The Unity issues described previously have been sorted through.
I’ve been able to get development going again on Crowdsourced Adventure, Astounding Worlds, and a handful of other indie game dev projects.
The sites are going to see major updates by Oct. 10 reflective of current status, and that is going to be interesting to a lot of you.
Crowdsourced Adventure is being launched by November. Astounding Worlds by end of 2024. Other titles, over 2025.
Also lots of itch.IO updates arriving over the next three months so a big finish to 2024.
In the case of Crowdsourced Adventure, there are no fewer than seven worlds with design docs relating to them, that’s the first location and some options following it. Some of these docs have ‘contingencies’ and those are possible ranges of design variation depending on both success of the project and public feedback steering many aspects.
The game won’t see any near term launch on Steam or Epic. The first run is fully freeware and web embedded, though if you pay for Astounding Worlds on itch.io that gets you a build of the two games that can run offline.
The Steam/Epic version is identical to that earlier itch copy aside from slightly reduced compression, the textures will be slightly better than on any other venues. Should the itch version of that listing manage upwards of $50 in sales, that’s the threshold when I put down $200 for Steam, Epic version listing.
That’s that listing specifically. The one with offline versions of these two titles for about $2. The itch profile as a whole had made a few hundred dollars in sales, selling stock media content that in its own right has involved hundreds of hours of work to date. That is, a TON of photorealistic texture art, that is thousands of seamless photo based PBR texture files for 3d use, hundreds of really efficient 3d assets, etc.
If you’ve noted a climb in activity on itch profile in 2024, you’re in no way wrong. This year I’ve seen a 40% increase in follower count there and about 40% of the revenue the profile has ever had. It’s an extremely encouraging development.
Better yet, it comes in tandem with what still very well could be a record breaking Etsy run. And all that is nice, Etsy saw some crazy spikes in activity by late 2023 and it consumed my life for about 3 months trying and often failing to keep up.
For 2024, some breaks, aka ‘vacation mode’ are baked into the plan and that was clearly true in August. But that’s because of a determination to diversify. I do not want to be dependent heavily on any one shop that could shift its rules arbitrarily at some point and cause disaster. Itch.IO, other upcoming venues, and especially my own shops will be key to ensuring resilience in the event of a future Etsy issue
That is big for many reasons. I’m throwing literally $300 into ads and promotional plans this fall. That backs itch and the game sites and so on, and about 1/3 of it will go to the audience here paying attention. Even before the big Crowdsourced Adventure update, there’s already a ‘help’ page that clarifies how you can obtain randomized prizes for sharing the site link in other areas online like social media or forum profiles. The prizes range from free asset packs to Etsy coupon codes / discounts, papercraft-kit PDFs for download, and yes, in about 10% of cases, small gift cards for shops like Amazon, Steam, eBay and Walmart.
There is a value in that grassroots sort of promotion. The first 200 shares will all result in prizes, and there is ZERO reason you cannot share a link in a dozen different places, claiming 12 random prizes.
The gift cards are worth about $100 but the other stuff may be valuable to you too. So give that a shot via this page maybe?
The other $200 in ads are run pretty well, and I am sure those will lead a total 7000+ REAL people to matthornb.itch.IO, CrowdsourcedAdventure.com, or AstoundingWorlds.com. Odds are, I think, fairly good that this campaign will be profitable as it’s really well optimized and a recent $10 trial run preceding it pulled in 380 visitors and raised $26 in sales on itch.IO. That made clear to me that some sort of barrier had been breached… Now there are just enough reviews and comments, enough customer feedback on my itch space that people feel safe and justified in buying things on that profile. In the past, I pushed tons of people to look but nobody would buy anything, and small ad campaigns attempted on occasion always failed to break even. Now, suddenly, it’s hitting a point where 1-2% of those who show up there make a purchase, which makes the promotion suddenly worthwhile.
And that pushes things to go WAY faster there moving forward.
For half a decade there was a ton of work going into itch but no justification, no feedback saying, hey, this is worth doing, this can exceed a dollar per hour worked… and now it has flipped from demoralizing to exciting, encouraging, and a genuine priority.
And that highlights the sheer impact the presence of user feedback has.
Every rating, review, comment, all the positive responses are impactful.
Heck, I have donated some $40+ this month across highly efficient and effective charities and the spike in Etsy and itch.IO sales gave me the resources to do so. I won’t ever abuse itch’s system or bribe anyone, the feedback’s always been t genuine, but if we can keep that building up it will impact sales and the decisions of future possible customers, and at least 20% of what I gain from these sales overall is usually donated so…
In theory if the shop doubles its total revenue each year for the next 5 years it would lead to a massive volume of releases launching way faster than before, and a mass of donations sufficient to save over a dozen peoples’ lives. (Some of the most effective identified causes can save a human life routinely, for as little as $200 donated, meaning a thousand $ donated there keeps five people from dying from entirely treatable or preventable painful illness.)
I think that would be an amazing thing to do and if I ever succeed at anything that is a lot of my intent, indeed a major motivator to make something work out in my business. I want to help other people. I like the work too of course, I love providing useful services, entertaining people, helping with their projects and creating my own but I also really want to make an impact on people’s lives financially, so my two major goals as a business operator trying to turn a profit, are to do that, and to entertain and assist making life more enjoyable and worthwhile with the work itself. Creative freedom is a big goal. I want enough cash coming in to keep making better and better things, that delight people and improve the world in tangible ways as well.
That’s kind of my objective. It’s my objective maybe because I have been through a ton of social abuse and various health and trauma crises. I know life hurts terribly. I want to make it better for people. If I can improve my own life too that’s nice but it’s a distant second aim. I am going to be creating a site, MatthewLylesHornbostel.com, addressing my personal story and what its implications are, at some point soon too. That site too should arrive around when the new game site designs go live.
And finally: I have some awesome visuals and puzzles and story ideas ahead and not all of it will appear in the pitches that are voted on, but know every proposed concept is ‘partial’ – a story premise provided but the ending isn’t spoiled, some of the scenery shown to provide a look at the world but not views of every area, some general puzzle mechanics indicated but the solutions to be discovered while playing.
There is a whole dev pipeline behind Crowdsourced Adventure. The three options posited as voting choices for ‘what comes next’ in the imminent website update, will all be reflective of fully thought out worlds with maps put together in Photoshop, grayboxed entirely with puzzles being tested, the storylines all written down and some parts not just loosely grayboxed but fully detailed in 3d. The three worlds proposed, in short, when the new site design goes live, all are at least 40% made now. Any one you choose can move forward fast – within two months or so it can be done – and when it releases a new choice opens up and it too will be at least a third done by then.
This is to say, a solo dev making six 3d first person game levels a year somehow and making them look beautiful and run smoothly, and that basically is like making a full Myst-like game by myself every year, essentially.
The actual Myst devs, as a side note, tried to do this every 5 months roughly at one point, a new world of moderately big scope each month released as part of their failed MMO ‘Uru’ but they spent millions of dollars a year going in there and had fifty people working on it full time. I’m launching this by contrast, by myself part time, on a budget well under $1000 a year, and that would be unthinkable aside from the presence of an established game engine and many custom shaders built in, visual scripting, etc, a major suite of tools making the task difficult still but attainable and a more efficient process than what they faced then in not just making a game but with multiplayer networking, and a custom in house game engine adding to the technical difficulty.
I have issues with Unity 3d. The basic people working on the engine are great, the leadership at the top post-IPO is not. The infamous runtime fee proposed idea is one that got enormous blowback from developers poking holes in the concept. It was quickly replaced with a more traditional 2.5% fee on revenue over a certain level, which was a much more sane way to monetize Unity games.
I am still using the engine, for now, despite some broken trust. I’ve already gotten through the learning curve and have the essential tools and workflow figured out to make games there. The choice to pivot away would be a major delay on top of a lot of work already done on many projects.
For players’ concerns, remember that just because a game uses Unity doesn’t always mean it’s junk. 70% of all mobile games use Unity, and over 30% of PC and console titles. This engine still [for now anyway] is an absolute industry giant. Think about the fact that many beloved titles used Unity and nobody seemingly knew they were Unity because they spent $180 on Unity Pro each month to customize the opening screen with their own logo, not Unity’s.
Unity’s potential in terms of mobile optimization remains phenomenal. Look at titles like ‘Pokemon Go’ and ‘Among Us’, ‘The Room’ and ‘Monument Valley’ and those games’ sequels. Alto’s Adventure. Temple Run 2. And many, MANY others.
On the bigger end of things, until recently Unity coordination on projects with over a few dozen developers got messy and problematic, which is why Unity is almost never used on AAA titles (yet) but many of those issues are being fixed recently. Still, if your dev team is under 30 people, a ton of teams have done great work using the system in the upper indie or low-end AA space. Escape from Tarkov. Genshin Impact. Ori and the Blind Forest. Outer Wilds. Eastshade [done almost entirely by one guy who made a visually lovely open world in Unity]. Subnautica. Firewatch. Viewfinder. Etc…
The range of things possible is big. There is not an identifiable ‘Unity look’ as some claim is true for many UE4 titles. But that flexibility and efficiency is helpful. It’s an engine that can make nearly anything. It’s a great engine being ruined by former EA and Zynga execs who now are trying to please shareholders by making it more profitable, and that has potential to ruin it slowly over time but at its core it still has a userbase BECAUSE it continues to be usable in making a wide range of games.
That flexibility matters here. I’m making a bunch of worlds that amazingly will look good and also run smoothly in a web browser, which is never easy. WebGL games must be in filesize below 500mb. And that is a hard limit – 500mb to download, maximum, and then 500 set aside for it to run in browser memory. Or 1GB total use. Which for a typical browser tab is as high as you can ever possibly go. So if it looks like a realtime title from the 2000s sort of, this is why. It’ll look better though than most browser games you know. You may be surprised.
And the compromises required to make that happen generally are [some] texture compression, and splitting each world off into a separate web page.
The offline version will not have those limits, it doesn’t have to have them.
But the fact is the optimization for webGL also makes mobile ports potentially promising down the road… and this all could be pretty awesome.
I’m excited.