By Michael Yick

Game development is a unique sector of work due to its lack of regulation, lack of hard capital requirements, and thus ease of start by anyone. The good part of this is that you don’t need credentials or permission from anyone to get started and the bad part is that you’re potentially competing with everyone else with an internet connection to get ahead. For this reason, the differentiating factors that set your studio aside from the rest are imperative for your success. This article will focus on the type of people you need and the first-moving strategies you have to get something started.

How to start with yourself from nothing

Game development is a multi-media endeavor and that necessitates having multiple skills. The first person you should look at is yourself: what do you bring to the table? Are you good at something? If you’re not good at something, are you at least good at learning things? Do you have the willpower to learn and improve? Take questions like these in earnestly and honestly. If you’re not skilled or capable in any way, then your project will be nothing but a masturbatory waste of time that you deluded yourself into doing. If you are skilled and capable, and you just self-deprecated yourself due to some internal complex, then you may have just talked yourself out of a great artistic and business venture that would leave you happier and more fulfilled in life (if this is what you really want to do).

If you don’t know how to measure your own skill, that’s fine. Skill is malleable and will improve through learning. If you practice a thing, study under someone else, read good books on the subject, and apply lessons learned from the past, you’ll become better naturally. The best time to start refining your skills was yesterday, get working on it now so you’re not even more late and even less capable.

The more important question than “am I skilled enough” is “can I even tolerate doing this thing enough to get good at it?”. You decide to learn a skill, but if every moment of doing it is a torturous endeavor, then you’re going to just not learn it. For example, I, Michael, am a software engineer and writer. I despise drawing. Doing it hurts my hand, hurts my feeble geometrically retarded brain, and bores me for its repetition. If I decided to “learn to draw”, every moment of learning would be pain, pain that would eventually make me give up (rightfully so, as I was miserable doing it). Know your limitations, you’re only one man. Quitting isn’t as evil as people make it out to be if you’re quitting for the right reasons.

As an aside, this is one reason why one-man-armies are bad. Most people are not capable of doing a one-man-army team. There’s a limited amount of hours in a day, and there’s even less of those you’ll be in peak operation. If you have certain skills you hate doing, then those are going to be more taxing on you, which will unfortunately burn more of your time. and more importantly, your interest in a project. If you don’t want to be the eternal tinkerer who starts a project mid way through another project, never releasing anything of value, then learn to budget your attention to maximize your ability, then offload what you don’t want to do onto someone else. Even if you’re the perfect artistic multi-skill, capable of doing everything without any drag, you’re going to eventually run into marketing, bureaucratic work, and accounting, which will likely cripple you. If you don’t get used to offloading work now, you’ll make a bad decision when offloading work then, and it may be the worst mistake of your life because you signed away your autism project to someone you shouldn’t have trusted.

How to assess your own skill level

Once you’ve established what skill you’re going to ride on for your utility as apart of your team, it’s important that you know where you stand. There’s two ways to do this that I would suggest: trying to complete a challenge and comparing yourself to others.

Completing a challenge is rather simple. If you’re good with a skill, you should be able to take in just about any arbitrary task and complete it to a good enough standard. This includes dealing with situations you’ve never seen before, as someone good with a skill should know how to complete any arbitrary challenge, or at least learn how to complete it. However, challenges like these don’t give you an overall view of where you stand in comparison to others.

Often times from what we see, people will emulate the form of our work while completely missing out on the substance of it. Many fan projects around Snoot Game fall into this unfortunate trap: They merely copy the minutia and beats of a specific project (blank-face human character, edgy dinosaur girl, high school setting) without getting into “why” for it working. This lack of why also tends to create projects that are doomed to fail from the start. “I Wani Hug That Gator”, before Snoot Game’s original team took over directorship of the project, was like this and it sucked to work on and would have been a bad product for this reason.

The best way to be an artist is to stop acting like an artist

Now, self-comparison tends to get a bad reputation among lower quality content creators. People tend to get upset that their work is not good enough when they see something else and end up feeling defeated, upset, or experience some other kind of ego damage when they see something better. This is your internal artist speaking. This internal artist identifies your own self-worth as an individual with the content you produce, meaning that when your content is inferior you will feel inferior and when your content is superior, you will feel superior. The internal artist is bad news for the success of any project, being the driver of most self-congratulating delusion and infinite crab-mentality butthurt that comes from artistic peoples when they see someone genuinely better than them or suggesting they be better.

The internal artist is the part of you that wants to identify the label of “artist” as an intrinsic quality of yourself. An artist is someone generative. When someone is an Artist, he’s wishing to create and have their creations loved. When the Artist label is identified with, this desire becomes an entitlement.

This is because, to justify your label, you must create art to feel “like an artist” even if that art is vague, nonsense, or actually not important to anyone. You will end up deluding yourself to keep that badge of honor if you internalize the label. Ironically, this will make you a terrible artist as your constant need to justify said label will push you to create for creations sake rather than creating for any higher point.

A good artist is goal orientated: he sees his message and his target, and will want to get his message to his target in the most successful way possible.¹ If that means ripping apart his comfortable assumptions about his project, then so be it. All attributes of your art, besides being able to be made, must submit to the original intention of your goal. Only once the artist has achieved his goal successful may he bask in that comfort of knowing he did something right (and hopefully good for the world too!), but even then that glory must never be integrated as an intrinsic part of the identity both because its fleeting and because the value in artistry lies in the success of the goal, not any kind of label identity formed around it.

So, the best artist is he who succeeds in reaching his goal. This gives you a rather objective measuring stick to say if your art is good or bad at being art. A bad artist fails to reach his initial goal and a good artist succeeds. This measuring stick waves away much of the obfuscation and subjectivity the art world has built around itself to protect its worst members from critique. If you operate with quality in mind, a good goal to start, and a willingness to do, you have a good chance of actually making good art that’s both worth people’s time and money.

The make-up of your core team

Now that you have a general understanding of your own skill set, and hopefully have an idea of what you want to do for your game, you’re going to need people to cover your weaknesses. This is your core team: people who you can trust that do things that you don’t do. This group ought to be kept small, trustworthy, and highly motivated to enable the success of your project. After all, you’re likely going to be spending years working with these people, make sure that whoever these people are top-tier choices who are aligned with you. Whatever flaws they have must be tolerable, able to be mitigated, or do not affect development.

These strict requirements on your core team likely will rule out a number of your discord “gaming buddies” that just smoke weed all day and play League of Legends. That’s intentional. These people are “chill to hang out with”, but they’re not “chill to manage the 25 thousand dollar merchandise deal you’re working on”. These are people who have a high likelihood of creating the “million dollar mistake that sends your life on a hell spiral”. Don’t let them anywhere near the levers of power.

In fact, any notions of egalitarianism should be discarded in the favor of mixed trust-and-merit based hierarchy for nearly all decision making relating to “who gets to do what”. As mean as it sounds, some people are just inherently worse than others not only for specific lines of work, but in general ability as well. The people managing your group should not act like McDonalds employees. This is an improper inversion of natural hierarchy that will have tangible effects on human psyche. The lower grade people managing your group will be unhappy with the responsibility if they’re moral, but want to do their best. They’ll also screw up more often due to a simple lack of competence. If you’re really unlucky and the lower grade people are also immoral, they’ll abuse the responsibility for their own gain, embezzling funds, screwing your fans, or otherwise creating up problems that you do not need at no gain to you. At least the guy who is scummy, but good at his job can get a job done, though that’s not much of a glowing recommendation either (we’ll get to these ugly traits soon enough).

Still, let’s say that you get your platinum-grade, best of the best core team assembled. They’re competent, trustworthy, and can cover whatever weaknesses you have. How do you ensure they stick with you instead of jumping ship to some other project? Top-tier people are a rarity and anyone with half a brain will want to poach them:

Simple. You align their success with the success of your studio. In terse terms: a cut of the profits, managerial voting privileges, and other benefits will let you buy their loyalty. Someone merely paid a stipend for work done gets his stipend no matter if your organization is succeeding or failing. Lower sales don’t matter since he is entitled to the amount agreed upon for the duration of your agreement. Even if your group fails, that guy is entitled to compensation for work done, at least by United States law, that is. A core team member however will suffer as your group suffers, and succeed as your group succeeds. He has good incentive to contribute to success within the system under a system like this. Every extra hour poured in and every extra risk personally swallowed increases his chances of future benefits and earnings down the line.

Remember, when you assemble your core team, you’re a part of it too. Everything said above about alignment applies to you as well. If your core team realizes you’re a dead weight, don’t be shocked if they form a new team without you. Business is a brutal ecosystem where niceties don’t make good products for customers. No one wants to be led by a loser. If you want to make kino, you have to come to terms with this reality. Your own personal success must be tied to the success of the organization as well to incentivize you to make good choices as you’re not above slacking. So don’t take a stipend.

Types of workers: what you need and what will kill you

Okay, so you’ve picked some good people for your core team. They’re cool, competent, and you think you’re going to go places with them. You also have a pretty good idea for what you’re going to be doing and everyone is on board with making it happen. This is the point where you can actually start working on the pre-production phase, turning your idea from a collection of disconnected thoughts into a coherent, real, and tangible thing for people to enjoy.

The fix is more human capital, which comes in two ways: Skilling up or bringing new people in. Skilling up involves the people you already have spending time to learn a new skill for your project. This option is attractive since this person is someone you already have a working relationship with, but it faces the same the one-man-army developer deals with: you have limited time and limited attention, and by splitting your attention, you’re going to necessarily be taking away from something else.

If you choose to get more capital by learning, that’s time taken away from development directly. Even if you do learn the skill, the work you’re doing with the new skills necessarily deprives time from old responsibilities. On smaller projects, this isn’t that much of an issue. One person can manage an entire game, but that will necessitate cutting corners, for example:

Snoot Game’s original release code was not organized. Every choice, piece of choreography, condition for score logic, and word of chapter dialogue was stuffed into a 28k line long file called script.rpy. I was able to manage the game myself, but at the complete cost of organization. In a one-man project this didn’t matter, but Snoot Game became more than a one-man project over time due to the additions of many collaborators. Technically, I could have done all of their work myself given enough time, but that would have taken years. If you factored in the translations as well, decades. That’s time that Snoot Game would dwindle out of public consciousness, thus degrading the value of my work since no one would have seen it. Art is for other people. What’s the point of a game, even a good game, if no one is there to play it?

So that leads us into the second option: bringing in new people. Newbies let you offload your work onto them so you can spend more time on fewer areas, increasing polish, and letting you get more done. Three guys splitting their work while under good leadership are just able to make better things than the one guy going solo. They are not only faster, but can spend more time focusing in on their best skills and fixations. If you want a game full of detail, effort, and kino, you have to ensure that your guys are capable of spending the time necessary to polish their work to make it the best thing it can possibly be. Sorry to my anti-social cowboys out there, but your game is just not gonna make it.

However, with the introduction of new people, you’ve introduced new variables to your studio. New variables means new conflicts, new problems, and new headaches. People who are cool on their own are not cool when you mix their personalities with incompatible people. Welcome to the problem of management. I’m sorry for the horrors you’re about to endure.

The Good

But before we get into the horrors, let’s start on a positive note: the traits you want in a new person and how to attract or find talent. New people are an opportunity for more perfectly executing the vision of your core team, or enhancing it in some way to more align it with the “why” of your project. A great addition to your team is someone who makes problems go awhile while offering only minimal problems for you in return. There are no problem-free people, but there are people who have massive gain to you while taking very little. These people are your best assets. Keep them close, treat them nice, and make sure they’re happy even if they’re not speaking up for themselves.

The best people for getting rid of problems are people who do the following:

• They’re eager to do something. They’ll jump up and volunteer for a project and then follow through on doing it. If they can’t help directly, they’ll help indirectly by providing critique, direction, or teaching.
• They’re up front and clean with their desires. If they want pay, they’ll just quote you and make it simple. If they want to influence your project in a certain way, they’ll tell you overtly. If they refuse to work on Fridays, they’ll make that clear to you from day one.
• They’re honest and trustworthy. When something comes up that irks them, they’ll let you know in good faith in the hopes that you’ll handle it. They won’t play weird e-drama games, instead favoring working behind the scenes to solve problems rather than make more. They’ll play internal politics in a fair and clean way: never trying to intentionally create bad blood and always trying to further push the solution to a problem.
• They know what they got. If they’re skilled, they’re not going to lie to you about it and show off their competency to the degree they have it. If they’re not skilled, but willing to learn, they’ll make it clear that’s what they want to do.
• They’re people who, when they screw up, will minimize the consequences of screwing up. They’ll fix the problem themselves and just make a small memo on the mistake if they’re capable. If they’re out of their league with a problem they caused, they’ll contact you and tell you promptly.

This list is rather short because its general, more specific traits will be department dependent, but in general these are what you should be looking for: honest, fair, and reasonable people who will offer you reasonable work for reasonable expectations and with reasonable clean up for their mistakes. People like this are a dependable bedrock to build your project under. The kinds of problems they cause are reasonable and, when there are problems, they do not intend on making more. These guys are genuinely happy working with you, see your arrangement as fair, and won’t suddenly blow up out of the blue or burn out in a catastrophic collapse.

Now, one big factor that’s missing from this list is raw skill. Raw skill is great, but what’s even better than it is dependability. The guy who can dependably give you a 8/10 is something worth killing over. His work’s not the greatest, but you don’t have to play clean up on it constantly. The traits described above all play into that dependability factor. Even in times where he’s not cooperating for one reason or another, there is a clear path to regain that cooperation in a clean manner. It’s just a matter of you and your core team either offering what he desires, or offering an agreeable alternative instead.

The Bad

As previously established, you’re never going to get a person who doesn’t provide you with problems. You just hope that the problems that are provided are problems you can handle. We call these “weirdness points”.

Weirdness points are your allotted amount of disagreeable, odd, or strange traits that you may have in relation to your positive traits. The guy who is consistent, dependable, and overall pretty good is tolerated in being a little annoying with his My Little Pony obsession sometimes because, overall, he’s pretty good and his excesses are not doing substantial overall harm. Similarly, a guy who is overly negative and a little mean is someone to keep around if he makes up for it by being consistently dependable when called upon and clean in negotiations.

Weirdness points are also relative. What’s really off-putting to one is tolerable to another. Something you must take into account is who is having to manage and deal with a specific person: If you have a hardened asshole dealing with your programmers, and many of your programmers are a little too mean spirited at times, it won’t matter that much that they’re pricks since their boss can handle it. Similarly, if the people who draw pretty pictures are flamboyantly artistic, and their boss is used to dealing with that kind of sappiness, the weirdness points are mitigated as well so long as the boss handles them.

The goal is to ensure that no one is trouble to work with. This can’t be done by picking for perfection, as everyone has something weird and obnoxious about them. Picking for perfection is bound to fail you, as you skip out on the reasonable weirdos for the weirdos who are really good at hiding their weirdness. All that can be done is that you pick tolerant people, and the intolerable nonsense is filtered through management as to minimize problems.

As an example of this: We, like any good organization, have a hard working sperg on our team who is consistent in his output, clean in his work, and has a knack for polishing what he codes into something that’s not only functional, but also nice looking. He’s very dependable, and often will solve problems as they come up, making less work for everyone around him. His fatal flaw: he is very pedantic, very perfectionist, and very bad at softly requesting for things. This annoys the shit out of our more “go-with-the-flow” artsy type people, who do not jive with the type of structured and rigid desires he has. Now, this doesn’t mean that he is inherently wrong when he brings something up, I’ve sided with him multiple times on subjects I believed were important, but it does mean that he can be a pain to work with and that pain makes people not want to cooperate with his desires (useful or pedantic). The solution? Filter his requests through one layer of management to help weed out the nonsense and keep everything on track for success. I can deal with his weirdness and strip out the pain of dealing with that weirdness when dealing with the other departments. Doing that makes everyone’s lives better: Our loyal sperg gets a clean answer on his suggestion, our artsy fartsy people have minimal amounts of pain when interfacing with the suggestion, and if the suggestion is adopted, we now have one more utility to make working on our project better.

These issues will require making judgment calls, judgement calls that will have your head on a platter if you fail. If you decide to take someone’s weird suggestion the consequences of said suggestion, good and bad, will fall upon your ownership. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to deciding if a suggestion is good or bad, but the cost-benefit analysis is the best algorithm for deciding if a suggestion is good or bad. This is a subject with a depth of its own for another time, but to give you a quick summary: Benefits are those things that bring you closer to your goal OR make future achievements easier and costs are what bring you further from your goal OR deprive resources from things that bring you closer to your goal. You likely set your goal on the “Why” question, and thus you should have a measuring tool to decide if a judgement is good or bad.

Now, what if your judgement causes unforeseen consequences? Not consequences born of the actions you took, but consequences born internally from internal politics? What if your decision pissed someone off personally? You’re entering into the world of the ugly traits: the traits that are irredeemable and, if found, will require immediate ejection from your group for the safety of the interior. Unfortunately, on the internet at least, many people possess these traits. When they rear their head, they’re an ugly sight to behold.

The Ugly

The ugly traits are all magically bad in their own spectacular ways, so this section will deviate from the rest and look more at individual traits rather than a general view of what to look for. When these traits show up and are allowed to incur their full wrath, they have a good chance of entirely killing a project and salting the land it once stood on so nothing may rise out of it ever again. These traits usually exist as a hyper-charged version of a normal bad trait. That means that these traits likely lurk somewhere deep within yourself too! If that sounds scary, that means that you have enough consciousness to want to avoid blowing it, which is a good thing since self awareness is one part of the prevention process.

That being said, it’s not all you need. You must be vigilant of these traits forming primarily within yourself, and secondarily within others. That doesn’t mean you have free reign to start purging people on the suspicion of having ugly traits (the danger of these people tends to show itself very proudly, so you’ll know when to get rid of someone when you see it), but it does mean you should keep a watchful eye and start looking hard when something off putting happens.

Still, without further delay, let me introduce you to the traits that (almost) killed Cavemanon.

Mister “Obsessed”

Mister “Obsessed” is someone who latches onto one part of the project he’s on and guards it like a rabid dog. No one is allowed to touch it without his permission, no one is allowed to critique it in his presence, and no one is allowed to influence it without his approval. He’ll make working in and around him a living hell when it comes to his personal pet project within your project to satiate his own ego. Pity should be on the man who has one of these types latch onto an important or core fact in the project.

These types come in many shapes and sides: They may be motivated by a sense that outwardly hands will taint his “perfection” or he has a sentimental and personal attachment to his work. The one we dealt with was neither of these, and instead was just a raw, masturbatory obsession with a character from Wani, so much so that the character is regarded as the weakest part of the story.

These types of people forget, or maybe never understand to begin with, that the project they work on is not for their consumption, but rather for the audience it’s intended to reach. If sight of this is lost, the project is lost as well, as the project will just devolve into something self-satisfying rather than productive.

Warding this off in yourself is as easy as submitting your own will to the goal you placed out for yourself. Measure every decision you make against this goal, and see if it improves your chances at success. If your personal taste aligns with success with your goal, that’s great, but must be understood to not be necessarily the case. Bend your taste to your goals if you must have your taste reflected in your work.

Mister “Blunder-cover”

Mister “Blunder-cover” is someone who screws up or who just doesn’t have the raw ability to do as asked, but instead of just swallowing his pride and just telling you, says he can do it anyways. A job of a manager is to work with their workers and contributors to set mutually agreed upon expectations. Mister “Blunder-cover” breaks this by not pushing back when expectations are too high, instead agreeing anyways only to disappoint you later.

Mister “Blunder-cover” has many origin points. Sometimes he’s just a liar who wants to suck money or time away from you. Sometimes he’s someone who puts too much on his plate and is incapable of saying no, letting it build up until it crashes down on him (and you as well). Our case was rather tragic, with the guy not wanting to disappoint us, so he kept providing work at the cost of his integrity as he plagiarized many Public Domain tracks.

Unlike other problem children listed here, Mister “Blunder-cover” tends, for us, to be someone you can sympathize with. He wants to meet your standards, he doesn’t want to see your disappointment, so he tries to “fix” the situation with a stupid solution that hurts everyone. When Mister “Blunder-cover” is like this, he’s the most dangerous because his unrelenting loyalty and admiration for your work may make you wish to trust him more.

Warding off Mister “Blunder-cover” primarily involves accepting limits. If you simply cannot do a job, voicing that early and responsibly is paramount to success. In our case, if our guy simply said he could not do the job and needed to fill in with some Public Domain tracks, we would have been more than happy to accept that. There’s nothing wrong with admitting a limit. The other side of this is that management should never get mad at someone who earnestly says they can’t do it. Doing so encourages this type of behavior. Reassigning people is management’s job, and if the choice is between spending an hour training a guy or reorganizing work and spending possibly weeks on a tower of lies caving in, it’s best to just spend the hour.

Mister “Fan Fucker”

Mister “Fan Fucker” gets way too involved with his fans. Now, this isn’t exclusive to literally fucking your fans, but sometimes can just be “being friends with your fans”. Either way, emotionally tying yourself to your fan base is a high speed monorail ticket to being manipulated for your clout, influence, or worse yet, access to your team’s secrets or valuables. Unfortunately, being the guy to “pwn” the biggest man in the room, in your case a high-ranking game developer, is a damn good way to become smugly e-famous. If something happens in the fandom (which it will because fandom culture sucks), you do not want collateral that affects your project, people’s pay checks, and the moral of those you work with every day.

To a fan of our work, this may seem off-putting or mean spirited, but it’s for good reason: If someone internal to the project is able to be influenced or manipulated into having influence on the project, the project won’t be answering to its ultimate goal, or the “why” behind it, and instead to the whims of someone external who does not have skin in the game for the project’s success. If you want good projects, those involved on the project must be dedicated to making the project good, otherwise it will turn out bad. Furthermore, there are unfortunately many manipulators who wish to see people with respect fall, often to further their own social standing and seem righteous. Being emotionally vulnerable and dependent on these types will permit them to use you (and your group’s resources) for their own gain.

You provide your fans with a product with a specific intent and purpose. If your intent and purpose is good, then you have done good to them without necessarily being personally involved with them. The surgeon needs not be friends with his patient, the soup kitchen worker needs not be friends with the homeless, nor does the business man with his customer. You are here to reach a goal. Reach it and bask in the goodness it brings if it is a good goal. “Moral and good” does not necessarily mean “nice and personable”.

Avoiding this may be rather painful for some, as the types who want to engage in this behavior (when they’re not sex pests, that is) are of good heart. Wanting to be a friend of all, however, is impossible. If you somehow do it, you’ll be stuck as a spineless fence-sitter, placating to everyone no matter how unnerving or detestable or end up making enemies with people who suck and have way too much time on their hands to ruin your life. The solution? Keep it professional and clean. Only engage with fans for furthering your goals, rather that’s to improve understanding of your art or for money reasons. It’s cold, but it has to be cold, your friends are your friends, your customers are your customers. Don’t mix the two or else you’ll end up trusting adversaries and losing friends to e-drama.

On the topic of actually, literally fucking your fans:

Mister “Bigshot”

Mister “Bigshot” thinks he’s “the guy”. He wants to be behind the big mahogany desk, cigar in mouth, calling the shots on what happens and who does what. In reality, he’s just some dude who wants to weasel his way into your core group without being worthy of that position. Sometimes, he doesn’t even want in for the money, he just wants in so he can sit on the throne.

In our case, our Mister “Bigshot” was an outsider coming in, trying to throw money around to get ahead. He gifted us some cash, then had an expectation that he was “one of the guys”. He then spent time and money paying for adverts we didn’t want, impersonating us in the process. It was very cringe. His magnum opus of Trump-style “Art of the deal” moves was to offer us 5,000 USD in exchange for 10% of our revenue, along with the ability to buy 15% of the company. When he saw that we weren’t impressed, he played it off like it was a “placeholder suggestion” and that he just wanted us to review the contract’s formatting. The only reason we kept in contact with him was because of the naive assumption that no one would blow 1,000 USD to have influence on a then fledgling 4chan-based game studio.

Mister “Bigshot” is why a promise and a hand-shake doesn’t work anymore. He wants to insert himself into your process just to take it for a joy ride and crash it. He may gift you stuff to win over your interest, only then to start acting like just because he gave you something, he’s entitled to something. He’ll play weird games when brokering with you instead of just shooting straight and telling you what he wants up front.

Of all the people here, Mister “Bigshot” is the most dangerous since he could trap you in some nonsense agreement that gives him undeserved power over your project. The solution is always to demand contracts and to always go over their contents with someone you trust (ideally a lawyer) before even considering signing. Never rush an agreement. Clean agreements with expressly shown terms and with plenty of consideration can save you from being legally obligated to kill your project by handing it to some sleazy goof ball who sees an opportunity to ruin you.

Mister “Bigshot” can arrive in yourself too, but likely in a less overtly scummy fashion. This is through complacency: If you “make it” with your art, you’re going to no longer feel that pressure on you to make that 10/10 hit. You will be willing to do less and to let your money work for you instead. You’ll sit behind your big desk, signing off on projects, kicking back and producing nothing good as your work degrades and you grow out of touch. This is how media slides into “sequel slop” habit of just making the same junk over-and-over again; This is how you get FIFA 23 and 52 Call of Duty games. This is why the scrappy indie project is usually more interesting than the AAA establishment project. If Cavemanon wanted to whore out, we could just endlessly remake Snoot Game and I Wani Hug That Gator, but with different faces plastered on. It would get very old very quick and most of our fans would rightfully hate us for it by the end of it.

If you’re competent and creative, you have to have a fire under you to keep the pressure on and to “keep it real”. You cannot become Mister “Bigshot”. Every action must be for quality and answer the “Why” question. Experimentation cannot be for experimentation’s sake, formula cannot be for formula’s sake, and you can never take your art for a self-serving joy ride. If we return to the Snootiverse, it will have to be with something purposeful, intense, and poignant. At this moment, we don’t have that, but maybe we will some time in the future. If you make it, this must be your mentality too or else you will stagnate.

As a final note for this section, since it covers legal topics: Neither Cavemanon, nor the author(s) who wrote this article, are lawyers and none of this constitutes legal advice.

Mister “Woe is Me”

Mister “Woe is Me” thinks his suffering is your problem and that because he’s suffering he’s entitled to more for less work done. Instead of measuring his value to your project by how difficult it would be to replace his contributions, he measures his value to your project by how much he personally is suffering to contribute to you. Furthermore, instead of realizing he’s getting less than he wants and quitting with proper notice and grace, he sticks around, makes demands, and feels entitled.

Do note, there’s nothing wrong with renegotiating a deal if more work is required from someone. If one of your best men comes up to you, says he’s offering you quite a lot in output and wants more as a reward for it, and you agree with him, then it’s in your best interest to provide him with more of whatever resource he requested, rather that’s profit, influence, or anything else of the sorts. Your best guys cannot be lost, talent is scarce, and talent that’s dependable even more so. Anyone would poach a good guy.

No, Mister “Woe is Me” doesn’t see the relationship like this: he skips works, constantly blows off tasks, and doesn’t provide you with that much value (or worse, causes you problems), and then demands for more out of a sense of entitlement to more because he is suffering. This is a key point in this: a wrong assessment about value doesn’t mean you’re Mister “Woe is me”, it’s a wrong assessment that your suffering matters for the health of the project that leads to it.

Furthermore, this isn’t an advocacy for any kind of cruelty (which is something that will cause your best men to burn out and hate you quickly). If someone is sick, has their life fall apart, or is in some way temporarily reduced in their ability to contribute, a reduction of obligations should be granted, but with the standard amount of compensation still received. However, this arrangement should be temporary, both parties should work towards returning to the usual expected norm, and the reprieve only entitles someone to a lesser obligation to suffer for the project, not more compensation for said suffering.

Mister “Woe is me”‘s origin ultimately lies in misunderstanding what the project serves: The project’s goal is to fulfill the vision of the core group, who will then deliver it to the customer or audience for their benefit. All artistic projects ultimately come down to communicating something to their audience and everything that inhibits that must be stripped away or maneuvered back into the name of doing this. Mister “Woe is me” thinks just because contributing to the project costs him, he’s entitled to more direct support from your core group, who then shifts this cost onto your customers if the project is commercial. Every compensation made is an expense that must be accounted for in some fashion. Mister “Woe is me” wishes to become a leeching crony who puts his own well-being above the purpose of the project. The core management in a project, who ultimately bear all expenses, must stomp this out for the benefit of the project.

This includes stomping it out in yourself. Management’s entitlement is more dangerous than the entitlement of any individual as management has ultimate ability to make decisions about what happens. A corrupt management can forgo the quality of their project, hurting their customers, and the satisfaction of their hardest workers in the name of taking the spoils of their venture all for themselves. This is a dangerous perversion that will do more damage than any worker’s entitlement, as the management, in this scenario, is no longer acting in a way to support the quality and sustainability of their project, and thus hurts getting their message to their audience. Management must live and die by their project’s success by getting a portion of the profits as a reward, but anything further than what’s absolutely necessary to keep management aligned with the project’s goals amounts to corrupting greed, which will kill the project.

“Loose lips sink ships”

Talk is cheap, doing is expensive: Don’t get addicted to the cheap drug of talk and instead focus on getting things done. More tersely: When you’re working on a project, shut up about working on it unless there is an actual incentive or reason to blab. If it’s not going to get you money to fund your project or make future work on the project easier, there’s no reason to come forward with what you’re doing.

This may seem counter-intuitive: You want critique from people to make the best project possible. You don’t want to be trapped in a bubble of your own guys in case it turns out that you’ve deluded yourselves into loving something that sucks. That’s all very true, but there are many more harms that blabbing can bring:

This was one of the reasons, besides avoiding getting hit with nonsense DMCA claims by KO_OP, that Snoot Game’s development was near radio silent while it happened. We didn’t want to attract attention or make hype for a project that didn’t exist and wouldn’t have any commercial reason to have hype. That protected us not only legally, but also from over-promising and under-delivering.

More pressingly however, talking about what you’re doing is a very cheap way of doing ego stroking. If you want to feel important and like you’ve done something, the best thing you can do is to chatter about something that ultimately isn’t real. Yeah, your cool battle system or awesome sprite work is cool in concept, but without any tangible or real thing to experience outside of what you say, why does it matter? No one can play a game that only exists in a couple sprite sheets and in your mind.

Really, this section is just an extension piece on Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games – Keep Your Internal Pressure High [Work Ethic], which is a video with great advice about this very subject. The summary is: It’s better to shut up and build up your idea into something real rather than get the relief of talking about it while producing nothing. We still would suggest watching the video in full.

That being said, there are times when talking is actually good for your project: If you can find some outsider people who won’t leak things, blab, and will give you an honest opinion, that’s a good way of fishing for a reality check on your project’s quality. We did this several times during Snoot Game’s development, and it was a great way of giving us proper reality checks on if we were going in the right direction or not.

Also, we do run a paid development blog, you’re reading it now. The funds we gain from yapping about our projects will go directly back into supporting further development, and us talking about what we do serves as proof that we’re working. The only reason we can get away with doing something like this is because we’re wagering our reputation: If we fail to bring a good article out, we’re failing to prove that we’re working, and thus our patrons have no reason to pay us. This is a tactic that can only really work if you already have established proof that you can produce.

Do it for free first

Another piece of advice we have for getting your foot in the door is to make your first project non-commercial. This is both so you can see if you can actually make a project and, if you can, if you’re able to build up an audience if you’re successful. The lack of barrier to entry for your project means that can easily spread and you can garner reputation. Reputation is a very lucrative and rare asset, if people know that you’re the guys behind a thing that they like, they’re going to be more likely to take a risk on buying something from you on the next go around. This is especially true if your next go around is very similar to your first one, like with what we did.

Snoot Game was a “literal who” project that took off for being good. The only reason people gave it a chance was because it cost nothing but time to play. Few people want to risk their hard earned money on something they may not enjoy. Snoot Game acted as a “try before you buy” of sorts for our work. If you liked the game, and wanted more, you could play “I Wani Hug That Gator!”. Wani was similar, but different enough that it’s not a boring re-hash of Snoot Game.

This strategy of using a free product to create reputation and a paid one to then cash in on it worked wonderfully in our favor and, because of that, we suggest that others try something similar. Only through hedging our reputation could we convince people to buy and play Wani. Since Wani was well received, we intend to do the same thing again to our next game, Exit 665. We now have a track record of making things people like, so people in the future will trust us more in bringing us something that will be good. This reputation is our greatest asset to our success and, if we want to continue that success, we must keep making quality games for our audience to enjoy.

“Doing it for free” may seem stupid, since that would take time, but many talented people already are doing it for free and may not even realize it: Do you mod a game that has a small audience? Do you translate games for other people as a hobby and you’re pretty good at it? Do you draw fan art for another game that people actually like? If so, then you have a chance to use your small reputation to either build a bigger one in game development or to cash in on it in some other way. Of course, you don’t have to do game development, most would not fare well in this field, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do something else. If you are capable in game development, for example if you make total game conversion Minecraft mods, hedging your reputation as a game modder may be worth it to get your foot in the door.

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