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SLARPG Postmortem: One year later
🕑 Added 2023-12-15 23:25:47 +0000 UTCIt's already been a year.
This week marks one year since the Super Lesbian Animal RPG Patreon Beta, when players first got their hands on the full game. Next week, on the 20th, it'll be the game's proper anniversary, celebrating a year since its release on Steam and itch.io. And a few days later, on Christmas, I'm turning 30.
As such, I'm in the mood to reflect on things. I'd like to open up about how the game has done, how I've been doing since the game was released, and what's in store for the future. (If you're just here for an update on what we're working on, that's at the bottom of this post.)
This is gonna be a long one. This post will have good news and... well, I wouldn't say there's any bad news, per se. Just me venting about the typical frustrations of being an indie dev - specifically an indie dev who spent almost eight years working on one project as the world changed around me. But that might be a bit of a downer, so let's start with the good news.
SLARPG has sold very well (relatively speaking)
For a niche RPG Maker game with no publisher and no marketing budget, SLARPG has sold well. Very well, even!
I won't get into hard sales numbers right now, but across Steam, itch.io, and our inclusion in the Humble Pixel Pride Bundle this summer, SLARPG has sold tens of thousands of copies. On Steam, we have the highly coveted Overwhelmingly Positive rating, with 99% of the over 700 reviews being positive. If you count reviews from people who got the game via a key, such as through the beta or the bundle, we really have almost 1000 reviews on Steam. While SLARPG may not be the new viral hit or whatever, this is VERY good for a debut commercial game, particularly one made in a version of RPG Maker from 2012. Games like this are lucky to get, like, 30 positive reviews on Steam. Even getting those first ten reviews, which gives you increased visibility on the store, can be an uphill battle. Getting a thousand is a rare privilege.
When comparing the sales across the two stores, Steam sales outnumber itch.io sales about 14 to 1, which certainly makes it clear that my decision to launch on Steam was the right call. (I was hesitant to put the game on Steam due to a fear of reactionary harassment, but we've received... almost none since launch? Aside from a few low effort trolls I've banned from the Steam forum? I'm shocked.) Overwhelmingly, people just want to buy their PC games on Steam, and they want to make those purchases during a sale. I get it. I'm often the same way.
Here, let's look at our sales graph from the last three months and play "Spot the Steam Sale."
(People are still buying the game every day regardless of whether or not there's a discount, though! The spikes from the sales just massively skew the Y-axes of our graphs.)
But even though Steam is where we've made most of our money, I wouldn't write itch.io off entirely. I have to assume that some of the people who bought the game on Steam would have still gotten it via itch if that was the only option, and the 300k views we've gotten on itch certainly helped raise awareness - particularly when we were featured on the front page for like a month. And at the end of the day, I just like supporting itch as a platform, plain and simple. I like their product! I want 'em to have a little walkin' around money.
This hasn't made me a millionaire or anything - not even close - but that's not something I expected. It has, however, far exceeded how well it needed to do to give me some financial stability for the foreseeable future. I don't have to worry about how I would pay for a new computer if my laptop broke. I could just afford a new one. I can help my mom out with random expenses. When I finally get back to driving, I could afford a car. I'm not set for life or anything, but I can continue living my current life comfortably until I put out my next game. That's not nothing. I'm thankful for that. I'm thankful that my fear of the game flopping, forcing me to abandon full time game development and immediately move over to commission work, didn't come to pass. That would have been brutal on me, given how burnt out I was by the end of SLARPG's development. (This is foreshadowing for the rest of the post.)
Defining "success"
I should also make it clear that my financial needs are different from a lot of other indies, so my bar for a "successful" release is lower.
I'm not trying to keep a whole studio afloat, I'm just trying to pay my own bills and give Bee her cut as well. I don't even necessarily need to be the primary breadwinner of my household. I've been renting a house with Anthony and my mom, splitting the expenses three ways in a pretty cheap part of Florida. (Like many successful creatives, one of the secrets to my success is just that I have a very supportive partner who has a normal job.) I am also not paying for a car, or health insurance, or student loans, or kids. I don't have a mortgage, and I've paid off my small amount of credit card debt. I mostly just have my share of the rent, utilities, and groceries to worry about, so I don't have to make much to break even every month.
It would, of course, be nice to have some of those things. I wish I had my own car. I wish I had health insurance so that I could more easily go to the doctor, or start seeing a therapist, or go on ADHD meds or antidepressants or hormones or whatever else I need. I could probably afford at least some of this now, although I'm not sure if I could yet afford all of it at once. I'm not sure how long it will be until my next release, so I have no idea how long I'm going to need this first year SLARPG money to last, and it's difficult to know how well the game will continue to sell in the next year or so. I haven't really had the space to think about this stuff yet, I guess. I've been in recovery mode this year. I've also kinda just been appreciating seeing that nice big number in my bank account before self-employment taxes hit me like a truck next year lmao
The response from players has been amazing
Beyond all these numbers, though, there's also been the way players have responded to the game. And that truly means the world with me.
We've received a mountain of fanart. The folder on my computer where I save all of it just hit 1000 files, and people are drawing more every week. I cherish each and every piece. There are fan animations. There are entire multi-page fan comics, which are sometimes even longer than the official prologue comic. There have been fan dubs. There's been fanfiction continuing the stories of various characters past the ending of the game. I haven't read any of them myself - I don't want to subconsciously rip off a fanfic in the future - but I'm delighted that they exist. There have been remixes. There have been cosplays. People have made their own SLARPG OCs, or adapted their existing characters into my art style to have them interact with the cast of SLARPG. There's an "incorrect SLARPG quotes" blog on Tumblr. Someone made a SLARPG dialogue box generator so that people can make their own conversations between the characters. Tons of people have streamed the game, and continue to stream it. We've got speedrunners. This got the game to appear in multiple Games Done Quick streams this year like the Flame Fatales event, where Melody was even used on the event's banner art. Melody and Allison have been turned into 3D models so that they can exist as VRChat avatars. Someone modded Allison into friggin' Guilty Gear.
Even with all that, though, what really stands out to me is the number of messages I've gotten from people who just wanted to say how much my story and its characters meant to them. People who’ve told me it’s their new favorite game ever made. People who felt seen. People who feel more comfortable with their bodies because of Melody. People who processed some stuff about themselves after playing our game, inspired to come out or go on hormones or whatever else. This absolutely means everything to me.
As I've said many times before, SLARPG is a very personal story for me. There's a lot of myself in the characters, particularly Melody. I wanted to create a fantasy adventure story about queer characters I could relate to on a deeper level, characters that it felt like no one else was ever going to create for me - especially back in 2015, when the landscape of queer media was very different than it is today. So to hear that people have connected with my characters like I hoped they would... it's been incredible. I'm so happy that this game has had a positive effect on people. That really makes all the hard work worth it.
I was worried that SLARPG would fade from memory as soon as it was released, but instead it led to all of this. I couldn't be prouder. While the rest of this post is going to have a lot of venting, I don't want to lose sight of the fact that I'm extremely happy with the audience response.
It's other things that have proven more frustrating for me.
The ever-changing world of indie games
(Please do not take this section as career advice.)
Since I started making games in 2013, I've absorbed a great deal of information about what you're "supposed" to do to successfully launch an indie game. The problem is that, in 2023, a lot of the stuff I came up understanding as The Right Way To Do Things just doesn't apply anymore.
The old wisdom told you to post devlogs to sites like IndieDB and the TIGSource forums. Nowadays, these sites are still around, but they aren't the ubiquitous indie dev meccas they once were.
The old wisdom told you to do in-person networking at events like GDC and PAX, but now we're entering year 5 of a global pandemic where basically every con is a superspreader event, and also GDC keeps jacking up the cost of admission.
The old wisdom told you to post eye-catching gifs of your game to Twitter, and - well, okay, you can still post to Twitter. I certainly do. But in the Elon era it's no longer the site that every indie dev in the world is present on. We're now fragmented across other hubs like Bluesky, cohost, various Mastodon instances, and a bunch of Discord servers. (And Bluesky won't even let you post gifs or videos!! Bluesky please hurry up and stop sucking ass.) Not to mention that the traditional “post lots of gifs and devlogs” strategy heavily favors specific types of games - ones with a lot of action or actual animation budgets, mainly. Mechanics-driven games where the core appeal can be captured in a ten second clip. It’s a lot harder to make that work for slow, narrative-heavy games with minimal animation like SLARPG.
But in particular, the old wisdom told you to email your press kit and a Steam key to as many journalists at the big sites as possible. I can’t say that’s bad advice, but to me at least, it now just feels like talking to a brick wall.
My favorite publications are laying off staff and closing left and right, and many of the best writers are burning out in their 30s and exiting the field. (There were multiple writers who showed interest in SLARPG who weren't even game journalists anymore by the time it came out!) Many of the sites that remain just don't cover random indie games with any regularity unless said games already have a publisher, get featured in a Nintendo Direct, or become a viral sensation. They're spread thin just trying to cover the big games, so they don't have the space for it. Valiant attempts from individual writers to make space for it fizzle out. Columns recommending obscure games and sharing Screenshot Saturday posts get quietly canceled because they don't generate as much ad revenue as "SEO-optimized" things like walkthroughs, gift guides, and updates on the same few live service AAA games. There are definitely still smaller sites and podcasts and whatnot out there trying to bring attention to the hidden gems of the indie world, but it's incredibly hard to build an audience doing so in this day and age. People just don't want to click on articles about games they haven't heard of.
Also, forgive me for feeling a little cynical about the prospects small-time queer creators in the indie scene have for mainstream recognition when big outlets celebrate Pride Month by whipping up lists like this:
(Speaking of publishers: I was actually approached by someone from PQube after I posted about needing donations to help move back in 2017. This didn't go anywhere for a few reasons. Mainly, I had no idea how long the game would take to finish, especially when the demo wasn't even out yet at the time, and didn't want the stress of publisher deadlines hanging over my head. I also worried about maintaining control of the SLARPG IP, and creative freedom, and things of that nature. Also I was, you know, busy scrambling to move in the short window of time our previous landlord had given us mere weeks before Christmas. So I just never got back to the guy. Years later I realized I'd dodged a bullet when the news broke about PQube exploiting the devs of A Space for the Unbound and withholding diversity grant money from them, forcing them to terminate their contract and move over to another publisher. In hindsight, me going "hey I'm a broke indie dev and I need money to move" on Twitter and a random publisher seeing my donation post and going "hey, wanna sign a contract?" feels... a bit suspicious?)
Rather than press coverage, what REALLY seems to make a difference these days is streaming. You should send your game to streamers who might like it. I can't argue with that. The problem for me, however, is that I made a gay furry RPG Maker game about feelings, and a lot of streamers just aren't going to engage with that on a genuine level. I'm not going to send a SLARPG key to cr1tikal or who the fuck ever. I honestly didn't even know where to start. I didn't have a list of streamers in mind, and by the time our launch was approaching I was too exhausted to even think about it. And even if I did have a list of big name streamers who might take me seriously ready to go, a lot of the same problems with trying to contact journalists apply to streamers. Their inboxes are surely already full of other games vying for their attention, and if they hadn't heard of us already then chances are they'd see the title "Super Lesbian Animal RPG'' and assume it was a porn game or a meme game and just keep scrolling.
So I just... didn't do a lot of this! I didn't send anyone a key unprompted. I relied on positive word of mouth, and also the fact that I already had a decent audience online. 16,000 followers on Tumblr, 14,000 on Twitter, a popular Sonic blog, and a bunch of people who vaguely remember hearing about my old fangame in 2013 isn't "Internet Fame," but it's something.
I lucked out, and this worked. This is absolutely NOT something I can recommend other first time indie devs do. "If you build it, they will come" is not a valid business strategy if you don't already have an audience for your work. But I got lucky.
I did at least make sure to launch the game during a less busy month, rather than trying to compete with the big fall releases. That's one bit of advice that remains accurate. The problem there, however, is that we ended up having to launch in December, just a few short days before the Steam Sale. This is a very stupid thing to do! A Valve rep literally told me I should not do that when I tried to set our release date!! I did it anyway because I promised the game would be out in 2022, goddammit, and I was NOT prepared to break another release window promise. (This also put us in the middle of awards season, which is generally a bad move - but let's be real here, I knew we weren't getting nominated for the fucking Game Awards or getting put on IGN's Best of 2022 list or whatever.) Again, things just managed to work out. Launching right before the Steam Sale meant that we had our launch discount during the sale, which might have helped keep us from getting totally buried. Who knows! This was a very stupid thing that you're not supposed to be able to get away with.
Anyway, the point of this long, rambling section is: making an indie game has always been a gamble, but there are also a lot of best practices you can try to follow to make it less of a gamble. However, those best practices have changed in the decade I've been a dev. While some things have gotten better - Steam opening up is an objectively good thing, no matter how much people bitch about shovelware - other avenues of success feel like they've been closed off. And the fact that I'm making a niche queer game and not a broadly appealing thing for Gamers limits my possibilities even further. Again, SLARPG has done pretty damn well for a game in its position, but I'm not sure how I could break through to that next tier of success without something like the right streamer randomly playing it. It feels largely out of my control, and it's easy for that to turn into tired resignation.
Opportunities
That's not to say that no opportunities presented themselves to me this year. But many of them had... catches.
Without a doubt, the biggest one was the offer to be a part of Humble's Pixel Pride charity bundle in June. Conventional wisdom will tell you not to start doing bundles so early in a game's lifespan because it'll undervalue your game, and I definitely didn't plan on doing something like this so soon. But Humble's pitch material argued that bundles don't negatively impact sales, and for us, at least, this seems to have been true. Our sales remained pretty steady throughout the year, and we did really well in the Steam Summer Sale mere days after the bundle. Mainly, though, the bundle just seemed like a really cool opportunity that I didn't want to miss out on. It felt like a huge honor for my dinky little RPG Maker game to be a part of this charity bundle next to games like Celeste or Get In the Car, Loser! or Later Alligator, all games by much more well known creators. It felt like a big deal to be in the conversation with those games, and to be seen as a valuable asset for raising money for charity.
By all accounts, the bundle seems to have been a decent success, raising $46,991 for the Trevor Project and getting the game into a bunch more peoples' hands in the process. So that's the end of this part of the story, right? That's great news! The end!
...Well…
Following our agreement to take part in a charity bundle benefiting the Trevor Project, said charity spent all summer embroiled in controversies over mismanagement, poor working conditions, layoffs, and union busting. I say this not because we got in trouble for supporting them or anything - literally no one has ever said anything about it to me - but it doesn't sit right with me. It left a bad taste in my mouth, and made me more picky about what charities I decide to support in the future. But still, I can only hope that at least some of that $47k actually went towards our goal of funding the hotlines and helping queer youth.
Admittedly, while the charity fundraising was the main goal, I was also hoping that the bundle might have helped us get a little more mainstream attention as a bonus. (Again, it would be nice if SLARPG sold well enough that I could more comfortably afford things like, y'know, health insurance.) This didn't really happen. We got a handful of half-sentence mentions in articles listing the games in the bundle, which is definitely nice, but that was about it. We didn't get any noticeable increase in coverage. Again, the space for reporting on obscure indie games is simply not there anymore.
There were several other noteworthy events that ALMOST happened this year, but then didn't.
- We were invited to take part in another event showcasing queer indie games and raising money for various charities, organized by a company that will go unnamed in this post. This year's iteration of the showcase suddenly fell apart due to the fact that this company was offering more prominent placement in their Steam event to their paid sponsors, which Valve understandably took as them selling spots on the front page of Steam. Which is against the rules. So the whole event was quietly canceled. Great!!!
- I got invited to do a plush campaign on one of those Makeship-type sites, but I kind of hate those sites, so I didn't do it. I would love for SLARPG plushies to exist someday, but I would want them to be widely available, not some limited time deal where your fans have three weeks to preorder or they never get one. (I don't blame other creators for doing campaigns like this, though.)
- I was also asked to comment for an article on queer representation in games for a new vertical at a major newspaper. I declined because I wasn't comfortable with said newspaper's recent history of transphobic fearmongering and platforming TERFs, which sometimes literally gets cited by legislators trying to push anti-trans bills. (Yes, I know that doesn't narrow down which paper it was.) I have no ill will towards the specific writer who contacted me, who seems cool, but I hated the thought of becoming a token trans person that the higher ups might point to to go "See? We're totally fair and balanced on the Trans Debate here! We offer perspectives from both sides!"
I also got a decent number of emails from people asking for keys. I did send a few streamers keys when they asked. The problem is that launching a game on Steam and having a public email address attracts a lot of scam artists trying to get free keys. This has thankfully slowed down, but it was difficult to sift through all this for the first few months, so I ended up just ignoring a lot of it. I apologize to any legitimate streamers who got lost in the shuffle and didn't end up getting keys.
Maybe all this, including my hesitation over sending keys to journalists and streamers, is just me being cynical due to burnout. A more optimistic, more constructive person will tell you to go after every possible lead. Even if some are dead ends, it all builds awareness for your game little by little. This is marketing 101. But the cynic in me is tired after almost eight years of development, and just wants to fucking make art, and not worry about the marketing part. An optimist would tell you that getting a promotional email about entering yourself in the NYX Game Awards is something you should follow up on, because you never know what could come of that! The cynic in me says that I'd probably just get beaten by games made with bigger budgets and better engines anyway, and also no one knows what the fuck the "NYX Game Awards" is, so who gives a shit. Wait hold on I'm actually looking at their site for more than five seconds for the first time, why do they charge devs hundreds of dollars for every category they enter themselves in??? What is going on here
Oh, I guess there was one other business opportunity that appeared in my inbox this year, which in this case turned out to be an unambiguously very cool thing.
The physical soundtrack(s)
I don't really have much to say about this one. It was very cool. I'm glad that Turtle Pals Tapes reached out to us, and that we got back to them and made it happen. I absolutely adore Bee's soundtrack, and I'm glad it's getting the treatment it deserves.
I gotta say, though, holding a vinyl record in my hands that has my own art on it was a surreal moment. It almost feels like it's just some silly little arts and crafts project of mine that someone else finished and mailed to me. But no, it's the real deal. It's a real album that people can purchase, covered in art I drew of my own characters, with music from my own game on it. As a VGM enthusiast, this was a very special moment for me.
...I still have to buy myself a record player, though.
On a less cheery note, while I'm very happy about the soundtrack, finishing all the art for it ended up taking much longer than expected, which is why they've taken so long to arrive on peoples' doorsteps. What should have taken only a week or two at most ended up taking several months, due to...
Burnout
Yes, let's finally talk about the elephant in the room.
I expected finishing SLARPG to be very freeing. Finally, this project that I had been toiling away at for years would be finished, and I'd be able to move on to other things that I said I wanted to do. Instead, finishing SLARPG was hard for me.
The first time I rolled credits when testing the epilogue last fall, I cried. A lot. At first I thought that I was crying tears of joy over finally seeing the story through to the end, or that I was moved by the incredible song Bee had written for the ending. As I sat there choking back sobs in the middle of the night, though, this morphed into a strange sadness. A major chapter in my life was ending. The story that lived in my head for the better part of a decade was finally finished, and it was time to say goodbye to Melody and friends. It felt like a part of me had died.
Over the next few days this feeling quickly morphed into me just being fucking tired. The burnout was here, possibly in tandem with seasonal depression. I've never been sure if I have that. I limped along to the finish line over the last couple months of development, just barely getting everything done in time for launch.
Once the rapid succession of post-launch patches were done, I went on break. I thought I'd need a month or two to just chill, and then my newfound free time and financial stability would allow me to get back to a whole bunch of other creative endeavors I'd been neglecting. I'd draw a bunch of stuff just for myself! Fanart, personal art, whatever! I'd bring back Thanks Ken Penders! I could start streaming again! And, of course, I could start learning Godot, perhaps making some short experimental games along the way!
...Obviously, if you follow me, you know that none of this really happened. 2023 has probably been the least productive year of my adult life. I quickly lost steam when trying to learn Godot. Thanks Ken Penders is still on hiatus. I haven't streamed anything. I've drawn, like... two pieces of art for myself? I'd try to draw more and just hate how it was coming out and feel discouraged. Again, it was a struggle to even pick up the tablet pen to get the art done for the vinyls and CDs. I've even struggled to keep up with hobbies. I've had a Gunpla kit sitting on my table waiting to be built since April. I've spent much of this year in that horrible state of executive dysfunction where you can't get anything done, but you feel like you should be doing something productive instead of goofing off, so you just sit there feeling guilty about how unproductive you're being instead of giving yourself actual time to unwind.
This burnout is also why I haven't done nearly as much to promote SLARPG as I could've this year. I could've drawn more promo art. I could've drawn little comics with the cast. I could've made more trailers. I could have just been way more annoying about plugging it on social media all the time. I could've done a lot of things. I just didn't have the energy.
Anyone who's suffered from burnout or depression or whatever before knows how much this sucks. The worst part is that it feels like you're just being lazy, even though there are very real mental and physical conditions to blame. But I guess this is to be expected after coming off of a years-long creative project. To some extent it's like creative empty nest syndrome for me. I'll be able to create things again in the future. I miss having a project to chip away at. I've got ideas. I've just needed time to recharge. I'm thankful that the financial success of SLARPG has allowed me to take that time to recharge, instead of rushing right into work on commissions or another game or whatever.
I also need to look at social media less.
The stresses of making queer art long-term
I often worry that, rather than pushing for a wider range of queer fiction and judging individual works on their own merits, we just keep bickering with each other on social media and making up new rules for what we’re “supposed” to be making.
There's a broad spectrum of things for people to make up these rules about. If the content is too explicit, if it isn't explicit enough, if the relationships are too "toxic," if they're too "wholesome," whether it does or doesn't explore real world oppression, how much the characters' identities are or aren't acknowledged in the dialogue, how much of it is subtext, if it explores kink too much or too little, how much the trans characters do or don't "pass," if the deadnames of trans characters are or aren't acknowledged at any point, even general aesthetic choices and vibes. Everyone has their own personal Goldilocks zone for this stuff, so social media is constantly inundated with opposing takes on The One Correct Way To Do Queer Fiction. Opinions swing back and forth every year or so, often in response to current trends and whichever fandoms people are most annoyed by at the time. Rather than treating popular new pieces of queer media as their own stories with their own creative goals, different stories are pitted against each other as opposing blueprints for All Future Queer Stories.
This zero-sum discourse could, perhaps, become a major source of stress if you were to spend the better part of a decade making a video game with "lesbian" in the title. You know, for a purely hypothetical example.
Again, I'm extremely proud of SLARPG, but it was born out of creative goals I had in 2015, at age 21 - and, going back even further, it's built off of the skeleton of a game I made in 2013, at age 19. In internet terms, that's eons. I started work on SLARPG many discourse cycles ago, before Undertale, before Celeste, before the memes about "EarthBound-inspired indie games about depression" had codified, before the terms "wholesome games'' and "cozy games" existed, when there were hardly any games with queer protagonists at all. I had no idea how it would land when it finally came out, but I sure did spend a hell of a lot of time stressing over it.
Because I completed each of the five acts of SLARPG one after the other, you can literally see my writing mature and my creative priorities shift over the course of the game. In the end, I think this ended up creating a compelling arc. Act I starts off very lighthearted and comedic, with Melody and Allison being in hopeless puppy love mode. A lot of this consists of jokes I wrote all the way back in 2013, when I was a lovesick teenager who'd only come out of the closet the year before and I'd never even been in a real relationship. Over the course of the game a number of dramatic twists serve as harsh reality checks for Melody and Allison, things gradually get more introspective and serious, they spend some time apart, and by the end they've done a lot of growing up and come away with more nuanced perspectives on both their own lives and their relationship. Melody's arc ended up being a story about the growing up we do in our 20s, in particular evoking the "second puberty" many queer people go through in young adulthood when we're finally able to live as ourselves, but the fact that I literally wrote it over the course of my 20s pushed that even further. I was doing a lot of growing up right alongside Melody.
But because the game is wrapped in such a cute and colorful package and starts out with a lot of shit I wrote when I was a decade younger, some will simply write it off as juvenile or infantilizing, projecting their annoyance at zoomers who tell them to watch The Owl House or whatever onto me due to creative choices I made almost a decade ago. I couldn't possibly have predicted where these trends would go in 2015, or what other pieces of media and internet debates my work would end up being perceived as a response to when I was finally finished. I was simply making something that spoke to me, and, well, I like a lot of cute shit. I do not consider SLARPG to be a "wholesome" or "cozy" game - Melody has multiple ugly emotional breakdowns throughout the story - but some people will inevitably bring their baggage about these trends and how they think there are currently too many “wholesome queer games” with them when looking at my work.
And, yes. The title. I like the title. Many people like the title. Rock Paper Shotgun liked the title. It grabs your attention in a way that something like "Reverie Saga" or whatever (this is not a title I actually considered, just an example) simply would not. But the title does make people assume a lot of things about the game - usually that it's either a porn game or one big joke. Or both! On rare occasion this has even extended to people making very nasty assumptions about not just the game, but me as a person. For these and other reasons I tried to think of a title I liked better, but I never did, and at a certain point it was too late to change. Changing your title tends to be suicide, since getting people just to remember the title of your thing is half the battle in marketing. And so I just had to stick with this title that I thought was funny as a teenager, even if it meant letting people make all sorts of assumptions about me and my work.
I don't know. I guess this is mostly just an RSD thing that I have to work through. (Yes, I need to see a therapist.) Strangers being weird about your work due to factors out of your control is just an inherent part of putting your art out there. I get that. And like I said up top, the response to SLARPG has been extremely positive. Very little negativity has actually been directed my way in the last year. A bunch of people have messaged me to say that it was literally life changing for them, that it was exactly the story they needed at that point in their lives. That's incredible! But the problem I'm getting at here isn't just whether or not people like my game. The problem is that it's stressful working as an independent queer artist when it feels like at any moment someone online could decide that the very personal way I've expressed my relationship with my own identity is Objectively Wrong and try to ruin my life over it.
I just wish more people would accept that queer people are not a monolith, that we don't all have to like the same things, that different stories will speak to different people, and that we don’t have enough of any type of queer fiction right now. We need more of everything! Queer representation is not one-size-fits-all. I'm never gonna watch Love, Simon, but I'm happy for the teenagers who felt validated by it. I would not want it to be turned into something completely different just so that it could cater more to me. I'd say the same thing about Hannibal. I don't need everyone to like my game - I know it's very niche. I just think a lot of queer creators would rest easier at night if more internet users learned the phrase "it's not for me."
Redefining success
Let's try to give all this a more positive spin. What have I learned from this?
Years ago, when I began work on my ill-fated previous project, Andromi, I had a particular vision of what a "successful" indie game looked like. These were games that not only sold well, but had many thoughtful words written about the intricacies of their design, their art direction, their narratives, their characters, whatever it was they excelled at. These were foundational texts. Games like Kentucky Route Zero, The Stanley Parable, Gone Home, Spelunky, Papers Please, Thomas Was Alone, FTL, and Hotline Miami, just to name a few. There was a part of me that was chasing the sort of validation that those games got. Having never released a commercial game of my own, I had no personal bar to clear, only these ideas of success and respect gleaned from the household names of the indie world.
Now, SLARPG has been out for a year. It did pretty well, but it didn't do "indie superstar" well. Part of me is frustrated, unsure how I could possibly hope to do any better. But another part of me is more at peace, and wonders... do I really even want that kind of success?
In hindsight, 20-year-old me was much more concerned with trying to “fit in” with the existing indie scene as I perceived it. I wanted to make something personal, sure, but on some level I also wanted to make something "respectable" that could be a part of that scene. Something I could post about on the TIGSource forums without feeling like I didn't belong. Something that wouldn't scare off the normies too bad. That was the only path to sustainable success that I knew of. And so I watered myself down because I felt like the Real Indies would think my past work was uncool, too cute and girly and silly. SLARPG, on the other hand, was a project that started out as something just for me. The “respectable” game I wanted to make never got made, while my goofy, melodramatic, surreal, colorful, cartoony, sappy, overly-sincere, completely self-indulgent RPG Maker game made it to the finish line and did pretty darn well for itself. It kind of has me reassessing things.
SLARPG isn't one of the Big Fandoms on Tumblr, but the people who love it love it very deeply. Honestly, having millions of eyes on me and a giant fandom full of drama might just stress me out! Look at how high-strung I already am! We didn't get streamed by, like, Jerma or whoever, but we got streamed by a lot of cool people. We don't have any reviews on Metacritic because the press barely knows we exist, but we got a really lovely writeup as part of Gamesline's best of 2022 coverage earlier this year. SLARPG didn't make the kind of money where I could hire a whole team and start a studio, but it did make the kind of money where I can comfortably keep doing what I'm doing. I'm not sure I could ever be a part of that Indie Game Canon as I envisioned it in 2014, but I'm carving out a space with a small but passionate audience of my fellow gay weirdos who get what I'm trying to do and really connect with it.
As a certain fox once said: Maybe that's enough.
...I would still like health insurance, though, so please keep telling your friends to buy SLARPG.
The future
Now, to close out, on to the big question. What's next?
More music from Bee
First off, if you liked Bee's soundtrack for SLARPG, she's already working on another game soundtrack! She's doing the music for Punkitt's Susan Taxpayer, a freeware Wario Land-inspired game about a stressed out office worker made in the SMBX2 engine. I'm real excited for this one, and you can get excited about it too by checking out the newest demo or the demo soundtrack.
(You may also find a familiar character if you go poking around for secrets in the demo. 🙂)
The Hard Mode update
Full transparency: I've made very little progress on Hard Mode due to the aforementioned burnout. I've only really had the energy to put out regular bug fixes. It will happen at some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, but I cannot currently give an estimate of when that will be. This update basically requires rebalancing the entire game and adjusting a lot of enemy behavior, and I wanna make sure I do it right so that Hard Mode is still a good experience and not just a bunch of random one-hit KOs. Your patience is appreciated.
Since I'm already adjusting things throughout the game, the Hard Mode update will also serve as my excuse for a couple gameplay tweaks, and maybe also some tiny additions here and there. Things on the level of, like, "a couple new lore entries" or "a new piece of equipment," for some hypothetical examples. That sort of thing. These will, of course, be accessible regardless of your difficulty setting, as has always been my design ethos for SLARPG.
We are not, on the other hand, planning any sort of major expansions. The game feels pretty complete to me as it is, and I'm mostly ready to move on. Any new content in the Hard Mode update will be more a matter of fine tuning and polishing things, rather than a continuation of the story.
Merch
I would like to do more merch beyond just the physical soundtracks (and the keychain that comes with the soundtracks). Again, I haven't really had the energy this year, so it hasn't happened, but we'll hopefully have a few little things in 2024.
Lingering Patreon stretch goals
I haven't forgotten about my promise to do some pixel art tutorials and a digital instruction booklet for SLARPG, even though Patreon doesn't even do stretch goals anymore. At the risk of becoming a broken record, I will do those when I have the energy. I'd like to make sure I do them right, rather than just churning out something quick to check them off of my to do list.
I'm not really losing any sleep over the fact that the game didn't come with a manual because, honestly, only 0.1% of players would have actually read the manual before playing the game lol. It was always going to be a novelty item.
The next game(s)
This is, of course, the big one that I get asked about a lot. To be absolutely clear: I have not started working on a new game just yet. But there will be more games. I have ideas.
I have several pitches for more games set on Reverie, including many ideas for how to continue the story of the Novas. However, I am not currently planning on working on a "Super Lesbian Animal RPG 2" anytime soon. With how long SLARPG took to make, I'm not eager to jump straight into another big RPG. There's a pretty good chance I'll make that someday, but I just don't have that in me right now. I would, however, be interested in exploring other genres, since I've never particularly seen the SLARPG cast as being inherently tied to the RPG genre.
That being said, the game that I have the most ideas for right now isn't set on Reverie at all, and would be a standalone game completely disconnected from SLARPG. As I give these ideas time to gestate, I'm becoming more and more convinced that this is the next story my heart wants to tell.
This game, which I won't currently name here, would be different from SLARPG in setting, gameplay, and style, but I think that if you liked SLARPG there's a very good chance that you'd like this as well. (Yes, it still has queer furries.) As I envision it now, it would be more squarely focused on just telling a story, with much less involved gameplay than SLARPG. It'd be a bit more mature in tone and lean more into drama, but I do love writing comedy, so it'll probably still have funny parts. I'd also like it to be a lot shorter so that it doesn't take another eight years to make. But I'm still in the ideas phase right now, and everything is subject to change. This thing could also end up getting canceled or sidelined in favor of just doing more with Reverie. I don't really know right now.
This uncertainty is why I won't be formally announcing anything until we have a lot to show and a clear plan for how to proceed. Your patience is appreciated. I hope whatever we make next, it'll be worth the wait.
In the meantime, I'll be busy learning a new engine or two. Mainly Godot, but Gamemaker is now also worth considering since they've (mostly) dropped their subscription fees. It's entirely possible that this learning process could result in me making some very, very small games, just to get the hang of things. Successful indies always tell you to start out making a lot of tiny games, and I still haven't gotten through that obligatory part of my career because my first game turned into a 20-hour behemoth. Who knows. (I said all this at the beginning of the year, too, and then burnout happened. But here's hoping that 2024 works out better.)
Whatever comes next, to everyone who's supported SLARPG: from the bottom of my heart, thank you. Thank you to everyone who's played the game, whether you were waiting for years or only discovered it recently. Thank you to my Patreon supporters, who kept me afloat throughout development. Thank you to Anthony, the love of my life, for creating so many of the characters that give Reverie so much of its charm, and for supporting me every step of the way. Thank you to Bee, who spent countless hours creating the incredible soundtrack that gave the game its heart and soul. Thank you to my mom, who's encouraged my creativity since I was a toddler and always believed in my dreams. Thank you to all of the friends who contributed in any way, big or small, or even just cheered us on. I am only able to do what I do because of all of you. I hope I'm able to keep making things like this for many years to come.
Comments
Truly azul
This was a great read, especially considering I've been starting to get into game dev. The insights you've provided are greatly appreciated. SLARPGs was a game that meant so much to me when I played it, with Melody being a character that helped me figure out so much about myself, so I can't possibly give you enough thanks for creating it. Hope you take some time to recover from burnout, and I wish you luck future endeavors!
Melody ~ Amity System
That was an absolutely fantastic read, thank you for writing all of this Bobby! It was incredibly insightful and I always love hearing your thoughts! SLARPG means the world to me and is more important to me than anything so, thank you from yhe bottom of my heart for this incredibly special and beautiful piece of art. Best of luck with your future works! ^^
