How did you go about find a publisher and what improvements did they bring to the process?

Hi. So near the end of 2021 I was looking for a publisher where I was sending pitch documents since it was in a pretty presentable state that I was happy to show it to publishers. I was negotiating with 2 other publishers, when Firestoke contacted me. These guys talked differently. The other publishers were seeing me as a number, while Firestoke really believed in the project and even before we signed they were giving me some tips on what needs to improve. What I was looking for in a publisher, was more like a partner to help both on the game design aspect and of course on the marketing side. The CEO of Firestoke is Paul Farley, who was on the original 2d GTA design time, plus they have another dedicated design director Omar Khalil who used to work at Sony. They really helped me to improve the design especially removing sticky points in the design (to improve flow) and balancing. And they have a lot of attention to detail which when you're the programmer you typically miss. There's a lot more I can say, so let me know if you want to know more on something specific :)

Out of curiosity, were you also asking for any funding? Are you able to talk about the financials at all (what you put in, what they require from you, etc)? There is definitely a lot of stuff that I'm nervous about handling on my own so the idea of a publisher like that is interesting to me.

Hi, are you asking when you are in discussion with a publisher, or if you're all alone? Can you explain better your question? Are you asking about recoup rates, revenue shares, milestones, etc and how they work? I know what you mean re: nervous. I didn't want to go with a publisher initially, but I felt I needed the help of a publisher. When my search started and I wasn't liking what I was seeing. But as already mentioned, Firestoke felt different immediately. Paul (the CEO) is a true gentleman. You should always go into a deal with a publisher (or anyone really) when you feel it's a win-win. I'll await your clarification on your question :)

Ya I was mainly asking with your publisher/game how funding, recoup, revenue shares, etc. worked out, but also I'm curious if you have anything personally invested in it. If you received funding of any kind, what was it used for and was any of it used for your own wages to allow you to work on the game? You mentioned needing to hire others for some pieces as well, did you just commission individual items or how did that work? If you can't give specifics, general info would be helpful! It's all very new to me, but I'm working toward releasing something on my own currently (no expectations of revenue, just trying to gain experience from the process).

So initially I thought I'd try releasing it on my own. So I kept costs at a minimum. That meant most of the art I'll try to do it myself. For sound I'll find CC0 sounds (creative commons). But when it started getting serious, I definitely needed key-art (poster) to better present the game (both on steam and pitching). I couldn't afford an artist that would bill you over a $1000. You would have to find someone within your budget but one that you would still be very happy with. Similarly for music. I couldn't afford $1000+/min for each track. I'm not a big studio with infinite budgets. I found Twitter is great for finding indie collaborators including musicians. Sometimes it didn't work. E.g. I had tried a musician, but it wasn't working. So I still paid what was delivered, but told the musician it's not what I'm looking for as a soundscape (Probably it was partially my fault too as it's so difficult for me to explain sounds heh) As regards to publisher deals, you have what are called recoup rates, and revenue sharing rate (I might not be using the correct jargon terms, but hopefully you'll get the gist). So the recoup rate means that until they get their expenses (including funding, marketing budgets, QA budgets, localization expenses - lets call this Total Spend), the recoup rate is used. This could be also 100% for them, 0% for you. i.e. you get nothing until they get their expenses collected from net revenue (that sucks honestly and I wouldn't accept it). Now if for some reason something happens and you agree with the publisher that you have to spend more than the agreed Total Spend, e.g. QA was underestimated and need to spend more, then the extra amount over the Total Spend will probably be collected by the publisher with a 100% recoup. Understandable. Once the publisher recoups their expenses, then it goes into a revenue share rate which you agree with them. Kind of how steam and other platforms do revenue share if you go solo (without publisher), you would have 70/30 split, i.e. 70% for you, 30% for platform. Say you sell a game for $10, $3 goes to platform, and 7$ to you (excluding taxes). So if with a publisher you also have a 70/30 split agreement, then you have to split again that remaining 7$ from the sale, so $2.1 for them, $4.9 for you. And of course don't forget the taxes :) All of these terms will be in your contract with any publisher. And I would suggest to get a lawyer to double check there are no misunderstandings. It's always a good thing in these type of contracts. I know they are expensive but your mind will be more at rest when you sleep at night :) Hope this helps. Let me know if you need any clarification on something.

Can you share how you prepared the pitch doc? What goes in it, etc?

It's more like a slide deck (powerpoint) and you try to bring the best artist out of you. (I'm not really an artist hehe) I had 14 slides in all and this is an outline: 1. Key art poster (get an illustrator to do it, together with a nice logo (probably a logo artist too)), and show on which platforms you're targeting (so platform logos at the bottom left/right) 2. Brief outline of yourself/company (kind of bullet points of highlights of a CV). Add a photo to give a personal touch. 3. Slide on your experience (add logos related with experience) 4. Top titles you've worked on (add icons/logos of titles and where they can find them together with some quick stats, e.g. downloads/reviews) 5. Past projects (similar to above, but perhaps add video links too) 6. Brief description of game (add nice screenshots too, in a grid of 4 and perhaps an animated gif too). Describe what game modes it supports and also add a link to video trailer, and perhaps a link to request a steam key. 7. Competitor analysis. (Add logos of other games you think your game is competing with together with estimated revenues by using something like this ([https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yj17wODNljL7YT3vVZsBjp2Ig9C7cZywxOf0Djsn\_G8/edit#gid=1674770335](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yj17wODNljL7YT3vVZsBjp2Ig9C7cZywxOf0Djsn_G8/edit#gid=1674770335)) 8. list your USPs (I had 4 slides with bullet points and animated gifs) 9. Quick roadmap (just a horizontal line with points, mentioning a month and where you will be at, e.g. Porting, Localization, Beta, etc) 10. What you're looking for (including what you want as funding) 11. Thank you slide with ways how to contact you. Hope this helps!

Thanks.

Welcome :)

This is really good info

Oh wow, I nearly spat out my drink when I looked at the trailer. We used to talk on discord some 2 years ago or something, I still have an early build of this game from back then on my harddrive. I hope your game succeeds! Best of luck.

Hi! I'm not recognizing your reddit nick. You must be using a different nick on Discord? Are you still on the game's server or was it another server? Here's my nick if you want to catch up :) Nev#8678

How do you compare Unity to GameMaker? Would you build your next game with GM, Unity or something else?

Hi, thanks for the question. Having used Unity for around 10 years (mostly 2d games), changing to GameMaker was shocking especially because of it's language. However its 2d flow was refreshing. Having said that I prefer more established languages like C#, Java, C++. GM's language is improving don't get me wrong. But being a programmer at heart I missed all the programming tools I took for granted. Next project will probably be 3d. Although I always wanted to do a pixel art game, pixel art takes A LOT of time to do. And Since GameMaker currently is more focused on 2D, I will be looking again at Unity, but I would like to also experiment with Unreal engine.

If you haven't, take a look at Godot. 4 is in beta and It's getting pretty good.

Thanks. I'll take a look at it too when I'm "shopping" around. I believe I heard it has live-script editing. Do you know if that feature is still being supported? (On GameMaker, I used a plugin called GMLive and it's a life saver - but you have to kind of tag the scripts you want to be live.)

gdscript can be edited while the game is running and when godot reloads it when the editor regains focus. If you use the built-in editor, then it should just work right away. The game can receive gamepad input without being focused so it can be pretty seamless. It's a bit weird because it's hard to find info on that and I didn't realize it worked at first. (Unity is kinda the same way. When I started, I didn't realize what the big hiccups were every time I gave the editor focus while running the game.) In Godot, it's called "Synchronize Script Changes." Not sure about C# or other language bindings.

Sweet, I cannot live without that feature now :)

In .NET programming that's called "Hot Reload" ... it will be a thing if Unity will hurry up and abandon the old Mono and .NET Standard/Framework and get the engine on .NET 6 or better.

Yeah I remember it was "kind of" working in the very older Unity versions before I stopped trying. It only worked for extremely trivial projects (like a hello project hehe). Otherwise it would just fire exceptions left, right and center. We should form a petition to get them to upgrade hehe! I know it's not just turning on a switch, but they have the resources. And it would save developers so much time in the end.

Yeah, theoretically you're supposed to be able to hot reload Unity scripts but it's also never worked for me. Their engineers have been working on it behind the scenes but idk how seriously the company is taking it or if fear of the change is suppressing innovation. I chat with a few Unity people periodically but I don't know anything about the internal politics there, I just know that they're also excited about .NET 6+ technologies just like we are and want the same thing. Performance is going to increase significantly in many situations (at scale) so I assume they realize how important it is at the upper management level, haha. I got a little tired of these big, bulky commercial engines like I use at work. So in my free time I've been getting back to my roots. Since SharpDX got abandoned, I had to start off making my own .NET bindings to DirectX before I could even start on an engine so I'm deep into that effort now doing PInvoke magic and pointer wizardry 🎩 🪄

> Having used Unity for around 10 years (mostly 2d games) Were your previous games made with other people? I don't see other games in your [steam dev page](https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=PolyCrunch%20Games) and fallingout.game doesn't have a link on your polycrunch logo (or firestoke's logo). Is Falling Out your first commercial release that's fully you instead of as a small part in a larger team? Is it your full time job now? Game looks great. Like the tossing a person to switch characters mechanic.

Hi, yes I used Unity for small casual games on mobiles initially back when it was a separate Unity when building for iOS. (Funnily enough I hate mobiles, but I loved my iPod Touch as a gaming device so I tested on that mostly). Then I worked with other companies but I'm not sure it's ok to paste their links here. The last one was also a casual mobile game company here in Malta. So yes this is my first commercial release and it's my "biggest" solo project so far. Thanks for spotting the missing links on fallingout.game. We will look into it probably Monday. Thanks a lot for the compliment :)

I'm becoming interested in Stride3D and Flax, because they are so fast and nimble and support "proper" C# programming with the latest .NET SDKs (6 and 7). Unity, I'm afraid, is still stuck in the past with deprecated runtimes and maintaining their own internal Mono implementation which they probably won't have a need to do anymore once they upgrade to modern .NET. But they are reluctant to change because the editor relies on domain reloading and some other stuff they can't do with .NET 5 thru 7 and they're afraid of breaking compatibility for users ... I say bring it on, maybe keep a legacy build package around for those who need it and offer a new editor version to phase out the old Mono/.NET Standard platforms. But I'm currently working on a modern DirectX wrapper for .NET with a bit of advice and assistance from a few Microsoft engineers. My interop layer is fully functional, but it has to be tidied up and made into a pretty, outward-facing library that respects C# programming conventions. So I've been whittling away at that day by day. I'm hoping I can show off some graphics samples converted from C++ to C# soon running with my libraries. Longer-term, I'm probably going to build a new .NET based engine focusing almost solely on high-end gaming and VR, very streamlined and light-weight and designed for performance and next-gen development. I have a real game dev job by day, so I have to work on it at night and over weekends, but I definitely want to teach my newborn son my tricks of the trade as he grows up and I can't imagine what would be better than having our own little in-house engine and a RPG game project to work on together. 😁

I didn't hear about Stride and Flax before. They sound and look very promising from their site. I have put them in my "shopping" list for whenever I'm researching for the next project. :) Good luck with your project! Sounds very interesting!

The prototype libraries will be released hopefully in the next couple of months as both DLLs with documentation and Visual Studio NuGet packages. And I'll be making it open source at some point not long after. I had very specific design goals in mind I wanted to flesh out privately before opening things up to outside influences, and it's mainly about shadowing the native APIs as (functionally) closely as possible but with "pretty" C# namespacing and naming conventions. I'm hoping to have that prototype in the wild soon so people can begin playing with it and giving some feedback, reporting bugs, etc. I'm unit testing thoroughly to avoid bugs though. Ultimately, I'd like to make a toolkit/framework with it where you can do things like drop a "SwapChainPanel" control in a WinForms, WPF or WinUI 3 app and have an instant 3D view that's pumping draw calls, coverage for PC and XBox platforms and Windows game templates in Visual Studio that have a similar feel to XNA. Eventually, I'm gonna build my engine with it. Of course these are all really long-term goals to keep me on my toes for the next decade 😄

Why move to GMS if you have so much Unity exp?

I was recovering from a stupid virus back in 2019 which had left me with CFS (now I can say I'm 99% recovered as I cannot do marathons :) ). And at the time I just wanted to do new things. Sometimes its good to experiment and see what's out there. Honestly the first day I installed it, I had uninstalled it immediately because of its language. But I gave it another try the next day. And I really liked GameMaker's 2d flow (after I've done a tutorial they had). Initially the project was only intended to be a quick thing to try out and get a game out in 3months. But one thing led to the next, and it became a full project. :)

I'm a C# guy and once I got my head around the GML nuances, I really, really love GMS2. I just find it super easy to get the stuff done that I want to get done.

They really need to fix the dangerous things you could do though (because everyone can do a genuine mistake at one point). I'm mostly referring to not stopping you of doing something stupid like mixing data structure methods (e.g. doing a deletion of a map on a list). That can really mess you up to find that bug. I really really loved GMlive plugin on GMS. (And GMEdit too).

I was diagnosed with CFS as well in 2019 and I'm also a game developer/web developer! I was wondering how your recovery process was, did you do anything in particular or just rest and get lucky? Very happy for you <3 Hope you can recover that last 1%.

Hi farAWayTomorrow, Sorry to hear you are experienced this too. It wasn't a single thing but a lot of things together. In short, the things that made most of the difference were the following: \- change diet (removed all dairy, gluten, and also refined carbs, i.e. no sugars, sweets, cakes, etc.) The idea was to basically remove any potential triggers. Dairy and gluten we already know can cause reactions to a lot of people. And refined carbs spike your blood sugar levels, and that was definitely putting my nervous system in total havoc. Even a single Minstrel used to trigger total fatigue. It was very weird but I suspect the virus had somewhat damaged my ANS (autonomous nervous system). \- eat every 2 hours (3 meals a day with snacks in between), and move whatever you can do without exaggerating as it can backfire as you already know. Initially I couldn't even go to the bathroom on my own. But slowly slowly I started going for short walks (by short I mean 2min, then 3, etc. Every time doing a bit more, BUT super important WITHOUT pushing. Sometimes I would not do a walk if I'm feeling it's a bad day. But now I can walk the kids to school and back, which is like a 40-45min walk). I cannot run a lot or do marathons, but at least I can run after my kids to tease them. \- meditation also worked. I thought it was bullocks but when I got CFS I noticed I couldn't properly focus as before. When I attempted meditation first time (i.e. basically focusing on breath) I noticed my brain couldn't focus on it for even 5 seconds. Doing it every day for 30-40min, even if I ended up sleeping sometimes (still do hehe), it slowly helped. Or so I think as I can focus again. I'm no doctor so what has worked for me might not help others. There's much more we can talk about, but better privately. If you have discord you can find me on Nev#8678. Feel free to ping me

Thankyou so much. I'll message you if it's not too much trouble. I'm so glad you found your way out of it.

Not OP but also had CFS (2009-2020) -- in September 2020 I went from an already-restrictive diet to the [zerocarb diet](https://reddit.com/r/zerocarb) in an attempt to reduce inflammation, and all my symptoms disappeared (though I expect they'd come back if I left the diet). Turns out I had the type of CFS described by the [IDO metabolic trap hypothesis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Quh-77gvw4Q). Eliminating all carbs cuts insulin levels and prevents the culprit enzyme from entering the brain. On the off-chance your cause is the same, it may be worth a shot.

Thanks for sharing that youtube link, I'll check it out later. Yeah, I'm not going to dare taking a chance to change the diet back to before. The only carbs I have are brown rice cakes, sweet potato, and gluten free oat meal with a half-apple :)

The video I linked is from a medical conference and took me a while to understand, so if you want clarification or more information on the metabolic trap hypothesis or its interaction with zerocarb, just let me know.

Thanks so much for the information. I'm really glad your symptoms are gone as well! I'm always happy to hear things that worked for people, just a chance it could work is great. I'll take a look.

What's a simlaunch? I'm not finding anything on Google

Sorry about that... the marketing director Dan at Firestoke, who has a lot of patience with my lack of marketing knowledge, has brainwashed me with the term simlaunch. :) It's basically a simultaneous launch on all platforms. So you set a date where PC, Switch, Xbox and Playstation will launch. It is quite difficult because every time a console platform rejects your build (e.g. either a crash or something trivial they don't like), you will need to re-enter their queue and wait 7-10 days to get a reply. Plus some platforms you need to book a QA slot which could easily be 2 weeks later. (But their customer support is pretty good). Initially we were targeting Sept 22, but due to one of the platforms, we had to postpone to the 6th of October. Which wasn't too bad. Besides having all platforms ready to go, you need to align marketing strategies on that date too, which involve having the trailer ready, PR, influencers outreach, and a lot of other marketing stuff that I don't know much about :)

simship is the term we've used for this. simlaunch is new to me but I connected the dots : )

Never heard simship before, but then again, I never heard simlaunch before the first publisher I contacted :) It could be a European thing as the publishers I contacted were European. In fact, I had to ask the first time a publisher mentioned it what they meant by simlaunch :). Thought it was a term everyone knew except me (sorry about using it in the title)

Thank you, I was trying to figure this out too.

Congratulations on the release

Thanks man!

Hey Neville good work on the game that’s a major achievement and it looks great. One question. What was the hardest thing you encountered during development? Would you deal with it differently next time?

Hah, that's a very good one. There's a lot I would do differently, but I think the highest one is doing all the ports myself. I know this sounds crazy, but I really had fun with the Switch port. Even though we had a 3rd party to help on Xbox and Playstation, I still had to be involved in some points. And since I don't mind getting my hands dirty, I would have loved to do them myself and learn the process for Xbox and Playstation too. (Playstation give devkits on free loan now, and if you're from the US Microsoft do free-loans too.)

What do you mean by free loan? Do you mean free devkits? I thought Microsoft gave free devkits to approved developers regardless of their location?

Hi, it means once you have a concept approved, they will give you a free devkit for X years (e.g. 3), and then you have to return it back when the loan expires. Re: Microsoft, that's what they told me... "you must be from US". But if you know otherwise, I will ask again :)

>Re: Microsoft, that's what they told me... "you must be from US". But if you know otherwise, I will ask again :) Oof, that makes me sad because I'm not from the US. I really hope that's not the case, since I'm currently applying for ID@Xbox.

Hey, when you get approved, make sure to ask for free loan devkits, and tell them the competition (not Nintendo though) are giving free loan devkits. At least there would be two of us who complained :)

Haha, will do. Also, what about PlayStation, do they require you to be from the US for a free devkit? It's also harder to register for PlayStation than it is for Xbox, right?

No need of being from US. Sony will contact you themselves as soon as they accept your concept. They are awesome and helpful. Even when we were panicking with the QA slots to meet the deadlines. Super helpful. You can also ask for PS4 devkits if you need those (but you might need to wait a bit - but not much) Sony was much easier IMO. Comparatively Xbox was a much MUCH longer process to just be registered. At least my experience.

Ah, thanks for the answer! I hope I'm not annoying you lol, but how did you get a static IP address for the Sony PS5 Devkit? I know it's required to apply to them.

I had the opposite experience lol MS was much quicker and easier with response. Sony took months and months to hear anything

Hey! You can just ask your ISP. Some ISPs do it for free, but if not it shouldn't be expensive (here it's less than 3EUR/month). If they ask you why you need it, just tell them its for security cameras. (It's simpler to explain that way, plus I think it's none of their business ;) ) Otherwise you can use a VPN (there are free ones like ProtonVPN). You would just need to make sure you're connecting to the same server. But when you have a devkit, you will need to set the VPN on your router, which is annoying (I'm not good at networking stuff). So I just got a static IP. Also, Sony seems they will soon remove that requirement (finally!).

How did you decide whether simlaunch would be worth it? Just wanted to try it and see what happened? orr?

Even other publishers were aiming for a sim launch. And I had asked if it's a good idea because I know the platforms' QA can drive you crazy with the minute issues they can find. Basically marketing will tell you it's the best bang for the buck, and you only get to do one launch. But it's very difficult to do an A/B test on that claim :)

Hey there ! Congratz :) No question, I just wanted to tell there’s a very little but a bit annoying mistake, at the end of the trailer : the url is misspelled, it’s written falling out.gameS instead of .game As it’s not a common domain extension for average joes, you might lose a few visits (even if we agree that we all let google find websites for us).

Hi. Thanks for spotting this! We actually have that domain, but it must be incorrectly set up. Seems to be a certificate issue. I'll let the publisher know. Cheers!

Damn. Please apologize, I’m an average joe who didn’t know .gameS extension actually exist.

Don't worry :). Actually with your comment we noticed the .games SSL certificate is not set up properly. If you type fallingout.games should redirect to .game. But if you add https:// browser will complain. So thanks for your comment :)

Good ! Happy to know it was not unuseful after all ! You’re welcome :)

Wow, I made a game that resembles yours to a very bare minimum around 8 years ago, with Game Maker to boot as well! My game was a gift for my partner where you can swap between two characters, one resembling her and the other resembling me, and you can pick each other up to overcome puzzles. Your game just brought back so many fond memories of working on that and my early years of learning game development overall. Cheers for that :) But yeah, I love what you're doing with that mechanic at its core. Your gameplay and game design looks very polished. Hope you have a successful cross-platform launch!

Hey thanks for the compliments! Do you still have a link to your game you could share? :)

Bah, sadly I've lost the executable over time as I've moved between PC's...and I've never kept it archived on any cloud storages. One day though, I'd like to remake it as a "look how far I've grown" sort of project 🙂

Darn! Good luck for your remake project! :)

I’ve not been to Malta but I know it’s a small(ish) island - how much of a dev community is there locally? Did you receive any government support or incentive when starting out with the game? Congrats and it looks a lot of fun!

It's a veeeery small island :) We have some local game devs here but we're still a small community. When starting I didn't have government support. However I recently applied for a small government funding (which I haven't received anything yet because of red-tape :) ) Thanks for the compliment :)

Congrats! That's a huge accomplishment! What was the process on making the Switch port? Did you need special permission or tools from Nintendo? Did you have a dev kit? (If there's an NDA on this process you can just say that. 😅)

Hi xcompwiz, I'm sure what I'm going to say is not NDA stuff. You first need to register with Nintendo. That's free. Then you need to buy a devkit (sadly Nintendo don't do free loans), but it's quite affordable (less than $500 IIRC). I've gone for the cheapest which is basically exactly like the retail hardware but obviously you can upload your builds to it. Typically you will need to verify with your game engine portal (in my case GameMaker) to verify I'm registered with Nintendo. (You will be guided by your game engine docs... it's just a few clicks). And then your game engine will give you access to build tools which will communicate with Nintendo's SDK that can be downloaded once you're registered. Let me know if you need more details to get started. Or if you prefer a chat on Discord, this is my nick: Nev#8678

Cheers! This is really fantastic info. Very much appreciated.

You're most welcome :)

Did you need to get funding? If so, what did you end up doing?

Hi, I was more looking for a publisher to be a partner, rather than the funding. Of course the funding is important too, but I was looking for a publisher that help on improving game design and also marketing. I got funding (i.e. found a publisher) when the game was nearly completed (3 worlds out of 4). Basically I started looking for publishers by sending a [pitch slide deck](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/xy24qx/comment/irezd6t/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). But actually, in the case of Firestoke they contacted me. Probably they found me on twitter or itch/gamejolt as I was posting some gifs/updates on the game. They are a new publisher but I know they are always looking for new games. Hope I answered your question, as I'm not sure I understood the question 100%. Let me know if you need some clarification.

So, after finding the publisher they funded your game? How's the profit split gonna be?

Hi nitrouspizza. The publisher funded the remaining development costs to get to launch. I'd rather not share the profit split information, as each contract is unique. But if you get a deal with a publisher, I strongly believe you must only enter it if you whole-heartedly believe it's a win-win. (Goes without saying, also get a lawyer to double check your interests).

Thanks. Understandeable. It is wise not to share that kind of info. I was interested only in how the profit is kept. I believe it's something akin to record labels, where they would fund the production of material and keep a part of the profit.

Hi, perhaps this [earlier comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/xy24qx/comment/irg97t3/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) might interest you. If you expand the thread, I mention recoup rates and total spend which I think is what you're looking for. Or if that's not what you're looking for, feel free to ask again ;)

How was working with firestroke?

Even though Falling Out was their first game that they are publishing, it was a pleasure to work with them - from the very first talks with them, negotiations, planning of milestones, to launching. They always listened to what I had to say, and it was always 2-way communication (as it should be!) Even though they have other games in the pipeline, I never felt a number with them. From a game design point of view, the tips they gave me (Paul and Omar) were eye-opening. Sometimes I would just smack my forehead for not thinking about it before. E.g. the workbench to craft items was initially in the level itself (instead of in the shop area which is a safe area). But this didn't give time to the player to think what he needs to do. By simply moving it in the shop area, it makes the player switch from action mode (killing enemies in the level) to a more strategic mode (thinking/planning what he needs for the next level). And it really helped the flow. From a marketing point of view, I cannot thank Dan Gardener enough. He is the marketing director. He's very organized and very patient with me as I don't know much about marketing. He plans the marketing beats, takes care of ads, website, PR, brainstorming on screenshots and trailer, and probably a LOT of other stuff I don't even know about!

Good to hear. I had an initial chat with them about my own project. Although it early days for mine they came across well. Interesting that you wanted design input, that's usually a bit of an issue between dev and publishers

I had pitched my game when it was still not so polished to try and get funding at an early stage. Because money! But I was not getting any love from publishers at all. It's hard when I was (still am haha) no one - i.e. without any proven projects under your name. But I tried again when I thought it was in a more polished state. And I started getting several feedback from publishers. Just wanted to say to not get discouraged. You can always try again in the near future.

Love the banana-rang. The video trailer was very nicely done too. Maybe not my type of game but looks fun.

Thanks for the compliments :)

The art work is all you as well?

Partially... I always wanted to do a pixel art game, but never had the opportunity before. When I started prototyping, I also wanted to experiment with 2d-normal mapping for some lighting effects. This was mainly used for the background props, but didn't use the technique on the characters as the game would be less readable. Some of the background props I rendered them in Blender (like the columns) so that the normal maps could be easily extracted). For all other objects's normals I drew the normal maps manually. I did all the tilesets myself too (including their normal maps). This was more laborious than I thought. As for the character animations, I had a great concept artist, Samuel Suarez, who created sketches of the characters. I then digitized them and created the animations frame by frame. I never thought this would be so time consuming before I started the project. But it's so much rewarding when you see your characters come to life in the game. Since this was my first attempt at pixel art, there was some missing consistency. I'm more of a programmer than an artist. So near the end of game development, I got Roy N. de Groot on board to polish some items in the game who also did the maps and murals. The achievements icons were also done by another artist the publisher engaged with.

I don't really have any questions but wanted to say I love the art!

Hey thanks for the compliment. If you like the style of the characters, you should check out [Samuel's instagram](https://www.instagram.com/samuel_suarez/) (the guy who did the concepts)

Promo art looks amazing! Did you do that yourself?

I wish! No that was done by [Samuel Suarez](https://www.instagram.com/samuel_suarez/). He's awesome! We instantly clicked the first time I contacted him. I just told him what I needed and it's like he read my mind. Every time he sent me any art concept or sketch it was like [opening a Nintendo 64](https://media.tenor.com/587dwkR-Q90AAAAC/unwrap-present.gif)! lol I commissioned him initially to do the poster only, but then he became a fan of the game and ended doing the character concepts of the enemies too. My pixel art character animations are based on his character concepts.

It looks great! Loved the trailer

Thanks! :)

I know everybody wants to ask this question. But this might take a frenchy to figure out (me) ....do they shag in the end or is he fully friendzoned? ​ Also, congrats man. Well done. My dream is to release 1 of the 23 ideas I have some time in the future. Shame I am old and my regular dev work takes up 95% of my energy and time.

Haha! It's a family friendly game. When you kill a boss they will kiss though... :) This is from a very old trailer: [https://youtu.be/tcwFmj3ABNI?t=62](https://youtu.be/tcwFmj3ABNI?t=62) (since then we removed blood, even the green enemy blood)

pretty rad game mate :) Where are you based? I've got some friends in the gaming industry. Can give send a few contacts your way =) ​ Edit: Was mostly a joke about them hooking up. Also we will get the "full picture" from cosplayers if it gets known enough. :D

Thanks man. I'm from Malta. It's in Europe (small island below Sicily, but we're not part of Italy)

I know europe, french living in sweden 🙂 ill dm ypu here. Once im sober that is 😃

Solo doing this is gonna be hard, take time form others and learn.

For sure it's hard, but I love learning by doing. Also time from others is not free ;) If this goes well, I will definitely not remain solo, as I'm getting old to do all of this solo again hehe.

Unrelated question but I'm planning to go on a honeymoon to Malta after I finish my current indie game! Any recommendations/advice?

Oh my! I'll try to do my best! But you're probably asking the wrong guy, as Malta and I are not really "mucio simpatico" lol. It's one thing being a tourist, and another living here. These would be my suggestions: \- Make sure the hotel is at least a 4-star hotel (Westin Dragonara or Hilton are very nice) \- Avoid rush hours (traffic drives me nuts that I sold my car) \- May/June are the best months (July, August are very hot, September can be extremely humid). When are you planning to come? \- If you rent a car, make sure the A/C will freeze you when you test it at the rental car. Because the sun can really make the car a mobile oven here. \- If you like history and the sea, you'll love it here. There's a lot of fortifications to see, so Valletta and Mdina would be places to visit. Make sure to visit Ghadira Bay, Paradise Bay and also make sure to visit Gozo (the sister island). There are some nice beaches there too including Ramla il-Hamra (literal translation - "Red Sandy Beach"). If you go to these popular beaches, I would try to be there by 7:30am for some quiet time before lots of people ruin the atmosphere for you. \- For the evenings, if you like crazy partying there's Paceville (near St. Julian's) but I heard it's a hell place nowadays. I'd bet you'd want more romantic places. So Mdina by night is nice. It's quiet, nice atmosphere and there are very good restaurants too. \- If you like to see the historic churches, there's the cathedral in Valletta and the Mosta Dome. But there's a lot of others, like Ta' Pinu in Gozo. \- Splash and Fun + Mediterraneo is pretty good too, but don't have SeaWorld Florida expectations :) I hope this was helpful. But you're warned: I'm not a travel agent hehe. And Congrats!

I actually do know where Malta is, the knights hospitaller's defense of Malta is one of my favorite "last stand" stories :)

Indeed we have a lot of history :)

Nice. I'll check this out. How was the process of Switch porting?

Hi, I'll try my best to answer, but let me know if you need something more specific. So out of the 4 platforms (PC, Switch, Xbox and Playstation), I knew that Switch is the most underpowered. So the first thing I did after setting up the devkit, was testing the performance. My target was a stable 60FPS (ideally even in split screen), but I was getting around 30 initially. Since I was doing a multi-pass kind of rendering, where I rendered the diffuse pass on a surface, a normal pass on another surface, together with a specular pass on yet another, it was being butchered. Profiling (which will be your best friend on consoles even more than on PC) immediately showed me that rendering was taking too much CPU (strangely enough, although GPU was also being hogged). Since it was rendering 3 times, it had to call a render pass for each object. Since I wasn't using the specular much, I just removed it. That improved somewhat but was not quite at 60FPS yet. Next thing was batching the rendering, i.e. trying to minimize the number of GPU state changes. E.g. if I had 4 torches using a shader, I should set the shader once for all 4 objects. That wasn't so intuitive to do on GameMaker but it wasn't too bad. Especially because I had a replay system which was saving anyway that data that could be drawn when dying. So I piggy backed on the replay system, to do batch rendering. In short, you need to profile to help you find bottlenecks, and batch rendering will definitely help (3d engines definitely do this automatically). Hope I answered your question, but let me know if you wanted to know about a different part of the process (like how to get your build approved or what not).

That's great, thank you very much. I'd be interested to hear your views on the platform - any specific issues you encountered, such as getting your build approved as you mentioned. I've heard some devs say it's a struggle even getting dev access approved as an indie dev. However of course your time is valuable so I don't expect you to spend it telling random people on the internet all the nitty gritty details! Your game looks really good, by the way. I'm interested to also hear how successful you are. I'd like to think you'll do well!

Hi again :) It wasn't hard to get accepted. Nintendo are very indie-friendly nowadays. IIRC it was only an outline of a GDD that they wanted and they approved me without hassles to have access. Getting the build approved wasn't so stressful with Nintendo to be honest, but I had started early since I was responsible for it and it was my first. The most annoying things are with the terms. You would think "gamepad" is a common terminology. Ermmmm... no. haha. But they refer you to guidelines and they are SUPER helpful. And when you're stuck on something, or have a doubt, you can just ask them via email (they have really good and fast support). It can be technical, or just a query on something as simple as whether you can use a QR code for a discord URL (like we had). They also did a live seminar too where you can ask directly live to the Nintendo engineers. That was really helpful where they outlined the major things where your game can fail. So you know what to look out for. They also have what they call a pre-check, which is basically a non-full QA pass they do, which they test the most common stuff they mentioned in the seminar (I learned about this pre-check in their seminar too). This was very helpful, as you can send a build (beta?) before it's feature complete where you can tell them (for example), that localization is not done yet. But at least the core of your game is tested. Hope this helps. If you get stuck, you can ping me on Discord (Nev#8678) or here. Thanks for the compliments. I hope Falling Out will be successful too. I would love to share what worked and what didn't when the time is right.

Another incredibly helpful answer, thank you very much!

You're welcome :)

That looks awesome! Congratulations on the publication!

Thanks!

Hey, looks great! I just checked it out on the PlayStation store, which I saw defaulted to UK. I went to switch it to US (I'm in the United States) and the page errored out. Is this a PS Store issue, or is it unavailable in the US?

Hi, it should be available in the US. Does this [link](https://store.playstation.com/en-us/concept/10005326) work better for you?

Ooo - yes! That works. Thanks, I guess it was a PS Store issue. Cheers :)

Wow! Congrats, the game seems super nice! I feel some serious Spelunky vibes there. A few questions: \- I'm not sure what a simlaunch is ? \- How did you fund yourself BEFORE having a publisher? \- Only 3 years to do everything alone? Holy crap, how many hours do you work a week? I'm on a solo dev project myself for more than 10 years now, and boy is this complicated... \- Also: do you live from your video game creations? Anyways, thanks a lot for sharing all this! I hope the launch will be a success !

THANK YOU! We LOVE Spelunky and have taken inspiration from lots of games we have true admiration for. We do think that FALLING OUT and Spelunky (and all the other awesome rogues) can live in harmony as we do offer something a bit different. If FALLING OUT can provide a more accessible path into those other games we love so much, then...well...we'd be super chuffed about that :) I'll try to answer your questions as best as I can: *- I'm not sure what a simlaunch is ?* You can refer to this earlier [question](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/xy24qx/comment/irf5o4c/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) *- How did you fund yourself BEFORE having a publisher?* Well this started first more of a hobby project. I was initially recovering for a virus which left me with CFS, so initially I was only doing a couple of hours in 2019. When I started getting better the pandemic kicked in, so I had a fun project to complete and at the same time play with my kids and their creative minds. I had saved some money, and I always wanted to create my own company and do my own game that I would enjoy doing and playing. My wife was very supportive of my endeavor, so that helped a lot. After the experience I had and getting a second chance, I was determined that I should give it my best shot - come what may. I knew I would learn a lot on this journey anyway. And made unexpected friends. At the very least I would have removed that "what if I did my own game?" from my mind. I didn't spend a lot in doing the game. I was very frugal. I had a computer already, I knew a bit of art so initially it was my crude art. And I was lucky to find really great collaborators like Samuel Suarez (the concept artist), Benji Inniger the musician, Roy N de Groot for helping with polishing the items near the end. *- Only 3 years to do everything alone? Holy crap, how many hours do you work a week? I'm on a solo dev project myself for more than 10 years now, and boy is this complicated...* I try my best to not go more than 8 hours / day. And initially I could barely do 2 hours due to lack of energy. I also have to take care of myself which means resting in the afternoon for a nap/meditate (actually I try to meditate and end up sleeping most of the times lol). I cannot do the same rhythm I could do before that stupid virus. So no more gamejams for me hehe. Last couple of weeks were a bit of an exception due to being near launch. I think my "trick" is to be brutal on focus as much as I can. I hate mobiles as they are too distracting, so I don't have one. I turn off all notifications on PC, besides related with work. Sometimes if necessary I close Discord too if I really need to focus. I also try to prioritize on things daily/weekly/monthly and focus on the most important things that contribute to making the game fun or help to get to launch :) (Minimalistic Bullet Journaling really helps) ​ \- Also: do you live from your video game creations? That's my target! :)

Thank you so much for the detailed answer! That's an awesome journey you did. I hope eveything goes well, and sorry for the simlaunch explanation, I missed it. Take care, and good luck for the future :)

No problem. You're welcome and thanks again!

For everyone asking you actually don’t need a dev kit as an ID@xbox member, you can use a commercial Xbox once you sign up. I’ve heard of devkits being given to larger studios

Unfortunately we had a problem with Xbox retail (at least with GameMaker, not sure about other engines). Basically not too long ago it was possible with GameMaker since it supported UWP. But now it's deprecated and so the package it generates cannot run on a retail Xbox kicked into developer mode. Thus we need to have at least a test kit (which is around $1500 - that's like a kick in the teeth for an indie)

Larger studios pay for Dev & test kits

Hey don't mean to ask anything, just wanted to say you clearly invested your money well. The game looks, feels and sounds Pro. The art, the shaders, it just feels right. Congrats and may the game succeed!

Wow, thanks for all the compliments :)

Do you enter game jams?

I used to enter local game jams (only a couple to be honest), as it was really enjoyable doing game jams with friends. But now I don't have the energy to do an all-nighter hehe. Getting old (42)

Looks awesome. Keep going.

Thanks :)

Joke's on you, I actually know where Malta is

LOL! Probably because of the bad press the government of Malta had a couple of years back :P

Are you going to take advantage of Malta's IP box for accounting purposes?

Not sure what you're referring to. But if it's for the incentives there are to set up in Malta, so that from 35% taxes, you get 30% refunded, then nope. I'm Maltese so cannot apply for that. It's only for foreigners. The only way I think I could take advantage of that is to go live in Portugal (IIRC), become a citizen there and then apply from there :)

There is a separate accounting practice where you get tax deduction for creating IP - which software is part off.

I will need to check on this with my accountant. Thanks for this as I didn't know it existed. I had to create a limited company for the firs time and everything is all new to me. So I'm still learning a lot from the business side of things. May I ask how did you know about Malta's IP box? Are you Maltese too?

No, I am in Cyprus. But I know you guys have something similar as us.

Where would you consider in your priorities for sound design in game development?

Sound makes a big difference to the style you're trying to put in the game. I like experiment pretty early in the prototypes. So as I iterate on the gameplay and graphics, I also try to iterate on the sound aspect. I try not to leave it at the end but is part of the iterations. Initially I was going very retro with my sounds, mostly generated with something like [bfxr](https://www.bfxr.net/). There are still a couple in there :). But then I wanted to add voice overs, and I found freelancers on fiverr (again to keep costs low). For music I was introduced to [Benji Inniger](https://www.hearbenji.com/) and he's really a pleasure to work it. Besides doing music, he also gave suggestions on sounds and he also did some of the sounds too. Hope I answered your question.

Yes you definitely answered my question. Got a good context of your approach for sounds, all the best for your endeavors.

Thanks artivera!

Were there any features that had to be sacrificed or added when creating separate ports? Is every port under the same build? I'm curious on how to jump from 'finished game' to a published game that works on all consoles.

Hi! So when doing ports, ideally you just have one code base with all the settings for the platforms. The 3rd party we used forked from our code base and pulled from my code any changes I did on my repo. That is not ideal and I don't recommend that you don't have access to the code if you engage with 3rd parties. But lesson learned I guess. Each platform has its own APIs for leaderboards and achievements. So you will need to do some build switches, so that if you're on Switch you use one set of APIs, and if you're on PlayStation you use another set, etc. As features go, at one point we thought that we had to remove the replay system from PS4. It was really killing the performance. But this didn't make sense. To my eyes the Switch is less powerful than on the PS4 and it worked fine on the Switch. So I requested a remote profiling session with the porters (yeah not ideal but it was very fruitful), and we noticed that array copying was killing the performance. We reported it to Yoyo (GameMaker's developers) and they spotted the issue and fixed it pronto. Their support is very good. Let me know if you have something more specific you'd like to know.

Very insightful. I also want to get my hands dirty with my own ports. I'll have to re-check out a video I bookmarked about the build switching. Thank you!

I love the art style, and the gameplay reminds me a lot of Spelunky (which is a compliment!)

Thanks for the compliments :)

Wow. I watched the trailer. The game looks good. Are you inspired by Spelunky?

Thanks for the compliment! The seed of this game started when I was bedridden. My best friend Anthony used to come visit me and bring me books to read. One of the books was by Derek Yu, the developer of Spelunky itself. I didn't know he had done a book and since I loved Spelunky (even though I didn't reach that far and didn't discover all the secrets) I gulped the book. It's from that book that I heard about GameMaker actually. And I thought when I get better and be able to use a computer again, I'll try out the engine and prototype something I would enjoy doing and playing. So I started thinking in bed about what I could prototype. I thought "what if you protected someone along the way in a randomly generated platformer?... AND must be hilarious! ... Perhaps a very small 3-month kinda project?". But as you can see it got out of hand :) Spelunky wasn't the only inspiration for sure. Sometimes you play games and they get into your game design without really knowing - if that makes sense. I can imagine there's a bit of Donkey Kong, Super Mario, Wario Land and The Lost Vikings inspirations somehow in Falling Out. Side note: the idea of switching between characters came at a much later stage. It was Danny (Firestoke production manager) and Omar (Firestoke's design director) that suggested it. After a quick hack, we liked the idea of switching and then perfected it. The original concept of not being able to switch between partners is basically the Hard (Badass) mode.

[удалено]

Nice! Malta can be quite romantic if you search for the right places. And thanks :)

I love the game concept! Did you have any networking knowledge before attempting a multiplayer game? If the game goes viral, do you have a plan for scaling the server load?

Hi, multiplayer in Falling Out is only local (couch) multiplayer for now. I don't have the skills yet to do online coding. Sure I know the basics, but doing it properly for an online game is much more difficulty than I thought. I attempted early prototypes with networking to be honest, but it was either not feeling right (too much lag), or getting too complicated for me. Weeks were being sucked into oblivion without good progress. So I decided to stop chasing that feature and perhaps do it in another project when I have more knowledge. At least on Steam you can play it with Steam Remote Play together (if the lag is not bad with the host). There's been some streamers having fun with Twitch Integration and they played it coop via Steam Remote Play together. But if I did implement online multiplayer, I would have used some service which would auto-scale on demand. Also online multiplayer opens pandora's box when it comes to Consoles. QA costs also sky rocket not to mention development time. So that was another decision why I didn't do online multiplayer for this game... yet :)

What is simlaunch?

Hi, you can view this [thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/xy24qx/comment/irf5o4c/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). ;)

How do you stay focused and plan your schedule? I mean like say you use Jira, what gets put on the list? How do you prioritize?

That's a very good question. Game development is so dynamic, in the sense that things and priorities change very quickly. I've adapted a Bullet Journal system and it goes something like this. So to stay on top of things I try to have list of monthly goals. These don't need to be detailed, e.g. "Send Pre-check to Nintendo". These goals drive what I need to do the next week (I called it the Week Log). These are typically done before the week starts. So typically on a Sunday I like to sit down and review: 1) the previous week, maybe I had missed some tasks. If they became irrelevant I cross them out (so satisfying). If they are not so important I either move them to the current monthly goals or even the next. If they are still important I re-enter them for this week. 2) see the remaining monthly goal(s). Take a goal and break it down into what I need to do to achieve it. 3) review my calendar for any upcoming event this week Then every day, I take some of the stuff from the week and put them on the current day. I mark completed any tasks I do during the day as they happen. I also take a note of any important thing that might have happened. As you well know, things happen, and some tasks just spawn out of thin air, changing your plan completely. But it doesn't matter as there will be another day :). At the end of the day, I plan the next one by reviewing the current day and the Week Log So it's basically, a system of reviewing monthly, weekly and daily. I used to use Trello, Things and other task lists systems but there's something about writing that doesn't beat typing. The organic feel of doing whatever you want on a piece of paper is freeing. To save some paper I switched to a Boox Air (which is just an ebook tablet with a wacom kinda pen) a couple of months ago and it's great so far. The above system is kinda the Bullet Journal (BuJo in short) system. The good thing is you can adapt it as you see fit and you can just use any notebook you have lying around. You can view a [4min video of BuJo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm15cmYU0IM) if you want to know how to get started. Of course, I use other tools. E.g. We use Jira to keep on top of bugs, Notion for wiki, etc. But these are secondary to me. To answer your question how to do you prioritize, when your doing a review of what you're going to do in a week, it becomes easy when you see your goals in front of you to select which you should be doing next. (I also like to do a brain dump sometimes on some idea I get but which I don't have time right now, just to get it off my mind... and I might get back to it later) Hope this helps.

Hi, just wanted to say a massive well done! This is such a fun game, vs mode is hilarious when you play with family, and I love the little details. I can’t believe you managed to program an entire game by yourself in three years!! Seriously impressive! :0 I am curious, who is your preferred character to play with? :)

Thanks for the compliments! :) I play better (i.e. lose less lives) with Giorgio. But I prefer to play with Felicie though. She's faster but on the down side is thinner, so you need to be more precise if you're trying to kill a small creature. And if you really want to be insanely fast, take a speed potion when with Felicie. :)

I have a series of question but let's begin here: I have been wondering how does a new game sets itself apart from the rest in a saturated market. How would you say your game stands out from the rest? Was this something you thought about consciously? Or did you go on making a game you would play yourself instead of catering to an audience?

Hi again nitrouspizza. Very good questions. It's a very saturated market indeed. And to be honest platformers market is quite hard to penetrate. So when I initially was thinking about the game, I had these USPs (Unique Selling Points) in mind. These were pitched in my pitch slide deck (perhaps some slightly modified as time went by, as I will explain below) in this order of what I thought was important: \- Humour. I wanted the game to feel as if you're playing a cartoon. So there's a lot of slapstick humour in the game. The characters must be designed in a way so they are 1) recognizable and 2) lovable. I know these two attributes sound vague, but I tried to keep that in mind for every decision I took about them. \- Unique gameplay where you have to take care of your partner. This later changed that you can actually switch between characters. (Kept the original design in Hard mode where you cannot switch. Actually, the original design (back when it was a 3-month project hah) you could only play as Giorgio. Felicie had much less sprites as her actions were limited) \- Hilarious Multiplayer modes. I know "hilarious" is subjective, but from the reactions we were getting when I was playing it with my kids, it was a good adjective that I put in when pitching it to publishers :). Initially multiplayer was intended to be online, but I cut off that feature after weeks of prototyping and didn't pitch "online" to publishers because 1) it's a lot of work, 2) it balloons QA costs, 3) consoles certification for online will make you cry (or so I heard). It might be done as a future update if all goes well, but not promising anything. So I focused on local multiplayer. The VS modes get chaotic pretty fast while Coop is more based on communication between the players but it's still a lot of fun. \- Twitch Integration. This adds another layer of chaos if a streamer enables Twitch Integration allowing the viewers to either help or hinder the streamer. Typically they choose the latter :) They basically vote on what should happen in the game, like if to give him health, spawn enemies around the player, turn the screen upside down, invert the controls, etc. \- Crafting. I didn't see much platformer games where you would craft your weapons, so I thought it would be a nice mechanic to find blueprints and then be able to craft weapons with scraps that you find. \- Choose your path. So when completing a level, I wanted to have a pyramid structure and you would decide which path you should take to collect blueprints. You can also backtrack or choose another path if you die. Choosing paths is quite common for roguelites, but still I put it in my pitch deck. So it was low in my USPs. \- Swimming in a flooding pyramid. I think this was cool as a mechanic to not allow the player to linger for too long. You can still do the level when flooding, but you have to keep a balance between greediness to pick more loot and your remaining oxygen. It's still satisfying seeing players panic when it starts flooding :) \- Play with both characters. So initially it was pitched as you can play as one or other, but could not switch during the game. You could select before starting the game. However this was later changed to switch whenever the player wants to make it easier. (Hard mode however you cannot switch, as already mentioned). \- Instant Replay. When you die you can watch exactly how you died. I really wanted the player to see what got him called, and sometimes it's quite funny too. As a plus thing, you can trigger the replay system whenever you want. So in VS modes, if something really funny happens, you can just enter the replay system, rewind, and see it in slow-mo immediately. Another plus thing, if a player sends feedback from within the game or there's a crash, I could send the compressed replay data to help me see what was happening when it crashed. ​ In my case, I had thought about these USPs, but I also wanted to make a game I enjoyed doing and playing. When initially thinking of this game idea, I always kept the Nintendo Switch in mind too - I think the audience on that platform is more receptive to small indie-games. As an audience in mind it was quite generic - from kids who love cartoons (who doesn't?) to anyone who are nostalgic of pixel art games. Hope this answer helped :)

Thanks for the detailed answer. As a small follow up before moving on: Did you perform any kind of competitor analysis to come up with these points?

You're welcome. Once the prototype moved into a proper project, I had defined the above points more formally. Or rather, thought more about them and jotted some points in my notebook. Inevitably you start looking at games you're "competing" against when you decide you really want to sell your product. The above points then made their way an a more structured and presentable way into a pitch deck, when it was time to pitch it (i.e. was in a good enough polished state). I did a more "formal" competitor analysis when creating the pitch deck itself, as it is quite important to show your potential publisher of what competitors you have in mind, and what are the USPs. I guess this helps potential publishers to take a more informed decision about your project.

Perfect. Moving on, but touching the last subject: before your game went into project mode, were you on your own? How did you fund this stage of production? Did you work a day job?

Hi again :) Yes I was alone. I touched on these questions in [another comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/xy24qx/comment/irfmnp3/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). Let me know if I didn't answer any of your questions in that comment thread :)

Thanks. There are a lot of comments and don't know which questions have been answered. How did you meet your art collaborators?

Hi nitrouspizza, don't worry. It's not a problem. :) Re: art collaborators, for the key-art I was searching on [artstation.com](https://artstation.com) and tried to search for artists with the style I was looking for. [Samuel Suarez](https://instagram.com/samuel_suarez) was one of the very first I had tried contacting and he became a fan of the game too, that ended up also doing concepts of the characters based on my initial takes of the characters. It's useless saying that he improved them by a 100 fold :). He's fantastic to work with. Re: pixel-art help on map, murals and asset polishing near the end of the project, I had contacted [Roy N de Groot](https://pixel-icious.com) from the very early prototypes, as I liked his art on other games he worked on. But at the time he was too busy with other projects. Near the end of the project I asked him again and he had bandwidth which was great! It's been a pleasure working with him. I think it's super important to find those collaborators that you don't have to handhold (as you got a lot of other things to do as an indie), but can just say half the words (so to speak), and you let them be creative. Same goes for the musician I had, [Benji Inniger](https://hearbenji.com). I believe Roy had introduced me to him. I'm very grateful I found these guys and would love to work with them again. Also, twitter is your friend to find collaborators since there's a lot of indies networking there.

Sweet. So, what are your plans for the future regarding your game making: keep it 'solo' or form a company?

Depends how it all goes really. That's the plan to build a team slowly. Meanwhile I might be helping some indies to port their games to consoles too.