. (If you’ve read my shit at ALL over the past few years, you’ve definitely seen me plan for something BIG AND FANCY and then quietly downsize.)

But man, it seems like most devs would rather die on the hill of their giant-ass project than admit they should’ve started smaller.