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I have read your recent blog posts. Truth be told I figure that game development would be tough for an unknown person to set out and create an audience. I have followed several game developers on many websites and most of them struggle with gaining enough popularity. Eventually most just stop pushing out any content. From what I have observed the hardest part of game development is gaining an audience and maintaining that audience. I have followed another game developer called Matt Roszak(KupoGames) for years since I save his game more then a decade ago on a flash game website. He takes years to develop his games but I still check up regularly on his Deviant Art profile. 

Recently, this year I started to try and have some activity on itch.io and try and follow game developers but from what I can tell its hard to sort out anything in the chaos when it comes to searching the games here. Unless you have a really large following that rates your game well I think you might just have games lost in the number of games here.  

I was just contemplating a few points after reading your game dev blog post. I have also been wondering at the feasibility of creating an online game beyond the game itself, The business of creating an audience is not a little thing. 

Anyways Good luck with your future endeavors what ever they may be.

Sincerely a wandering web hermit.

Thanks Hectic for the kind words! It is indeed difficult to maintain an audience, but what I found the hardest was to cope with the fact that there is almost no audience beyond the initial release peak. My games - like many games out there - got buried very quick :-(

Deleted 5 years ago

Hi blascymot, thanks for taking the time to write! Maybe my postmortem post made you think I was feeling bitter, but I don't :-) I started gamedev because it was a lot of fun. I was aiming for a time consuming game knowingly (i.e. roguelike) because that's the kind of games I wanted to code, I didn't want to do other games beforehand; it wouldn't have been fun.

After three years of coding games, the fun of coding was mostly gone, I had learnt a lot in the framework I was using (and didn't want to try others as I don't have the time resource); and the reward aspect of gamedev wasn't worth it; hence I stopped developing :-) And 4 months later I do not regret it at all ^^ I've read a lot of great books thanks to stopping gamedev, I've redone HL1 solo and I'm on the way of finishing Opposing Force; things that make me happier than coding games ^^

Deleted 5 years ago