pros·tra·tion
extreme physical weakness or emotional exhaustion.

..

The last few weeks have been the weirdest mix of grueling and rewarding. I was tired, in physical pain, constantly going to sleep extremely late, finding myself growing apathetic towards my friends, and yet, at the same time, more proud and accomplished with my game development work than I'd been for over 2.5 years. I had just come off of the worst period of depression I've had since the year started, thanks to being completely out of a computer, and when I was back to work my mood quickly switched to one of happiness.

But.. it didn't last.

You see, I thought the wave of sadness that had hit me was due to being unable to work. I now know that was just me trying to mask the real reason why, that being Toupei55's failure. My failure. Because I now realise that, had Toupei55 gotten good sales, or at the very least a steady crawl of a few sales, I would've been happy, even without being able to work on Pelted Warfare. And now that happiness I got those weeks ago is vanishing.

Let me walk you through my line of thought: let's have a quick think about a few indie games that were successful. Specifically, 7 Days to Die, Enter the Gungeon, Overgrowth, and Gang Beasts. In my honest opinion, none of these games would have seen any amount of success beyond the first week or so of sales if it hadn't been for the games being covered and played by YouTubers all over. Doubt me? Check Among Us. That game came out ages ago, and it only now is seeing success thanks to streamers and YouTubers playing it. Hell, I didn't know I wanted to play a game like Among Us, until I saw some videos of it and decided to try it out.

Word of mouth is invaluable for indie game development. That much is obvious, but the part that content creators play in it seems to be a ton bigger than I originally thought. It seems that games are successful not based purely on their quality, but their quality paired with how video-able they are. Basically, is the game slow and methodical, with no real moments of unexpected chaos or excitement? Then it's doomed to fail. And I think Toupei55 falls into that definition. Sure - playing the game can be tense. Playing the game with friends or family is great fun. Watching boomers figure the game out and actually play competently is great. But it's not a video-able game. It's not a game that one would enjoy watching, say, Markiplier play.

The problem that that creates is that it limits artistic freedom. It forces me to keep in mind this extra attribute of how video-able it is, because, without that, anything I put out in the future is doomed to have the same fate. And that does frustrate me quite a bit. Because of course I want to make games that are successful, but I want to make games I want to play first and foremost. I don't want to have to scrap ideas or concepts that would be cool in a game because it wouldn't make for good video or stream content. But I have to.

Now, in the case of Pelted Warfare, the main project, the big dog, I'm not too worried about it. The current design of it is very video-able. It's almost entirely based on emergent gameplay, where systems overlap and create interesting situations for the player to deal with rather than the situations being all pre-designed. I mean, look at Minecraft, it's quite possibly the game with the most emergent design in it, and it's also one of the most successful games in the YouTube race. But what if that's not enough? I mean, there have been plenty of games based on emergent design that fell under the radar. What if Pelted Warfare suffers the same fate? What if it flops as hard as Toupei55?

You have to keep in mind as well that Toupei55 took only a month and a half to develop, not counting the extra time I've spent on the new huge content update that'll be coming out in a few days. But Pelted Warfare has taken almost two years to make and still lacks quite a number of core features and systems. For Toupei55 to pay for the time spent making it, it'd only really have to make around 100 or 200 sales (which it only made 6). For Pelted Warfare to pay for the time I've spent on it? It'd need to make over a thousand, at least 3 thousand sales. Think about it: I bought a whole-ass 3000 reais laptop just to work on it, I spent 2 years of constantly using electricity to power said laptop to work on it, not to mention food and other expenses caused by simply being alive.. a lot of resources and time have been poured into Pelted Warfare and it, more than ANYTHING else, has to succeed.

Because if it doesn't succeed, I'm giving up. Not just on game development, but on life itself.