04 Apr 23
dislekcia

Desktop Dungeons: Rewind Launches 18 April 2023!

Desktop Dungeons: Rewind will be available on Steam and Humble Games from the 18th of April! We’re incredibly excited to bring this remastered and rebalanced version of the game to you all. Please wishlist on Steam, after which you can give the game a try by playing the Daily Demo right now!

25 Jan 23
dislekcia

Desktop Dungeons: Rewind Daily Demo Available!

The Desktop Dungeons: Rewind Daily Demo is now live on Steam, allowing you to play a brand new procedurally generated challenge each day! You’ll be able to catch glimpses of a lot of the content in the full game, if you keep playing long enough. If you find the Daily Dungeons fun, consider wishlisting Desktop Dungeons: Rewind while you’re at it to be notified as soon as the updated game releases!

13 Jan 23
dislekcia

Desktop Dungeons: Rewind goes F2P with Daily Demo!

Ever since we added the Daily Dungeon system to Desktop Dungeons in 2015, we’ve toyed with the idea of making a stand-alone version of the dailies as a sort of demo/intro to the game. With Desktop Dungeons: Rewind, we’ve done exactly that! AND it’ll be available on the 25th, you should wishlist right now!

11 Oct 22
dislekcia

Revisiting Gender in Desktop Dungeons: Rewind

Now that we’re working on Desktop Dungeons: Rewind we have an opportunity to re-visit some of the old decisions that were made during development. A decade ago, we felt we had things to say about gender representation in games. Not only have our views matured, but they’re sadly more pertinent than ever (that’s right, QCF says Trans Rights). This article by Jon Keevy (writer on Rewind) goes into detail about our most recent decisions to broaden gender representation in the game:

When you play a game, do you see yourself in the story? Obviously you haven’t gone toe to toe with a dragon in your real life (probably), or had to scavenge antibiotics while hiding from zombies. But you can see bravery, determination, cunning, and whatever spectrum of human emotion the developers have explored. Emotions that resonate with your inner life.

But what about your outer life? Do you literally see yourself in the story? In the characters? If you’re white and male then you share that with a majority of game characters, and an even higher proportion of the protagonists. We don’t have to litigate the gender and race imbalance in games; it’s there. It’s the product of innumerable decisions by teams and individuals. Or rather one decision made over and over again: to go with the perceived default.

When we first made Desktop Dungeons, we made that same decision. This article is about how we unmade it and why.

The earliest iteration of Desktop Dungeons seen in public was the freeware version. The core mechanics of DD were in place, including many of the adventurer class and race combinations. It was at Indie-cade where we were asked a very obvious question: “Why are all the characters male?”

This question wasn’t a surprise. The team had realised the near total lack of female representation in the prototype up to that point, and was already working to correct it. But the reason it got asked in the first place is because we had made that same decision: we went with the default. Even with progressive politics and good intentions the default snuck in via our unconscious biases. And this didn’t just apply to gender. Our characters were overwhelmingly white.

But because we’d recognised what we’d done, we were able to fix it and turn Desktop Dungeons into an ideal example of representation done right. Except it wasn’t that simple. It never is. The solution to bad representation isn’t good representation, it’s reforming the process and systems that produced the bad representation. It requires not only a philosophical but also a technical approach, with all the provisos around time and capacity that comes with it. This is true even though we had decided that character gender should have nothing to do with how Desktop Dungeons works. It is devoid of mechanical impact. The same can’t be said of race. ‘Race’ is a messy term when it comes to fantasy, humans being a race unto themselves and non-humans also being races. We changed our terminology from ‘Race’ to ‘Kin’ – a quick fix to the confusion, but not to the lack of diverse human representation.

The solution we attempted for the full release of Desktop Dungeons was to create a female version of every playable class/kin combo. Equality! Players would get a random gender for each dungeon run. The technical problem was that this approach doubled the amount of art to create, increasing the workload to the limits of the team’s capacity. Perhaps this is why the default choices started creeping back in. Female coding in games (in the semiotic and not the programming sense of ‘coding’) can be stunningly basic. It’s best summed up by Ms. Pacman and her pink bow.

We repeatedly fell into this shorthand for ‘female’. We deliberately and successfully avoided the sexualisation of the female characters but the eyelashes got out of hand.

The end result was a genuine attempt at adding female representation but it fell short of what we wanted to achieve. In fact after release we wrote the forebearer to this article and came to this conclusion:

“If there’s one thing that we hope, it’s that our next game project will be more observant and inclusive from the very beginning, encompassing intersectional representation where possible and showing players that there’s always one more way to represent a complex group of people!”

And here we are. It’s not every team that’s afforded the privilege of trying again. And rarer still to have a second chance at the same game. So, did we make good on our hopes? We started development knowing the goal and knowing why we fell short before. Here’s what we did:

First off we scrapped our binary thinking about gender expression. We need non-binary, agender and androgynous representation! And we tweaked our language around it as well and spoke about male- or female-presenting characters. Secondly we needed the work to be within our capacity. The solution involved dice.

Instead of creating male/female versions of each class/kin combo there would be only one portrait for each. Players had never been able to choose gender before, so that remained unchanged. We went through the list and divided them up into male-presenting, female-presenting, or agender. There was definitely a programmatic way to do these, but we’ll take any excuse to break out some physical dice. We got rolling: 1 & 2 male-presenting, 3 & 4 female-presenting, 5 agender, and 6 reroll. The reroll was to balance out the statistics but we realised it also mapped well to a character choosing a gender expression that may have differed to what they were assigned at their creation. Yup, some Desktop Dungeons characters are canonically trans. No, we’re not revealing who.

This led to a new way of thinking of the class/kin combos. They really became individual characters to us. There’s only one gnome priest and she is feeling too old for this shit. Thinking of them as individuals allowed us to scrap prescriptive thinking for the art direction. These are a random sampling of characters from the world of Desktop Dungeons and the expression of that broke the gender and race coding we’d struggled with originally.

Can everyone see themselves somewhere in Desktop Dungeons? No, not yet. We know that our principles and our ambitions are constrained by unconscious forces even as we try to examine ourselves. They’re constrained by our limited time and capacity, and the choices of what to prioritise. And so we wait with an open mind to hear what our community has to say, what they see that was invisible to us.

Getting an opportunity to learn from our mistakes is a privilege we’re grateful for. An opportunity to develop as creators and as humans. We will keep growing and refusing to choose the default, because everyone deserves to see themselves in the games they play.

21 Jan 20
dislekcia

Drawkanoid is out!

Hyperspeed block-breaking explosions have just been made EVEN MORE LIKELY! Drawkanoid is now available on Steam.

Drawkanoid logo image.

It’s been a long journey from initial prototype in 2017, to a Humble Original deal in 2018 and now launching a much expanded and improved version on Steam (and other places shortly!) in 2020. What started as a paternity leave project and then a side-gig while work at Spry Fox ramped up, has somehow turned into a completed game? I’m hugely grateful to everyone that ended up working with me on this and turned it into a much bigger (and better) game than I initially imagined.

07 Sep 19
dislekcia

Peeling back the layers

I read this tweet + replies by Andy Schatz and immediately identified with almost everything it said.

Having to deal with a team splitting up and going their own way?
Yup: The Desktop Dungeons team stopped being a thing in 2015. We tried to be “QCF” and make more games together, but we couldn’t find a project we all wanted to work on, or even a creative rhythm. Some are still friends, some I haven’t spoken to in years. Most still work in games and a few have gone on to be really successful. It’s a hard thing to realise you probably won’t make anything more with a group of people you saw every day.

Having a child and finding out just how fragile your concentration actually is?
Yeah: Not only is it this hugely sobering, bone-deep knowledge that this tiny person is going to depend on your for everything so you’d better get your shit together, it’s also just a straight up fuck you to the idea of how you used to work. Or sleep. I still don’t feel like I can work anywhere near as well or as focused as I used to, and my child is 2 now.

Needing to re-focus to afford renovations and kids and life?
Yes. I mean, I know I’m lucky to have something like Desktop Dungeons and I’m grateful for how lucky we got with the game, but it wasn’t paying the bills anymore, I had to stop living in a decaying hovel and I honestly wasn’t sure what the hell I was going to do after the baby arrived. So I hustled, sold a prototype to Humble (thanks John!), did a lot of soul searching and joined Spry Fox. Which wasn’t really a hard decision, I didn’t want to manage a team again at that point and I knew quite a few Foxes already, so becoming one myself and not having to worry about salaries and just dive into code every day and have time to figure out how to be a dad? Very worth it, but also very not what QCF and my career had been so far.

Edit: This isn’t an announcement of me leaving QCF or ending support for Desktop Dungeons – I’ve been at Spry Fox for over a year and a half now and it’s been great! (We just launched Steambirds, which you should play) I’m still maintaining things in my spare time and slowly working on my own projects on the side, apologies if I didn’t communicate that very well.

Still having to support what got you this far?
I’m the only person who maintains Desktop Dungeons. The long tail sales are pretty flat, I suspect a smarter studio would have stopped paying revenue shares a while back and just sort of put everything aside. I can’t, I love the game too much and the idea of it still finding players is still rewarding. I’m not sure how to deal with the MacOS 64bit thing though, I’ve already handled numerous iOS and Android headaches and this one might be impossible without a huge update to a new Unity version (at the very least). I check 2 forums, a discord, google alerts and our various email addresses every week, still. Support takes it out of you.

And finally, that feeling of scratching away at a game idea that you know has something cool, but you just can’t find it…
Oh how I relate. The thing I sold to Humble, my current side project, Drawkanoid, has existed since 2006 when it was the game that was supposed to let me go indie after a stint working on a PSP game at South Africa’s only console studio. It didn’t, obviously, and I kept working on it between client jobs and it just… Always sucked? But sucked in ways that I felt I could fix!

Drawkanoid was sort of this white whale of a game concept that I’d iterated on in my head a million times. I couldn’t communicate it to anyone else because my thinking about it was so convoluted, we tried to work on it as QCF after Desktop Dungeons shipped, but that proved impossible. Eventually I was at an 8hr game jam with no good ideas and I figured why not try the biggest impact things I’d last written down for Drawkanoid. The first two were the special kind of bad that Drawkanoid is very good at producing, which I was used to, but this time-slowing super-fast ball idea felt good. Okay, it worked at the jam but Drawkanoid ideas never really work out with players, so I was floored when I showed it to John from Humble in a corridor at GDC and he liked it? Enough to offer to pay for it to become more than a prototype?

Drawkanoid is it’s own game now, it’s nearly finished, but I still don’t really trust it because of how it always felt like it wasn’t good enough. It’s won awards and been the second game that’s taken me all over the world, but it still feels like it could be better? I’m very glad it’s a side project, if it had to sustain me and QCF, I would have abandoned it again. But now that the pressure is off of it, I get to sort of play with the thing a little, even though I don’t trust that it’ll do well. I would never, ever have worked on Drawkanoid with my own future on the line.

So I don’t really know how to handle a game idea that won’t leave you alone but won’t surrender its own fun easily. I do know that the pressure to produce and succeed and EARN made everything ten times as hard, being able to put it away until someone else REALLY wanted it was the best thing by far. I’m starting to feel like projects drag you through them despite what you want to do, that you need to find things with that sort of inexorable momentum, that keep coming back even when you stop working on them. Desktop Dungeons was a non-stop version of that, even though it didn’t feel like it at the time, Drawkanoid is a slow pull. I wonder how many other different ways that kind of momentum can exist, but it’s unmistakable once it takes hold.

P.S. You should play Spry Fox’s Steambirds! Join other birds to dogfight cats in the sky!

18 Dec 17
dislekcia

DD Extreme Mod update!

Greetings diligent Kingdom Administrators!

Some of you are far too diligent. Far, far too diligent… We’re getting reports that few puzzle remain unsolved, rainbow borders surround dungeons galore and even Goatpeople are welcome in taverns under your watchful reign(s). This simply will not do! Which is why there’s a dedicated group of incensed Desktop Dungeons fans hard at work on a mod for the game to add new challenges, new classes, new dungeons and new puzzles for you.

Welcome to the mod!

The Extreme Edition has just received an update that adds more to the Eastern regions of your Kingdoms, as well as bringing the mod up to the current version of the game (so no more switching to legacy mode via Steam). All told, this update adds:

  • 4 new classes to play, with 6 new class challenges.
  • More than 25 new items to discover.
  • 11 new dungeons spread out over 2 quests.
  • 8 new ways monsters will mess with you.
  • And additional secrets that they didn’t tell me about and I haven’t found yet…

Seriously, this mod is an amazing project by loving Desktop Dungeons fans that are doing amazing things and sticking true to the game we loved developing. It’s a complete blast playing new classes and challenges in a game we otherwise know inside out and we hope you’ll enjoy this update as much as we have. The modders have even found ways to add new art to the game, which blows our minds, we didn’t think that was possible.

If you’ve enjoyed Desktop Dungeons and want more of it, download the mod and follow the installation instructions. And please, backup your saves!

22 May 15
damousey

Desktop Dungeons hits Android and iOS on May 28!

We get a lot of complaints about Desktop Dungeons: It’s too difficult, I can’t stop playing, What’s with the goats, etc. One thing people seem to be glad of is that they’re able to escape the game by moving away from their computers. This upsets us immensely! To rectify this huge oversight, we’re releasing Desktop Dungeons for both Android tablets and iPad on May 28th, 2015. It’ll set you back a mere $10.

promo banner with release date
 

We were initially quite worried about getting the game onto Android (there are times that being an African studio really makes indie life difficult) but thanks to our friends at Finji, we’re able to bring the game to Android at the same time as we publish it on iOS. So, Desktop Dungeons is getting a simultaneous release on those two platforms.

We’re sure some people are going to be curious about the $10 price. It’s actually really simple: We don’t think that Desktop Dungeons would work as a F2P game, not without huge changes that we feel would make the game experience worse as a whole. We’re focused on bringing the same game from PC to tablets, trying to rip out and rewire the guts of the gameplay to allow the game to nickel and dime people to death just doesn’t feel good. So, $10 it is. We feel like that’s a good deal for a game with as much replay value as Desktop Dungeons.

The Cloud Sync saving system that grew up over the beta and keeps the game up to date no matter where you play it has been extended to include iOS and Android as well. All your current Kingdoms will be playable on any device that’s online and logged in to DesktopDungeons.net. This was actually a significant amount of work over the last couple of months, but I’m sure we’ll blog about that later; We feel that more developers should offer this kind of portability.

Desktop Dungeons on tablets will contain all of the extra Enhanced Edition content, so you’ll be able to play the Chemist and Rat Monarch right off the bat. Each mobile platform does have different Daily Dungeon seeds and leaderboards though, so you’ll be able to do a maximum of three different dailies if you feel like it. There’s no Goatperson DLC planned for the tablet versions as yet, but if you log in with a DD.net account that has the DLC you’ll be able to play the Goatperson and the triple quests as much as you’d like.

We’re super excited to be releasing Desktop Dungeons on mobile. This has been the number one request that we’ve received since we started working on the game and it’s been a long road to get to this point. Next week it’ll finally be real. See you on the 28th!

 

Be sure to check out our presskit for more information on the game, screenshots and trailers like the one above.

15 Apr 15
dislekcia

Free Update – Desktop Dungeons: Enhanced Edition

We’re very happy to announce the Enhanced Edition of Desktop Dungeons. If you’ve been visiting our forums, you might have gathered quite a lot of what this entails, but we thought it was time to actually collect it all in one place and clear up some details:

blog_workinghard_v01

As you already know, we’ve been working hard to bring Desktop Dungeons to mobile platforms. While we’ve been streamlining the interface and reworking chunks of the game, we’ve also added things, because, well… because we couldn’t really not, there just too many interesting ideas to explore with this game. This has culminated in the expansion that we’ve called Enhanced Edition.

The Enhanced Edition is a free expansion to Desktop Dungeons that adds new classes that create fascinating interactions and quests that push your thinking in how to deal with them. It comes with parts of the streamlined interface changes that make understanding the game a little easier. It has also had a pretty major overhaul as far as optimization goes, but that is distinctly less sexy to talk about, let’s move on. There’s a new building that houses…

Daily Challenges

Your Kingdom is being audited, but in order to check the correct boxes and fill what seems to be an infinite void of incomplete records, you have to recreate lost adventure reports as part of the Daily Expedition Re-enactment Program, or DERP, every day a new DERP. You’ll be able to pit yourself against your friends with this seeded adventure each day. The daily expedition preparation choices also allow you to play with combinations that you might not actually be able to have in the game and select multiple preparations from the same building. These auditors are all about the hypothetical, so it’s time to explore your ideal power combos! Daily expeditions will reset at midnight, GMT.

This seed will be different on each of the mobile platforms, so while you can only play the daily once per day on PC(inc. Mac and Linux) you’ll be able to play a second hypothetical re-enactment on your iPad and then a third on your Android tablet. Each with their own leaderboards.

Let’s talk Mobile

The mobile version is a full one-to-one port of the game with a spiffy new interface for touch devices. All of your cloud saved kingdoms (built in if you log into your Desktop Dungeons account) will synchronize across the various platforms. So you won’t even lose your kingdom progress when you leave your PC and whip out your iPad for a quick run of Ick Swamp whilst on the bus.

When? WHEN?!

The Enhanced Edition will roll out on Steam, GOG and Humble on the 20th of April, with the mobile release following soon after that.

25 Mar 15
Robbie Fraser

GDC 2015 – Retrospective

Ahoy there friends and fans of Desktop Dungeons! The four of us have just gotten back from the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Dorianne has been before and Danny and Marc have been making the annual pilgrimage for several years now, but this was my first year (of many I hope). It was a special experience for me and although I am jet-lagged and weary; I must write! Sometimes writing is the only way I can collect all my thoughts, so here goes; this is my thought collection:

The last time I travelled outside of Africa I was young, too young perhaps to make the most of the experience. So this trip was obviously exciting for regular travel reasons. I flew in fancy aeroplanes, I cycled over the Golden Gate bridge, I snowboarded in Tahoe (we don’t get that in South Africa), I ate foods and absorbed cultures that I’m not used to and I did a great number of other interesting travelly* things.

However, those are experiences and feelings that you can get from any trip really. GDC meant so much more to me.

WARNING: SOME PERSONAL HISTORY AND FEELINGS AHEAD

I decided at quite a young age that I wanted to make video games. I’d found it, and it was fun, and I would make my career out of it. But I never really knew what being a game developer actually meant. I never knew what kind of lifestyle or career path would actually await me. I just knew that I liked making video games, and that I could get good at it if I stuck with it.

I could never have predicted that possibly the most special thing about making video games, is the other people who are doing it.

I’ve never really been a people person. I’ve always been shy and introverted. Socialising and seeing people can often take a lot of my energy. But games people are different, for whatever reason, other developers give me energy. And what a difference that makes.

I was in my early teens when I started getting involved in the South African game development scene. It was scary and everyone was older than me, but I always felt welcome. Everyone was friendly and everyone helped me as much as they could. That was great.

I wasn’t just lucky to meet the right people, everyone is great. Years later MGSA (the local gamedev association) meetups started happening, I felt awkward and introverted again. I didn’t know that many people and often found myself feeling out of place amongst the success stories and brilliant minds. I didn’t believe in myself enough, and although those evenings were motivating, they were also energy sapping.

After I started working in the industry, things began to change. I began feel like I was a real game developer. I began to feel that I was actually good at this thing that I had devoted so much of my life to. I lost some of my inhibitions and the MGSA meetups became a thing that I looked forward to with great eagerness. I got to hang out with all my friends and recharge my motivational batteries. These days, chatting with other devs energises me like nothing else, and reaffirms my love for my work.

So what does this have to do with GDC? Well GDC was like all the uplifting parts from those previous paragraphs but on steroids. I’ve been getting more and more involved in the global indie community over the last two years, and it’s been an incredible experience. I consider the indie community (and the local scene in particular) as my second family. Such is the way we help each other and care about each other.

Over the course of GDC I met and hung out with so many amazing people. I met the developers of many of my favourite games and made new friends everywhere I went. Each day I was just blown away with how great everyone was and how much we had in common. It was glorious to spend a week or so meeting new people and liking everyone I met.

It was surreal. I’ve found my tribe and that makes me unbelievably happy.

So now that the soppy story is off my chest, I’d like to highlight a few of my favourite moments from the trip, in no particular order:

GDC running club
Adam and Rebekah Saltsman (who are awesome!) organise a run to the pier every morning of the conference at 8AM. It was a monumental effort to haul myself out of bed at 7:30 (after getting into it just a few hours earlier), but it was totally worth it. Cool people, a nice way to experience the city, and I always felt amazing afterwards.

A group photo at the pier, on Wednesday?

Indie breakfast
We stayed in the indie hostel, which means at breakfast time, you can sit down and any random table and just ask people what games they made. By far one of the easiest ways to meet cool people that I’ve ever experienced. Also, cream cheese and jam bagels!

Indies and bagels! Sitting at tables!

The quieter parties
These nights were absolutely incredible. I went round from person to person introducing myself and then being blown away as people revealed they were the ones behind so many of my favourite games! My mind was blown so frequently that I began to just expected something amazing every time I sidled up to someone new. And most of them have played or heard of Desktop Dungeons too!

I met so many rad devs.

Wild Rumpus party
This party has a reputation for being amazing and it didn’t let me down. I’m not usually one for loud clubs and partying, but instead of being filled with smoke and dude bros, the place was just packed with people that I liked. I barely got to spend any time talking to all those great people because I spent pretty much the whole night dancing at the front of the crowd. I was having such a good time that I didn’t care, and was genuinely surprised when it was suddenly 2AM and we were kicked out of the venue.

Everything is going to be okay

GameLoading premier
This movie felt a lot like “My friends and what we do – the movie”. It hit home. Even more so because I watched with a whole bunch of people starring in the film itself! My good friends Colin and Sarah Northway sat just behind, and Zoe Quinn sat a couple of seats to my right. What a bizarre and fascinating way to experience a documentary!

This is the only picture I have of the showing. Still, I like Unity.

IGF awards
The sheer scale of this event blew me away. 10000 developers packed in a massive hall, the lights, the sounds, the drama… it’s huge! These are the Oscars of indie game development and it was awe inspiring to witness. It was also special because Desktop Dungeons won an IGF in 2011. I kept thinking “Wow! Four years ago it was you guys sitting down there at the nominees’ tables. And it was Desktop Dungeons that was the name inside the envelope! And it was you who went up to stammer out a surprised acceptance speech in front of all these people!”. Amazing. I’ll never look at that glass trophy in the QCF office quite the same way again. I’ve never cared for accolades and awards much, and I’ve never really even sought or thought much about recognition. But now I really want to win an IGF, just for that experience. (And also to further legitimise my gloating over the Vlambeer guys who have never won one.)

What an event!

Travelling with my friends
This is a no brainer, but seriously, what a great group. Ya’ll are awesome and thanks for everything. I <3 you guys.

Us!

Snowboarding
So this is not really GDC related, but it was just too much fun. If you ever get the chance, go get on a snowboard and learn to ride it down a snowy mountain. It’s a blast. I learned quickly and spend the rest of my time taking the biggest and quickest lifts all the way to the top of the mountain and then riding all the way back down again in one massive long run. Superb fun.

SNOWBOARDING.

Systems design roundtables
I guess I should mention something about the actual GDC sessions: I had an all access pass and they were great. I only discovered these roundtables quite late, but the ones I went to were insanely useful. I think about game design a lot, and having a room full of big name AAA designers discussing interesting themes and sharing great tips and ideas was brilliant. Next year these will be the first things I check out.

Danny and Marc spoke at GDC!

Biking the bridge
The day after the conference ended Danny and I rented bikes, met up with a bunch of other cool devs and rode along the coast, over the Golden Gate and down into Sausalito. After lunch we rode to the forest to see the great California redwoods and then rode back in time to catch the ferry back across the bay and past Alcatraz. From there we took a tram to Chinatown for the chinese new year parade and celebrations. Needless to say it was an amazing day. Rad people, rad places, rad itinerary.

This is a famous bridge. I rode over it on a bike.

Indie common room
I made a point out of being as sociable as possible. I didn’t want to miss any opportunities and forced myself to go hang out in the common room late at night when it would have been much easier to just go to sleep. I’m not sure how I managed to have so much energy during the trip (considering the serious sleep deprivation most days), I think my body was just running on pure adrenalin for the entire conference? Anyway, the common room at the indie hostel was always filled with cool people playing games, making games and just hanging out. I met some of my favourite new friends there and never once regretted turning down the convenient option of sleeping.

The creative energy was palpable.

Alt.ctrl.GDC
Walking around the expo floor was a strange experience for me. I felt strangely disconnected from the AAA scene. With their massive stands and their shirts that say “DEV TEAM” on the back. It felt like a different industry. It felt very commercial, with none of the family feelings that I got from the indie crowd. So when I found the Alt.ctrl.GDC booth I immediately thought “This is where it’s at! These are the people who are really innovating, they get it.”. The display consists of a bunch games with unique custom controllers. Some games require you to high-five another player, others require you to plant your face in the butt of a plushie dog. Line wobbler in particular, is absolutely brilliant. I liked these games, they were interesting when most of the show floor was not.

Custom controllers always make for interesting experiences.

And finally, a word about imposter syndrome:

This is a thing that plagues indie game development. Very few people succeed, and when they do they often become the most visible and outspoken people in the community. But the vast majority of us learn the hard way that being an indie dev is not a smart career choice. Most people languish in self-doubt, obscurity and financial insecurity. And so when you go to something like GDC and you meet your heroes, idols and community pillars, it’s easy to feel unworthy. It’s easy to weigh up your achievements against those who you look up to and admire.

I say hogwash.

As an introverted video game programmer, one thing I’m good at is rationalising my emotions. Imposter syndrome isn’t a useful feeling, so force yourself to forget about it. Force yourself to be more outgoing and to meet people. You’ll realise that everyone else is just somebody who likes making games and likes people who makes games. You make games, you are one of those people. It doesn’t matter what you’ve made or how successful it is, you’re part of the family already, just embrace that. I have and I feel great about it.

Anyway, GDC is great, everyone is great. Everyone should go to GDC if they get the chance.

Note how happy I am.

*May not be an actual word.

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