Caravan Newsletter Experiment #16
Hey everybody!
16 weeks down and that’s a wrap on the experiment! I’m feeling… accomplished. These three months have been greatly enjoyable for me. Starting next week I’ve decided to split time finishing up some demo features while beginning a new job search. Caravan development will continue but not in a full-time capacity. I’m so grateful to everyone out there who has followed along.
Retrospective
The original plan for the experiment is still here in its entirety: https://caravanexperiment.com/plan. To recap: I like working on my game so I decided to invest some time to try to make it my job instead of a side project.
My development objectives were to
finish a playable demo of Caravan
host live demos and collect feedback
write a weekly newsletter
The main questions I wanted to answer were
Can I maintain a full-time one-man development schedule?
Can the game make money to fuel such a development schedule? Or (as was always more likely to be the case) could a demo of the game be in a state which warrants additional investment (that state measured as objectively as possible)?
How Did I Do?
I’m surprised and pleased with my day-to-day performance. I did not stumble at any point in sticking to a full work week nor do I feel burnt out by it now. That was never a guarantee for me! I’m fairly happy with my scoping and prioritization. I completed more features than were in the original list, but I definitely underestimated the time it would take to produce content (the more… creative elements of game making I found tough to do under time pressure) and ended up cutting corners there to get the demo out in time. All in all I just love the process. I feel confident I could do it forever.
What’s the State of the Demo?
https://jackmccarron.itch.io/caravan-demo
I would say that the demo is not fun. That isn’t to say that it’s bad — in fact I’m more excited about it than ever — but the feature list I completed simply wasn’t enough to get it where it needs to be to attract an honest playership. Unfortunately I don’t have the wide and unbiased quantitative data that I’d hoped to back up this opinion; coronavirus threw a wrench into my plans to shanghai game development Meetup attendees into playing it and I way underestimated the difficulty of convincing random people on the internet to give it a go. However, I did spend a great deal of time watching and taking notes while some very insightful friends tested it. There were brief moments where I saw a promising gleam in their eyes, but unfortunately it has not yet passed the only test that really matters: will somebody play it if I’m not watching! So at this time I can’t justify putting further full-time investment into it. I am a bit too nervous about money and very nervous about ending up in some career no-man’s land. I will continue working on it in my spare time and I’m thrilled that I now have something people can download and play!
(Oh and unfortunately there is game-breaking issue with the Mac version of the demo so I’ve had to take it down for now. The issue is to do with old shaders which cannot be recompiled for Mac variants because they were made with a tool that is no longer supported in my working version of Unity — I could do some version juggling to fix it, but since I want to do some VFX work anyway I’m going to rewrite them using Unity’s new hotness — hopefully soon.)
Lessons Learned
Two of my more meta goals for this experiment were to challenge myself with feedback and accountability.
Feedback
Getting criticism didn’t turn out to be nearly as scary as I thought it would be. I found that when the feedback was a conversation (as was the case when I audited play sessions) the criticism never felt personal or demotivating. Perhaps that was because I could empathize with the frustration in the moment — there was simply not enough distance between me and the player to get defensive. The rewards for soliciting feedback were great; it was essential for multiple prioritization decisions in the final month. When something was seriously screwing up the experience it lit a fire under me to fix it rather than despair. I’m very fond of this conversational model I’ve landed on, and I suspect that wide, shotgun-style, feedback could both be misinterpreted easily and suffer from diminishing returns. I suspect I will always prefer 3 long play sessions with notes over 300 likert scale data points.
Accountability
I thought of accountability as pop psychology’s dark side of the force; self-actualization being the Jedi’s path. I was wary of it for two reasons. The first is that it seems like a hack or a trick; it doesn’t feel right to succeed by psychological subterfuge. The second is that it relies on fear as a motivator, which seems like its continued practice could take you to a shitty place even if it does get results. But if you’re reading this then you know that I gave it a try anyways. And if you’re not reading this then you’ve still helped because for the duration of this experiment I’ve labored under the delusion that you were, and even more farcically, that you would actually judge me in some way by the end result! And it worked. I got the thing done when I said I was going to, and on those days when I got up on the wrong side of the bed it was the accountability that got me through — working to save face even when I felt I had failed my ideals. That sentiment definitely came with moments of embarrassment, but I think that was ultimately a beneficial by-product — facing that fear of judgement seems to have deflated the importance of it all just let me relax and live my life. So if you are like me and struggle with motivation stemming from a fear of failure, I would say doing something like this is worth a shot. Plus everyone was really nice.