Are you successful? Am I?

General Off-Topic Discussion
1

This is a useless yet interesting conversation that comes up in novel-writing circles all the time. I’ve never seen it in game-dev circles though…

What do you consider “success” as a game developer?

(This can be a depressing convo, so please focus on the successes that you have had rather than the lack of them.)

Some possible definitions:
*I am enjoying tinkering with developing a game or games!
*My friend liked a section of my game!
*I finished developing a game!
*I am reasonably satisfied with my finished game!
*People are playing and enjoying my game!
*Someone paid for one of my games! On purpose!
*Reviews on one of my games average over 4 stars!
*I received a frothingly negative review!
*I received a 5-star review from a non-relative!
*Someone did fan art of one of my stories!
*One of my games is available on my favourite device/s!
*I landed in the top twenty in the IF Comp!
*I landed in the top ten of the IF Comp!
*IF Comp top five!
*I won the IF Comp! Or, another comp of some kind!
*I got paid an advance for a game!
*I got hired by a gaming company!
*I got hired by a gaming company that is still solvent after over a year!
*I made over $10,000 in a single financial year!
*I am running my own gaming company!
*My gaming company is still solvent after a year!
*I was invited to a gaming conference as a guest of honour!
*My cousin’s girlfriend’s dad’s tennis buddy mentioned my name/company in conversation!

I think there are roughly three categories there: Fun, Fame, and Fortune. I hope no one has stopped having fun. And that no one is too delusional about making a fortune.

I suspect we all see others as way more successful than ourselves.

Myself: I am middle aged (giving me the advantage of having been around a long time), and have been writing novels since I was 7 (and finishing novel-length works since I was fifteen). I have eight novels published by small presses, and ten or so interactive novels, two of which have scored in the top ten of the IF Comp. I’ve also worked for Tin Man Games, which was seriously awesome, although I’m solo again now (not fired; I was a contractor).

I once earned $20,000 in a year from writing (a huge achievement, even though it’s less than half of what I’d have earned if I was working minimum wage for the same number of hours), and in one memorable year I worked an incredible number of hours and made a loss of $10,000 (due to writing my own interactive mail-out stories). I usually get a few thousand dollars per year from a combination of novel and game sales, which I think works out at roughly $2/hour. I think I’m moderately successful, and I’m very proud of that. (I was writing a book a year on average for fifteen years before any of them were published, and it’s clear that all those years of writing practice and study are useful in my very word-heavy choice-based IF.) I am having a LOT of fun (having said that, the whole poverty thing is definitely not fun, but luckily -?- I am chronically ill and can’t do regular work).

Pretty darn successful! Living that game-dev life! And still glowing from last year’s IF Comp (and from winning an IFTF micro-grant to teach IF to Indonesian people this year!)

How about you?

32 Likes
2

Okay, so… my main measure of “success” is pretty simple: do my stories resonate with people?

Every comment, every review, every DM in which someone says “I finally feel understood”, “it was like looking into the mirror”, “you managed to put all the feelings that I had but could never name into words” - this is success for me. I managed to write something authentic, in one aspect or another, something that touched someone else and maybe, just maybe, left a tiny bit of impact.

This is the most important thing, now to other, slightly less important ones.

  • I actually won some places in ranked jams! (Ill-gotten Light got third place in Theme Inclusion and fifth place in Narrative during Velox Turbo 2023, lovetellers got first place in Theme Inclusion in Velox Formido 2024)
  • I hit the first 1+k plays under some of my games!
  • some people actually used the Pay What You Want option under some of my games! (which I’m eternally grateful for)
  • I’m getting a lot more recognition for my work now than ever before!

Generally, I’m really happy that I get to be in this place in my “career”. I do think I’m successful, and even if I wasn’t, I think I’m on a good way to get there. I can only get better, and I sure damn will.

17 Likes
3

I think I’m successful on the scale of “One aspect of my game brought joy to multiple people.”

Edit:

 _________      __                     _____                    
 __/ ____/___ _/ /___ __  ____  __     __/ /___  ____  ___  _____
 _/ / __/ __ `/ / __ `/ |/ / / / /____ _/ / __ \/ __ \/ _ \/ ___/
 / /_/ / /_/ / / /_/ />  </ /_/ / _/ /_/ / /_/ / / / /  __(__  )
 \____/\__,_/_/\__,_/_/|_|\__, /  _\____/\____/_/ /_/\___/____/ 
 _____________________________/
13 Likes
4

The Lady Thalia series has hardcore fans! On the right day and if the moon is in the right phase we may even have a fan count in the double digits! If that’s not success then I don’t know what is :sunglasses:

More seriously, there’s a game @EJoyce and I have been working on and off since 2020, mostly off because for the vast majority of the time it was beyond our skill level. Now it isn’t, and we’re making good progress on it. Looking back at how much I’ve (we’ve) grown as authors and developers over the last four years, I think that’s the real success.

18 Likes
5

As long as I am happy I’m doing this, and people are happy I’m making games, that’s success for me.

16 Likes
6

I just started doing this, and the fact that the game compiled and does what I want it to do is a huge victory. The forum is great, but this is still a pretty small community, so it’s not like you’ll find a bunch of YouTube videos and such to explain how to solve every problem you’ll run into. Being a fan of the old text adventures, making them almost feels like a game in-and-of itself (instead of “I only understood as far as” it’s “Error, could not compile”)

10 Likes
7

I would venture to say that this is the crowd least likely to post a technical explanation in the form of a youtube video. :) As opposed to, you know, text.

12 Likes
8

I became a successful game developer at the age of 15, when Kim Schuette’s Book of Adventure Games 2 was published and it included a walkthrough for a game I wrote.

If I were a complete sage, I would have stopped there. Or, better, kept writing games with the knowledge that I had achieved ultimate success and had nothing left to prove.

Sadly, I am not a complete sage. But it’s something to remind myself of.

21 Likes
9

This, but also, once you’ve won two XYZZYs I think everyone on this forum is legally allowed to come to your house and punch you in the face if you say you’re not successful.

Although I won’t really feel I’ve arrived until someone writes fanfiction of my work. (Because they want to and not because they know I want them to, before anyone gets ideas.)

11 Likes
10

The problem isn’t believing that I’m successful. The problem is tackling writing a game without thinking “Is this up to my standards as a Successful Game Developer?”

Nasty stuff, ego.

13 Likes
11

Personally, I’m mostly concerned with the amount of attention my work receives versus the amount of reviews/support I give back.

Ten years ago I was barely involved with IF but felt like it was hard to get attention. Over the past five years, it was the opposite, where I felt like I owed other people a lot more attention.

Right now I think it’s pretty balanced, even though I’m pretty infrequent at this point and I only play a handful of IF games per year.

Sometimes I feel bad for commenting on our non-IF threads too much, like I’m snubbing IF authors by talking about mass media. I would probably consider myself a failure if I didn’t review or publish any IF over the next several years but kept commenting on other stuff. Then again, there’s no rule…

9 Likes
12

While I enjoy reading people’s thoughts on my games, my metric for success is to see how well I’ve overcome the challenge in developing the game. If I don’t find it challenging and satisfying, I don’t think it is very successful. It can be popular, yes, but I just don’t find any personal value in it.

Maybe, I’ll think differently whenever interactive fiction becomes commercially viable.

7 Likes
13

Never got as far as getting something downright trivial to compile when I tried learning Inform a few years back, so I’d probably feel like I’m on top of the world if I made something worth sharing in the IF realm… That said, dusting off some old code to create my avatar and the other experiments in mathematic art I’ve posted in the Mathematicians thread and the feed back has been a huge mood booster in the last couple of weeks.

And while I’ve never written a full novel, some of my writing has earned me mutual respect from other writers that post on A3O… though I still feel like a failure with how inconsistant my output is.

6 Likes
14

It’s just as well you didn’t. I was one of those who paid for System’s Twilight in 1994 and that little game brought me joy at a time when I most needed it.

I still keep the codesheet with your handwritten thanks, just as a reminder that hope can be found in unexpected places. I am the one who is thankful after all the long years.

10 Likes
15

My success is measured in other ways.

I often encourage player to think on the message(s) in my work.

from this perspective, Creative Cooking was an abysmal failure, going in the opposite direction of the underlying message (that MagX and the underlying AGT, can still be valid if one kept itself inside (or bent to good use…) the known limitations.

OTOH, recent threads shown that The Portrait unexpectedly hit the mark, because indeed is even floating the idea to revive the IF art competition (actually, was intended also as an homage to a significant comp whose indeed tipped the scales between narrative and puzzles)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

5 Likes
16

I think probably the biggest win I’ve had with regards to Interactive Fiction has been the friends I’ve made out of it- especially those who I’ve been having tons of fun writing in our TTRPG campaigns with- I’ve developed quite a lot as a writer from our playing together, made projects snipping bits and bobs out from those exchanges, and had plenty of laughs and happy moments.

It’s something special, to find someone that you both personally and creatively connect with, and it’s been a real pleasure to get to know some of my fellow creatives better: this community is wonderfully vibrant, with people I’d never in a million years consider befriending normally, but that my life is all the richer for having done so. And goodness, can they write!

More directly connected to my games- it’s been pretty rewarding! I know a teensy bit more about CSS and HTML- enough to get the job done, more or less, and it’s been really lovely being able to quickly bring something from a prototype to a finished (more or less) product in the time constraints of game jams. I’ve learned a lot, taught myself things, and have enjoyed the gentle challenge posed by the multiple fronts of creativity posed by interactive fiction: art, writing, coding… Demonstrating provably to myself that I can learn how to do cool things has been really gratifying. Sticking to my motto of ‘I’ll be happy if I can make even a little bit of it pink!’ has helped a lot there, haha.

I’ve also gotten a bit of attention from some really, really cool people in the scene for my works: such as a kind comment from Harrison Powell-Smith about my characterization in a brief work, a fantastic review from one of my favourite reviewers of all time, Mike Russo, that described my writing as a lush hotbed of prose, a game adaptation of a poem I wrote that was everything I could have hoped it’d be and more by the Amanda Walker- and some really tender responses from a bunch of people who had some of my more morose or personal games deeply resonate with them: I’ll always remember when someone shared that the way I depicted alcoholism in Sweetpea really resonated with them.

Recently, I also made a chunk of change from the Queer Games Bundle- (about $300 USD) and was able to chip in to help a cherished friend of mine. I wouldn’t have been able to do so if I hadn’t made my backlog of IF games, so that was really awesome, and I’m grateful I was able to.

So, yeah, I think so! I’ve had a good time, met some fantastic people, and made some cool stuff. That’s a win!

12 Likes
17

I have won the IFComp and had people make fan fiction about my game (although they were forced to, in some way; but more is coming in the foreseeable future…), so I should consider myself successful.

This said, I am not. Because

  1. the only novel I’ve ever written is there accumulating dust on Amazon both as print and ebook.
  2. I can’t seem to be able to write anymore anything that I can’t finish in, like, two weeks.
  3. I’m still using mid-phrase interjects such as ",like, ".

As for what @zarf said (“will this thing I am doing be on par with my best work?”)… that’s more or less the reason why I never completed the Andromeda Trilogy.

Other than a wannabe writer, though, I’m a renowned graphic designer in Italy.
Am I successful in that, at least, given I’ve been doing that for, like, 27 years?

… Well, nope.

14 Likes
18

Let’s review:

  1. My first game beta has managed to connect with a number of players.
  2. One of my albums was heard by the guy who makes the languages for Game of Thrones, and he enjoyed it.
  3. I am alive.

I’d consider that successful. At this point, it feels like I’m doing extended victory laps and seeing what else I can accomplish.

18 Likes
19

*I am enjoying tinkering with developing a game or games!
*A person on this forum liked a section of my game!
*I (mostly) finished developing a game!
*I am reasonably satisfied with my (mostly) finished game!

Very proud that I’ve nearly finished something after years and many, many hours. My game is not a typical IF but more of what @zarf I think calls a “Hypertext MMO” (thank you for Seltani, by the way, it was nice to see someone else did something somewhat related, if I am connecting the dots correctly and indeed Seltani is his creation).

8 Likes
20

Ha. I had a microscopic twinge of that, but I know why I’m reviewing lots of films and not games. Because I want to review, but reviewing games takes double the typing bandwidth, because you have to play them first. My hands/arms get sore, and I’m saving what I have for the game(s) I’m making. That’s why I’m not prolific like I used to be. I’ve got 189 reviews on IFDB and used to be top 3 there. That won’t happen again now that multiple people review all of IFComp, and IFComp is thrice as big as it was. I’ll never be able to do that again. But when Andromeda Acolytes is done, I hope I can get back to some reviewing.

-Wade

7 Likes