Blog | Adrian Gaudebert

The origin story of Corpus et Spiritus

Adrian — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:00:00 +0200

Welcome to a new story about my studio's next game: Corpus et Spiritus. Today I'm telling you where the game concept came from and how it took form. And we're currently running an open playtest, so read on if you want to have fun with us!

Where did Corpus et Spiritus come from?

Corpus et Spiritus initially started after we finished Dawnmaker. I wanted to make a second game as fast as possible, by reusing as much code from Dawnmaker as I could. That meant I could either make a city builder or a deck builder, essentially. However, a city builder requires that each individual building has its own, unique asset, and that's expensive. Going for a deck builder, especially one that, like Dawnmaker, has no illustration on the cards, means that producing content is a lot cheaper.

So during my vacations in September 2024, I started thinking about what kind of deckbuilder I could make, and settled on exploring the alchemy theme. I thought it was pretty cool, and quite unused as far as I could tell — though there have been a few alchemy games coming out recently. I wanted to make something about the theory of metals, the search for the Philosopher's Stone, turning lead into gold, that sort of things. I didn't want it to be about making potions, as there are already plenty of games doing that on Steam.

Back at home, I started prototyping different versions of the game, using my trusted paper and pens. I tried a mechanic where you could merge cards to fuse their effects, but didn't manage to make that work. For a while metals had a monetary value, and you would sell them to buy cards. It took a few iterations to get to the core of what the game is today: cards that generate metals, metals that go into a machine to produce new cards. That's about where I stopped using paper to prototype, as I wanted the machine to have a complex and random behavior, and that would be a lot easier to prototype with code.

Cards and talismans for one of the first paper prototypes of Corpus et Spiritus. Back in the days it was called "The Great Work".

In terms of lore, for a while the game was about alchemists trying to create the Philosopher's Stone. At first they were participating in a tournament, and the player would compete against bots, aiming each round to be in the top half of the participants — the bottom half being eliminated at the end of the round. Then I changed it to be about a king on the verge of dying, who imprisoned the best alchemist of the kingdom and poisoned them, giving them a pretty good incentive to create the Philosopher's Stone if they wanted to not die. The king getting eternal life was, of course, a simple side-effect.

However all those ideas weren't very compelling enough, mostly because what you were fighting wasn't represented in the game. The tournament pitch wasn't really working, and the notion of poison is hard to show graphically. I wanted to have something that would be physically present in the game, like the Smog in Dawnmaker. Luckily, two popular cultural references came to my aid…

The cultural references of Corpus et Spiritus

The notion of having a little demon that helps you, but also wants to kill you, came from a conversation about the game with friends of mine, who told me about Faust, the famous character from Goethe. In the story, the erudite Faust is quite dissatisfied with his life, and turns to the Devil to gain unlimited knowledge. This became the starting point for the game: you sign a pact with a magical creature because you want knowledge, but that creature is actively trying to suck your body, spirit and soul, which will eventually lead to your death.

The other reference that made this enemy the Homunculus is of course the manga Fullmetal Alchemist. In a flashback, we learn of the origin of the heroes' father, Van Hohenheim: a slave to an alchemist, he became linked to the "little man in the flask" through his blood. That creature taught him alchemy while tricking him to create the Philosopher's Stone, sacrificing his country in the process. That and the manga's "equivalent exchange" rule played a big role in the notion of sacrifice that is heavily present in Corpus et Spiritus: you have a give something up to gain something else.

The third, and biggest influence on the game, is the actual history of alchemy. People have been trying to understand the principles of the world for a very long time, often being completely wrong about it. I find that history fascinating: how people thought about metals before we learned about the structure of matter; how they thought that humans had a body, a spirit and a soul; how everything in the world was either male or female — something I quite deliberately did not put into the game. Add to that the various symbols that alchemists used to represent… things, from metals to planets to elements, that have greatly impacted the graphical assets of the game. If you're familiar with that history, you'll find subtle visual cues in a lot of places.

Time to play(test)!

I hope you enjoyed those little anecdotes about the game! Games take a lot of time to reach their final form. And ours is getting really close to hatching. It is thus time for us to put the game into your hands again! It's time for you to do alchemy!

Corpus et Spiritus' latest version is now available on itch.io. You can play it directly from your browser, right now! Head over to https://arpentor.itch.io/corpus-et-spiritus and click the "Run game" button to get started. There's a tutorial in the game, so if you haven't played before, be sure to hit the "Learn to play" button before starting your first game — it's quite the complex game, trust me, you'll want to learn a few things about it. Also we need to know if that tutorial works, so please do play it.

Play Corpus et Spiritus

After you've played the game, please let us know what you thought! You can do so by filling the survey at the end of each game, by clicking the F8 button anywhere in game, or by joining our Discord server. We are looking forward to your feedback!

Thank you very very much for being part of our community, and we hope you'll enjoy this new version of Corpus et Spiritus.

Oh, and if you haven't done it already, don't forget to…

❤ Wishlist Corpus et Spiritus on Steam ❤

L'état de l'Adrian 2025

Adrian — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 18:00:00 +0100

Avec un bon mois de retard — janvier n'a pas été de tout repos — voici enfin venir mon bilan de l'année 2025. Au programme : la fin (enfin) de Dawnmaker, un nouveau jeu, et c'est à peu près tout, mais c'est déjà beaucoup !

Projets principaux

Arpentor Studio

Mon entreprise — c'est désormais quasiment exclusivement mon entreprise, j'en reparle plus tard — se porte correctement. L'exploitation de notre premier jeu, Dawnmaker, a permis à Arpentor de dégager quelques revenus, que j'ai pu réinvestir dans notre prochain jeu. 2025 a été notre meilleure année en terme de revenus non issus de financements publics : l'entreprise a gagné environ 20k€. Les principaux postes de revenus ont été les ventes de Dawnmaker sur Steam, grâce au travail de l'éditeur Acram Digital, le financement dudit éditeur du portage mobile de Dawnmaker, et quelques missions que j'ai effectuées par-ci par-là. J'ai notamment depuis septembre une activité de mentorat dans une école lyonnaise, Ynov, qui me permet de faire rentrer un peu d'argent de manière régulière.

Cependant, tout cela est très loin de suffire à me payer un salaire décent sur un temps long. Je me suis payé un SMIC pendant quelques mois en fin d'année, grâce à un financement de la Région Auvergne Rhône-Alpes, et j'en suis très content, mais j'ai désormais besoin de trouver une source stable de financements. Il est donc fort probable que mes activités directement liées à la création de jeux vidéo pour Arpentor Studio diminuent pendant l'année 2026.

Le fait marquant de l'année 2025, c'est mon rachat des parts de l'entreprise à Alexis, mon ancien associé. Alexis a toujours une part (sur 10 000), pour qu'Arpentor puisse continuer à lui rembourser ses dettes, mais dans les faits il n'est plus impliqué dans l'entreprise. Je suis donc seul aux commandes du vaisseau désormais !

Dawnmaker

De façon très inhabituelle dans l'industrie du JV, Dawnmaker s'est mieux vendu en 2025 qu'en 2024, année de sa sortie. Normalement, les ventes d'un jeu suivent à peu près la règle des trois tiers : un tiers des ventes la première semaine, un tiers le reste du premier mois, et enfin un tiers sur la première année. Grâce au travail de l'éditeur Acram Digital, qui a repris l'exploitation commerciale du jeu en décembre 2024, les revenus de Dawnmaker ont plus que doublé par rapport à ses quatre premiers mois de vente. Le jeu s'est retrouvé bien positionné dans des festivals qui ont reçu pas mal d'exposition sur Steam, comme le Earth Appreciation Festival ou From Poland With Love. Le jeu a été soldé régulièrement, et a également bénéficié de quelques bundles bien stylés, par exemple avec Carcassonne — l'adaptation numérique du jeu de société du même nom. C'est un peu miraculeux, c'était totalement inattendu, et ça fait du bien aux finances d'Arpentor.

Et puis le gros événement de cette fin d'année, c'est la sortie, enfin, de Dawnmaker sur plateformes mobiles ! Le jeu est disponible depuis le 18 décembre sur les magasins d'Apple et de Google, et tourne bien dessus. Ça a été un long processus, notamment pour Apple — il a fallut que l'éditeur m'envoie du matériel que je n'ai pas, un Mac et un iPhone, puis que j'arrive à créer un compte Apple Developer (ça m'a pris une journée entière, dont plusieurs heures de discussion en ligne avec des employé d'Apple, oui oui… ), et enfin que je trouve mes marques sur cet écosystème bien différent de Linux.

Le budget du portage mobile que j'ai envoyé à l'éditeur s'est avéré très juste. J'avais prévu 3 mois de travail à mi-temps, de janvier à mars, pour faire tout le travail d'adaptation du jeu aux petits écrans tactiles, et j'ai doublé ce temps pour avoir de la marge. Grand bien m'en a fait : j'ai effectivement mis 3 mois pour faire la partie adaptation — c'est une petite fierté de ma part que d'avoir su bien anticiper ça — maiiiiiiiis j'ai bien doublé mon temps de travail sur le reste de l'année pour tout le reste. Il y a eu les correctifs de bug, quelques features spécifiques aux iPhone à développer, toute la partie liée à l'écosystème Apple que j'ai mentionnée plus haut, et puis les nombreux retours des playtests à corriger. Tout ça a en plus impacté la production du prochain jeu, qui a pris beaucoup de retard par rapport à mon plan initial.

Je n'ai pas encore de nombres précis, mais il me semble qu'on a vendu entre 500 et 1000 unités toutes plateformes confondues. C'est toujours ça de pris, mais ça me semble très loin de permettre à l'éditeur de rentrer dans ses frais. Et du coup, on est loin du moment où Arpentor commencera à toucher la majorité des revenus des ventes sur mobile. Mais comme ce portage a été financé par Acram, ce n'est pas Arpentor qui a pris le risque financier, donc ça m'impacte très peu si le jeu n'est pas rentable sur mobile. Je note aussi que j'avais l'espoir que la sortie du jeu sur mobile boost les ventes sur Steam, et ça n'a quasiment pas été le cas, en tout cas de manière très négligeable. Dommage !

Bon, cette fois je pense que je peux le dire : Dawnmaker est terminé ! Je n'envisage pas de faire de mise à jour, et les ventes du jeu ne le justifient pas, donc à moins d'une situation exceptionnelle, je ne travaillerais plus dessus. Au bout de 4 ans, ça fait du bien !

Corpus et Spiritus

Cette année 2025 aura été majoritairement dédiée à mon prochain jeu, Corpus et Spiritus. Si vous avez raté la récente annonce du jeu, voici le topo : c'est un jeu solo de construction de deck sur le thème de l'alchimie. Vous passez un pacte avec un Homoncule, une créature magique, qui va vous guider sur la voie de l'alchimie, mais au prix de votre force vitale. À vous d'utiliser votre atelier pour créer de nouvelles cartes et des talismans magiques, d'optimiser votre deck et de trouver des combinaisons puissantes, afin de devenir plus intelligent que votre dangereux partenaire avant qu'il ne vous tue. Corpus et Spiritus devrait sortir dans l'été sur Steam et itch.io.

Si j'ai eu l'idée initiale et créé les premiers prototypes papiers fin 2024, la préproduction de Corpus et Spiritus a commencé tout début 2025. Pour ce jeu, je me suis associé avec Théo, un illustrateur talentueux qui vient du monde de l'animation et voulait se lancer dans le jeu vidéo. Pendant la première moitié de l'année, je me suis occupé de créer une horizontal slice du jeu, c'est-à-dire une version jouable avec la majorité des systèmes, mais sans aucun graphisme ni quoi que ce soit de joli. Mon seul objectif était de pouvoir jouer au jeu « complet » le plus vite possible. Théo pendant ce temps-là s'est occupé de monter la direction artistique, d'étudier tous les besoins graphiques du jeu : les nombreuses icônes, les diverses parties de l'atelier d'alchimie du joueur, et bien sûr notre bon compagnon l'Homoncule.

Cette préproduction s'est terminée fin juin, et on a enchaîné avec ce qu'on pourrait appeler une période de production, mais qui était en fait une continuation de la préproduction, puisqu'on s'est attaqués à la construction d'une vertical slice. La vertical slice, c'est une version du jeu qui ressemble au jeu final, en termes de qualité globale, de finitions, mais qui n'a qu'une toute petite partie du contenu du jeu. Dans notre cas, comme j'avais construit une horizontal slice avant, il y avait déjà beaucoup de contenu et de systèmes, mais le principe reste le même : il s'agissait de définir nos processus de production et d'intégration du contenu, d'intégrer les assets que Théo a produit, etc. Notamment, on a eu toute une partie où il nous a fallut comprendre comment fabriquer et intégrer les différentes parties animées du jeu. On a utilisé l'outil Spine, que ni Théo ni moi ne maîtrisions, et on a dû essuyer quelques plâtres avant de trouver nos marques.

Depuis fin janvier, nous avons terminé cette phase de vertical slice / production, et nous sommes désormais en post-production. En gros, on ne touche plus aux systèmes du jeu, mais on améliore un peu tout, petite touche par petite touche. On fait des tests, on voit ce qui frustre les joueurs, ce qui n'est pas clair dans l'interface, dans le tutoriel, dans les mécaniques, et on ajuste pour réduire au minimum les frictions. On ajoute des animations qui n'étaient pas prioritaires jusque là, par exemple quand on démarre ou termine une partie. En gros, on fait en sorte que le jeu soit le meilleur possible, en jouant sur un maximum de détails possible.

Globalement, sur Corpus et Spiritus en 2025, j'ai fait beaucoup de programmation, pas mal de Game Design, un peu d'administratif (notamment pour la demande d'aide à la préproduction auprès de la Région AURA), un peu de juridique (pour les contrats avec Théo et François, qui ont travaillé sur le jeu en échange d'un pourcentage des revenus), un peu de gestion de projet et un poil de marketing en décembre, puisque j'ai monté le trailer que vous avez pu voir dans mon précédent billet.

L'objectif initial, annoncé dans mon précédent État de l'Adrian, était de terminer le jeu fin septembre. Ça devait représenter environ 6 mois de travail au total. Comme vous pouvez le constater : c'est un échec ! Mais c'est un moins gros échec que Dawnmaker, puisque le jeu devrait être terminé d'ici deux mois environ. En retirant tout le temps de travail que j'ai dû passer sur le portage mobile de Dawnmaker, je dirais que jusqu'à maintenant j'ai travaillé environ 9 mois sur Corpus et Spiritus. Arrondissons pour dire que d'ici à la sortie, j'aurais travaillé 12 mois au total, et on se trouve avec un temps de dev qui aura seulement doublé, et c'est franchement pas si mal ! Pour référence, Dawnmaker a pris 2 ans et demi au lieu d'un an prévu initialement. Je m'améliore !

Projets secondaires

Voilà une année qui fût bien chiche en projets secondaires. Entre le développement de Corpus et Spiritus et le portage de Dawnmaker sur mobile, j'ai pris très peu de temps pour m'atteler à d'autres jeux, qu'ils soient numériques ou sur papier. J'ai juste bidouillé un petit prototype de jeu incrémental en fin d'année, mais qui n'a pour l'instant rien donné de très concret.

Souls

Mon jeu de cartes en 1v1 est toujours en pause, à mon grand regret. J'ai une nouvelle idée de jeu qui réutiliserait une partie de ses mécaniques, et que j'espère pouvoir prototyper en 2026, donc peut-être que son âme reviendra un peu sur le devant de la scène, à défaut de pouvoir enfin m'y remettre sérieusement.

Blog

Là aussi, cette année est un gros échec. À part mon dernier État de l'Adrian, je n'ai publié qu'un seul billet. Certes, c'est un très gros billet, dans lequel je reviens en détails sur tout ce que j'ai appris en créant Dawnmaker. Certes j'en suis très fier, et j'y ai passé beaucoup de temps. Mais j'aurais aimé écrire plus, parler plus de la création de Corpus et Spiritus, prendre des temps de recul. Je n'ai pas réussi, je vais espérer faire mieux en 2026 !

Kessler Cleanup Program

Le seul prototype que j'ai fait cette année, comme dit précédemment, est celui d'un petit jeu incrémental. Le concept est simple : nettoyer les débris en orbite autour de la Terre — d'où le titre, rapport au syndrome de Kessler — dans un gameplay à la casse-brique. Le jeu se découpe en une partie gameplay, dans laquelle vous envoyez une balle vers les déchets. La balle inflige des dégâts aux déchets, rebondit vers d'autres, les détruits si elle les touche suffisamment de fois. Chaque déchet détruit donne un peu d'argent et des bonus potentiels — plus de dégâts, dupliquer la balle, une explosion qui détruit les déchets adjacents, etc. Une fois que la balle est perdue dans l'espace, le joueur accède à un arbre technologique dans lequel il peut dépenser son argent pour améliorer sa balle, en débloquer d'autres, augmenter les revenus générés par les déchets, etc. C'est une structure classique de jeu incrémental, très inspirée par le récent succès de A Game About Feeding A Black Hole. Mon prototype n'est pas allé très loin, il faudrait que je le reprenne depuis le début dans un vrai moteur de jeu comme Godot pour pouvoir en faire plus.

Mes recommandations de l'année

Et c'est l'heure de mes désormais classiques recommandations culturelles de l'année !

Mon jeu vidéo de l'année

Lauréat : Aethermancer

Je n'ai pas eu d'énorme coup de cœur vidéoludique en 2025. J'ai beaucoup aimé Prey, joué en début d'année, mais je n'ai pas réussi à aller au bout, à cause d'un ventre mou et répétitif au milieu du jeu. Je vais donc vous parler d'un jeu que j'ai été très heureux de découvrir, parce qu'il est assez proche d'une idée que j'ai depuis longtemps : Aethermancer. En gros, c'est un Pokémon mais plus adulte, plus sombre, avec une structure de roguelike et un système de combat bien plus intéressant que celui de son modèle. Le jeu est en early access, son contenu est encore très chiche, mais ses animations en pixel art sont très chouettes. En gros, on va se balader dans des petits niveaux, dans lesquels se trouvent des monstres qu'on va combattre et capturer pour se monter une équipe de trois monstres. À chaque fin de niveau, on enchaîne sur nouveau niveau parmi trois, chacun avec un événement ou personnage spécial, jusqu'à atteindre un boss, puis recommencer dans un biome différent.

Ce que le jeu réussi vraiment bien, je trouve, c'est son système de combat. Chaque monstre a un certain nombre d'attaques, mais chaque attaque demande, pour être lancée, de dépenser des gemmes qui correspondent à quatre éléments différents. On gagne un peu de ces gemmes au début de chaque tour, ou bien en utilisant l'attaque de base de ses montres : celle-ci inflige très peu de dégât, mais génère des gemmes supplémentaires, qu'on pourra utiliser immédiatement pour lancer une meilleure attaque avec un autre monstre. S'ajoutent à ça des mécaniques variées de passifs, d'effets déclenchés et de synergies possibles entre les monstres qui donnent tout son sel au côté roguelike.

Mon jeu de plateau de l'année

Lauréat : Sky Team

Sky Team est un jeu coopératif pour deux joueurs dans lequel il faut faire atterrir un avion. Et ce jeu m'a bluffé : ses mécaniques sont extrêmement simple, mais tout s'imbrique parfaitement pour créer un véritable challenge très agréable à jouer. Chaque joueur joue soit le pilote soit le copilote, et à chaque manche du jeu, on lance en secret quatre dés à 6 faces. Ensuite, chacun son tour, on va poser un dé sur l'un des différents composants de l'avion : axe, réacteurs, volets, freins… Avec évidemment tout un tas de conséquences en fonction des dés que les deux joueurs auront posés. Si l'avion va trop vite, on se crash, si les freins ne sont pas déployés au moment de l'atterrissage, on se crash, si l'avion penche trop à droite ou à gauche, on se crash… Et bien sûr il y a de nombreuses pistes différentes, représentant les aéroports du monde entier, ainsi que des modules supplémentaires qui viennent pimenter tout ça. C'est un très gros coup de cœur, on y a beaucoup joué avec ma compagne et on y a pris beaucoup de plaisir !

Ma BD de l'année

Lauréat : Les Navigateurs (de Serge Lehman et Stéphane De Caneva)

Voilà une BD dont je n'attendais pas grand chose, que j'ai prise parce qu'elle était dans les tops de 2024, mais qui m'a mis une belle claque ! Dans Les Navigateurs, on suit deux personnages qui retrouvent une amie d'enfance, pour la reperdre quelques jours seulement après, dans des circonstances trèèèès étranges. S'ensuit une enquête sur une peinture qui change, des légendes urbaines, et la découverte d'un monde parallèle dont nous protègent depuis toujours les fameux « Navigateurs ». C'est difficile de décrire plus que ça la BD sans divulgâcher son contenu, mais je vous la recommande chaudement, tant pour son dessin parfaitement maîtrisé que pour son histoire qui est excellente.

Mon livre de l'année

Lauréat : The Broken Earth trilogy (de NK Jemisin, Les livres de la Terre fracturée en français)

Une recommandation notamment de l'ami nical, et de loin ce que j'ai lu de mieux en 2025. C'est une trilogie (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate et The Stone Sky) qui se déroule sur un monde à la géologie très instable et régulièrement frappé par des catastrophes climatiques, appelées les cinquièmes saisons. L'histoire débute quand survient la plus terrible de ces saisons, celle qui va décimer l'humanité pour de bon. On y suit les aventures de plusieurs orogènes, des personnes aux pouvoirs magiques leur permettant de contrôler, dans une certaine mesure, l'énergie cinétique de la planète. En bien ou en mal : s'ils sont capables d'atténuer des tremblements de terre et des explosions volcaniques, ils sont aussi capables de les déclencher. On suit donc ces personnages dans une société qui les déteste, tue les enfants qui sont découverts en ayant ces pouvoirs, mais dépend d'eux pour leur survie, dans un contexte de fin du monde. L'univers est d'une profondeur incroyable, avec notamment des traces de civilisations disparues qui ont laissé de gigantesques obélisques flottant dans les airs. Les enjeux montent au fur et à mesure de la lecture, le système de magie est une merveille, le monde a une histoire qui se dévoile doucement, bref c'est vraiment tout ce que j'aime.

Conclusions sur l'année 2025

Voilà encore une année qui se conclut en me laissant un goût bizarre. Pourtant, je suis loin d'avoir chômé : j'ai porté Dawnmaker sur mobile, j'ai créé un jeu de A à, disons, W. Ce sont deux énormes chantiers, mais je crois que je suis frustré de n'avoir pas pris le temps d'explorer d'autres projets secondaires. Ce sont des temps de respiration qui me font du bien, et qui, notamment au moment du bilan, me donnent la sensation d'avoir fait plus de choses. C'est peut-être un mal pour un bien, parce que j'ai tout de même réussi à faire Corpus et Spiritus en bien moins de temps que Dawnmaker ne m'a pris. Ça n'aurait sûrement pas été le cas si j'avais dédié du temps à d'autres activités secondaires.

Par contre, ma situation financière est désormais critique. Les quelques entrées d'argent en 2025 m'ont permis de tenir jusque là, mais ça ne suffira plus dans les mois à venir. Je suis donc en train de chercher une source de revenus plus stable — comprendre, un boulot à temps plein — ce qui va forcément impacter mon activité en 2026. Il est possible que mon prochain activité à venir soit très différente de ces 6 dernières années. On en reparle dans un an ! :)

Corpus et Spiritus is coming to Steam

Adrian — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:00:00 +0100

I am happy and proud to let you know that Corpus et Spiritus is now officially announced! As of today, it has a public Steam page and a ✨ trailer ✨. Check it out:

Corpus et Spiritus is a roguelite deckbuilder without combat. You signed a pact with a Homunculus: it will guide you on the path of alchemy, but at the cost of your life force. Use your workshop to craft new cards, transmute metals and discover magical talismans. Become smarter than your dangerous partner and break out of the pact before it kills you!

Did you like it? If so…

❤️ Wishlist the game on Steam right now! ❤️

If you didn't like it, well you can still wishlist it, that doesn't hurt. But please do tell us what you didn't like, so we can improve for the next trailer.

What's next?

Now that the official announcement is made, the next step is to publish the demo of the game on Steam. That should happen sometime next week. We'll then aim to be part of the Steam Next Fest — Steam's celebration of demos — at the end of February. The release of the game is planned for early May, in a just a few months.

Of course, we'll be improving the game until then. We've had some great feedback in a local playtest 2 weeks ago, and I'm looking forward to getting even more with the demo on Steam. We are now in the post-production phase of the game, where we'll be polishing as much of the game as we can, to make it shiny, to remove friction and bugs, etc. This phase involves a lot of smaller things to do, the gameplay will ideally not change at all. We'll keep running playtests of the full game too, but not on itch.io as I plan to replace the current (old) version of the game with its demo. Everyone subscribed to our newsletter or hanging out in our discord server will be invited to take part in those playtests. Join us now to be sure to get in!

In the meantime, be sure to wishlist Corpus et Spiritus and tell your friends about it. It means a lot to us!

3 years of intense learning - The Dawnmaker Post-mortem

Adrian — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 14:00:00 +0100

It's been 3 years since I started working on Dawnmaker full-time with Alexis. The creation of our first commercial game coincided with the creation of Arpentor Studio, our company. I've shared a lot of insights along the way on this blog, from how we made our first market research (which was incredibly wrong) to how much we made with our game (look at the difference between the two, it's… interesting). I wrote a pretty big piece were I explained how we built Arpentor Studio. I wrote a dozen smaller posts about the development of Dawnmaker. And I shared a bunch of my feelings, mistakes and successes in my yearly State of the Adrian posts (in French only, sorry).

But today, I want to take a step back and give a good look at these last 3 years. It's time for the Dawnmaker post-mortem, where I'm going to share what I believe we did well, what we did wrong, and what I've learned along the way. Because Dawnmaker and Arpentor Studio are so intertwined, I'm inevitably going to talk about the studio as well, but I think it makes sense. Let's get started!

What we did

Let's get some context first. Dawnmaker is a solo strategy game, mixing city building and deckbuilding to create a board game-like experience. It was released in July 2024 on Steam and itch.io. The team consisted of 2 full-time people, with occasional help from freelancers. My associate Alexis took care of everything related to graphics, and I did the programming and game design of the game. If you're interested in how much the game sold, I wrote a blog post about this: 18 days of selling Dawnmaker.

I created the very first prototype of what would become Dawnmaker back in the summer of 2021, but we only started working on the game full-time in December of that year. We joined a local incubator in 2022, which kind of shook our plans: we spent a significant portion of our time working on administrative things around the game, like making pitch decks and funding briefs. We had to create a company earlier than we had planned to ask for public funding. So in 2022 we only spent about half our time actually working on developing the game. In 2023, after having been rejected our main source of funding, we shrunk down our ambitions and focused on just making the game. We still spent time to improve our pitch deck and contacted some publishers, but never managed to secure a deal. In early 2024, we decided to self-publish, started our Steam page and worked on promoting the game while polishing what we had.

Because we never found a publisher, we never had the money to do the production phase of Dawnmaker. That means the game shipped with about half the content we wanted it to have. Here are my definitions of the different phases of a game project, as I'll refer to them later on in this article:

Ideation — The phase where we are defining the key concepts of the game we want to make. There's some early prototyping there, as well as research. The goal is to have a clear picture of what we want to build.
Pre-production — The phase where we validate what the core of the game is, that it is fun, and that we will be able to actually deliver it. It can be cut down into three steps: prototyping, pre-production and vertical slice. In prototyping we validate the vision of the game. In pre-production (yes, it's the same name as the phase, but that's what I was taught) we build our production pipeline. During the vertical slice, we validate that the pipeline works and finalize the main systems of the game.
Production — The phase where we build the content of the game. This phase is supposed to be one that can be planned very precisely, because the pre-production has supposedly removed almost all the unknowns.
Post-production — The phase where we polish our game and take it through the finish line.

Now that you have some context, let's get into the meat of this article!

What we did right

Let's start this post-mortem on a positive note, and list the things that I believe we did well. First and foremost, we actually shipped a game! Each game that comes out is a little miracle, and we succeeded there. We kept our vision, we pushed it as far as we could, and we did not give up. Bravo us!

Good game quality

What's more, our game has been very well received: at the time of writing, we have a 93% positive review ratio on Steam, from 103 reviews. I am of course stoked that Dawnmaker was liked by that many reviewers. I think there are 3 main reasons why we had such positive reviews (other than the game being decently fun, of course):

We kept a demo up at all times, even after the release, meaning that tentative customers could give it a try before buying. If they didn't like the demo, they didn't buy the game — not good for us — but then they were not disappointed by a product they bought — good for them and for our reviews!
We were speaking to a very small niche, but provided something that was good for them. The niche is a weird intersection of deckbuilding, city building and board game fans. It was incredibly difficult to find and talk to, probably because it is, as I said, very small, but we made something that worked very well for those players.
We under-priced the game aggressively (at $9.99) to lower the players' expectations. That actually transpired in the reviews, where a few people mentioned that the game had flaws, but they tolerated them because of the price tag. (Note: the game has since been moved up to a $14.99 price point by our new publisher.)

Of course, had the game been bad, we would not have had those reviews at all. So it goes to say that Dawnmaker is a fine game. For all its flaws, it is fun to play. I've played it a lot — as I guess do all game creators with their creation — and it took me a while to get bored with it. The median playtime on Steam is 3 hours and 23 minutes, with an average playtime of 8 hours and 17 minutes. Here's a stat that blows my mind: at the time of writing, 175 people (about 10% of our players) have played Dawnmaker for more than 20 hours. At least 15 people played it for more than 50 hours. I know this is far from the life-devouring monsters that are out there, like Civilization, Skyrim, Minecraft or GTA, but for our humble game and for me, that's incredible to think about.

So, we made a fun game. I think we succeeded there by just spending a lot of time in pre-production. Truth be told, we spent about 2 years in that phase, only 6 months in post-production, and we did not really do a real production phase. For 2 years, we were testing the game and making deep changes to its core, iterating until we found the best version of this game we could. Mind you, 2 years was way too long a time, and I'll get back to that in the failures section. But I believe the reason why Dawnmaker was enjoyed by our players is because we took that time to improve it.

Lesson learned

Make good games?

The art of the game was also well received, and here again I think time was the key factor. It took a long time to land on the final art direction. There was a point where the game had a 3D board, and it was… not good. I think one of our major successes, from a production point of view, was to pivot into a 2D board. That simplified a lot of things in terms of programming, of performance, and made us land on that much, much better art style. It took a long time but we got there.

The first prototype of Dawnmaker, which had sound for some reason…

There's one last aspect that I think mattered in the success of the game, and for which I am particularly proud: the game had very few bugs upon release, and none were blocking. I've achieved that by prioritizing bug fixing at all times during the development of the game. I consider that at any point in time, and with very few exceptions, fixing a known bug is higher priority than anything else. Of course this is easier done when there is a single programmer, who knows the entire code base, but I'm convinced that, if you want to ship bug-free products, bug fixing must not be an afterthought, a thing that you do in post-production. If you keep a bug-free game at all times during development, chances are very high that you'll ship a bug-free game!

Lesson learned

Keeping track of bugs and fixing them as early as possible makes your life easier when you're nearing release, because you don't have to spend time chasing bugs in code that you wrote months or years before. Always reserve time for bug fixing in your planning!

Custom tooling

Speaking of programming, a noticeable part of my time was spent creating a custom tool to handle the game's data. Because we're using a custom tech stack, and not a generic game engine, we did not have access to pre-made tooling. But, since I was in control of the full code of the game, I have been able to create a tool that I'm very happy with.

First a little bit of context: Dawnmaker is coded with Web technologies. What it means is that it's essentially a website, or more specifically, a web app. Dawnmaker runs in a browser. Heck, for most of the development of the game, we did our playtests in browsers! That was super convenient: you want someone to test your game? They can open their favorite browser to the URL of the game, and tada, they can play! No need to download or install anything, no need to worry about updates, they always have the latest version of the game there.

Because our game is web-based, I was able to create a content editor, also web-based, that could run the game. So we have this editor that is a convenient way to edit a database, where all the data about Dawnmaker sits. The cool thing is that, when one of us would make a change to the data, we could click a button right there in the editor, and immediately start playing the game with the changes we just made. No need to download data, build locally, or such cumbersome steps. One click, and you're in the game, with all the debug tools and conveniences you need. Another click, and you're back to the editor, ready to make further changes.

Screenshot of the Dawnmaker content editor

That tool evolved over time to also handle the graphical assets related to our buildings. Alexis was able to upload, for each building, its illustration and all the elements composing its tile. I added a spritesheet system that could be used in buildings as animations, with controls to order layers, scale and position elements, and even change the tint of sprites.

Lesson learned

Tooling is an investment that can pay double: it makes you and your team go faster, and can be reused in future projects. Do not make tools for the sake of making tools of course. Do it only when you know that it will save you time in the end. But if you're smart about it, it can really pay off in the long run.

Long-term company strategy

There's one last thing I believe we did well, that I want to discuss, and it's related to our company strategy. Very early on in the creation of Arpentor Studio, we thought about our long-term strategy: what does our road to success look like? Where do we want to be in 5 to 10 years? Our answer was that we wanted to be known for making strategy games (sorry, lots of strategies in this paragraph) that were deep, both in mechanics and meaning. The end game would be to be able to realistically be making my dream competitive card game — something akin to Magic: the Gathering, Hearthstone or Legends of Runeterra.

What we did well is that we did not start by the end, but instead drafted a plan to gather experience, knowledge and money, to put ourselves in a place where we would be confident about launching such an ambitious project. We aimed to start by making a solo game, to avoid the huge complexities of handling multiplayer. We aimed to make a simple strategy game, too, but there we missed our goal, for the game we made was way too original and complex. But still, we managed to stay on track: no multiplayer, simple 2D (even though we went 3D for half a year), and mechanics that were not as heavy as they could have been.

We failed on the execution of the plan, and I'll expand on that later in this post, but we did take the time to make a plan and that's a big success in my opinion.

Lesson learned

Keep things as simple as possible for your first games! We humans have a tendency to make things more complex as we go, increasing the scope, adding cool features and so on. That can be a real problem down the line if you're trying to build a sustainable business. Set yourself some hard constraints early on (for example, no 3D, no narration, no NPCs, etc. ) and keep to them to make sure you can finish your game in a timely manner.

What we did wrong

It's good to recognize your successes, so that you can repeat them, but it's even more important to take a good look at your failures, so that you can avoid repeating them. We made a lot of mistakes over these past 3 years, both related to Dawnmaker and to Arpentor Studio. I'll start by focusing on the game's production, then move on to the game itself to finally discuss company-related mistakes.

Production mistakes

Scope creep aka "the Nemesis of Game Devs"

The scope of Dawnmaker exploded during its development. It was initially supposed to be a game that we wanted to make in about a year. We ended up working on it for more than two years and a half instead! There are several reasons why the scope got so out-of-control.

Dawnmaker in July 2022 — called "Cities of Heksiga" at the time

The first reason is that we were not strict enough in setting deadlines and respecting them. During our (long) preproduction phase, we would work on an iteration of the game, then test it, then realize that it wasn't as good as we wanted it to be, and thus start another iteration. We did this for… a year and a half? Of course, working on a game instead of smaller prototypes didn't help in reaching the right conclusions faster. But we also failed in having a long-term planning, with hard dates for key milestones of the game's development. We were thinking that it was fine, that the game would be better if we spent more time on it. That is definitely true. What we did not account for was that it would not sell significantly better by working more. I'll get back to that when discussing the company strategy.

Lesson learned

Setting deadlines and respecting them is one of the key abilities to master for shipping games and making money with them. Create a budget and assign delivery dates to key milestones. Revisit these often, to make sure you're on track. If not, you need to reassess your situation as soon as possible. Cut the scope of your work or extend your deadlines, but make sure you adapt the budget and that you have a good understanding of the consequences of making those changes.

The second reason the scope exploded is that we were lured into thinking that getting money was easy, especially public funding, and that we should ask for as much money as we could. To do that, we had to increase the scope of what we were presenting, in the hope that we would receive big money, which would enable other sources of money, and allow us to make a bigger game. The problem we faced was that we shifted our actual work to that new plan, that bigger scope, long before we knew if we would get the money or not. And so instead of working on a 1-year production, insidiously we found ourselves working on a 2 to 3-year production. And then of course, we did not get the money we asked for, and were on a track that required a few hundred thousands of euros to fund, with just our personal savings to do it.

I think the trick here is to have two different plans for two different games. Their core is the same, but one is the game that you can realistically make without any sort of funding, and the other is what you could do if you were to receive the money. But, we should never start working on the "dream" game until the money is on our bank account. I think that's a terribly difficult thing to do — at least it was for me — and a big trap of starting a game production that relies on external funding.

Lesson learned

Never spend money you do not have. Never start down a path until you're sure you will be able to execute it entirely.

The third reason why the scope got out of control is a bit of a consequence of the first two: we saw our game bigger than it ended up being, and did not focus enough on the strength of our core gameplay. We were convinced that we needed to have a meta-progression, a game outside the game, and struggled a lot to figure out what that should be. And as I discussed in the previous section, I think we failed to do it: our meta-progression is too shallow and doesn't improve the core of the game.

Looking back, I remember conversations we had were we justified the need for this work with the scope of the game, with the price we wanted to sell the game for, and thus with the expectations of our future players. The reasoning was, this is a $20 game, players will expect a lot of replayability, so we need to have a meta-progression that would enable it. I think that was a valid line of thought, if only we were actually making a $20 game. In the end, Dawnmaker was sold for $10. Had we realigned earlier, had we taken a real step back after we realized that we were not getting any significant funding, maybe we would have seen this. For a $10 game, we did not need such a complex meta-progression system. We could have focused more on developing the core of the game, building more content and gameplay systems, and landed on a much simpler progression.

Lesson learned

Things change during the lifetime of a game. Take a step back regularly to ask yourself if the assumptions you made earlier are still valid today.

Prototyping the wrong way

I mentioned earlier that we spent a lot of time in preproduction, working on finding the best version of the core gameplay of our game. I said it was a good thing, but it's also a bad one because it took us way too long to find it. And the reason is simple: we did prototyping wrong.

Dawnmaker in January 2023

The goal of prototyping is to answer one or a few questions as fast as possible. In order to do that, you need to focus on building just what you need to answer your question, and nothing else. If you start putting actual art in your gameplay prototype, or gameplay in your art prototype, then you're not making a prototype: you're making a game. That's what we did. Too early we started working on adding art to our gameplay prototype. Our first recorded prototype, which we did in Godot, had some art in it. Basic one, sure, but art anyway. The time it took to integrate the art into that prototype is time that was not spent answering the main question the prototype was supposed to answer — at that time: was the core gameplay loop fun?

It might seem inconsequential in a small prototype, but that cost quickly adds up. You're not as agile as you would be if you focused on only one thing. You're solving issues related to your assets instead of focusing on gameplay. And then you're a bit disappointed because it doesn't look too great so you start spending time improving the art. Really quickly you end up building a small game, instead of building a small prototype. Our first prototype even had sound! What the hell? Why did we put sound in a prototype that was crap, and was meant to help us figure out that the gameplay was crap?

Lesson learned

Make your prototypes as small and as focused as possible. Do not mix gameplay and art prototypes. Make sure each prototype answers one question. Prototype as many things as possible before moving on to preproduction.

Not playing to our strengths

I mentioned earlier that we had a 3D board in the game for a few months. Going 3D was a mistake that cost us a lot of time, because I had to program the whole thing, in an environment that had little tools and conveniences — we were not using an engine like Godot or Unity. And I was not good at 3D, I had never worked on a 3D game before, so I had a learn a lot in order to do something functional. The end result was something that worked, but wasn't very pleasant to look at. It had performance issues on my computer, it had bugs that I had no clue how to debug. We ended up ditching the whole 3D board after a lot of discussions and conflicts. The ultimate nail in the coffin came from a publisher who had been shown the game, and who asked: "what is the added value of 3D for this game?" Being unable to give a satisfying answer, we moved back to a 2D board, and were much better for it.

Dawnmaker in June 2023, with a 3D board

So my question is: why did we go 3D for that period of time? I think there were two reasons working together to send us in that trap. The first one is that we did not assess our strengths and weaknesses enough. Alexis's strength was making 3D art, while I had no experience in implementing 3D in a game, and we knew it, but we did not weight those enough. The second reason is that we did not know enough about our tools to figure out that we could find a good compromise. See, we thought that we could either go 3D and build everything in 3D, from building models in blender to integrating on a 3D board in the game, or we could go 2D, which would simplify my work but would force Alexis to draw sprites by hand.

What we figured out later on was that there were tools that allowed Alexis to work in 3D, creating models and animations in blender, but export everything for a 2D environment very easily. There was a way to have the best of both worlds, exploiting our strengths without requiring us to learn something new and complex — which we definitely did not want to do for our first commercial game. Our mistake was to not take the time to research that, to find that compromise.

Lesson learned

Research the tools at your disposal, and always look for the most efficient way to do things. Play to the strengths of your team, especially for your first games.

Building a vertical slice instead of a horizontal one

We struggled a lot to figure out what our vertical slice should be. How could we prove that our game was viable to a potential investor? That's what the vertical slice is supposed to do, by providing a "slice" of your game that is representative of the final product you intend to build. It's supposed to have a small subset of your content, like a level, with a very high level of polish. How do you do that for a game that is systemic in nature? How do you build the equivalent of a "level" of a game like Dawnmaker?

We did not find a proper answer to this question. We were constantly juggling priorities between adding systems, because we needed to prove that the game worked and was fun, and adding signs, feedback and juice, because we believed we had to show what the final product would look and feel like. We were basically building the entire game, instead of just a slice of it. This was in part because we had basically no credentials to our name, as Dawnmaker was our first real game, and feared publishers would have trouble trusting that we would be able to execute the "icing" part of the game. I still think that's a real problem, and the only solution that I see is to not try to go for funding for your first games. But I'll talk more about that in the Company strategy section below.

Dawnmaker in November 2023

However, I recently came across the concept of horizontal slice, as opposed to the vertical slice, and that blew my mind. The idea is, instead of building a small piece of your game with final quality, to build almost all of the base layers of the game. So, you would build all the systems, a good chunk of the content, everything that is required to show that the gameplay works and is fun. Without working on the game's feel, its signs and feedback, a tutorial, and so. No icing on the cake, just the meat of it. (Meat in a cake? Yeah, that sounds weird. Or British, I don't know.) The goal of the horizontal slice is to prove that the game as a whole works, that all the systems fit together in harmony, and that the game is fun.

I believe that this is a much better model for a game like Dawnmaker. A game like Mario is fun because it has great controls, pretty assets and funny situations. That's what you prove with a vertical slice. But take a game like Balatro. It is fun because it has reached a balance between all the systems, because it has enough depth to provide a nearly-endless replayability. Controls, feedback and juice are still important of course, but they are not the core of the game, and thus when building such a game, one should not focus on those aspects, but on the systems. We should have done the same with Dawnmaker, and I'll be aiming for a horizontal slice with my next strategy game for sure.

Lesson learned

Different types of games require different processes. Find the process that best serves the development of yours. If you're making some sort of systemic game, maybe building a horizontal slice is a better tool than going for the commonly used vertical slice?

Game weaknesses

Let's now talk about the game itself. Dawnmaker received really good reviews, but I still believe it is lacking in many ways. There are many problems with the gameplay: it lacks some form of adjustable difficulty, to make it a better challenge for a bigger range of players. It lacks a more rewarding and engaging meta-progression. And of course it lacks content, as we never actually did our production phase.

Weak meta-progression

As I wrote earlier, I am very happy about the core loop of Dawnmaker. However, I think we failed big with its meta-progression. We decided to make it a roguelike, meaning that there is no progression between runs. You always start a run from the same state. Many players disliked that, and I now understand why, and why roguelites have gained in popularity a lot.

I recently read an article by Chris Zukowski where he discusses the kind of difficulty that Steam players like. I agree with his analysis and his concept of the "Easy-Hard-Easy (but variable)" difficulty, as I think that's part of a lot of the big successes on Steam these last few years. To summarize (read the article for more details), players like to have an easy micro-loop (the core actions of the game, what you do during one turn), a hard macro-loop (the medium-term goals, in our case, getting enough Eclairium to level up before running out of Luminoil), and on top of that, a meta-progression that they have a lot of control over, and that allows them to adjust the difficulty of the challenge. An example I like a lot is Hades and its Mirror of Night: playing the game is easy, controls are great, but winning a run is very hard. However, by choosing to grind darkness and using it to unlock certain upgrades in the mirror, you get to make the challenge a lot easier. But someone else might decide to not grind darkness, or not spend, and play with a much greater challenge. The player has a lot of control over the difficulty of the game.

Dawnmaker's world map

I think this is the biggest miss of Dawnmaker in terms of gameplay. Players cannot adjust the difficulty of the game to their tastes, which has been frustrating for a lot of them. Some complained it was way too hard while others have found the game too easy and would have enjoyed more challenge. All of them would have enjoyed the game a lot more had they had a way to control the challenge one way or another. Our mistake was to have some progression inside a run, but not outside. A player can grow stronger during a run, improving their decks or starting resources, but when they lose a run they have to start from scratch again. A player who struggles with the challenge has no way to smooth the difficulty, they have to work and learn how to play better. The "git gud" philosophy might work in some genres, but evidently it didn't fit with the audience of Dawnmaker.

This is not something that would have been easy to add though. I think it's something that needs to be thought about quite early in the process, as it impacts the core gameplay a lot. We tried to add meta-progression to our game too late in the process, and that's a reason we failed: it was too difficult to add good progression without impacting the careful balance of the core gameplay, and having to profoundly rework it.

Lesson learned

Offering an adaptative challenge is important for Steam players, and meta-progression is a good tool to do that. But it needs to be anticipated relatively early, as it is tightly tied to your core gameplay.

Lack of a strong fantasy

I believe the biggest cause for Dawnmaker's financial failure is that it lacks a strong fantasy. That gave us a lot of trouble, mostly in trying to sell the game to players. Presenting it as a "city building meets deckbuilding" is not a fantasy, it's genres. We tried to put forth the "combo" gameplay, telling that cards and buildings combine to create powerful effects, but as I just wrote, that's gameplay and not a fantasy. Our fantasy was to "bring life back to a dead world", but that's not nearly strong enough: it's not surprising nor exciting.

Dawnmaker in February 2024

In hindsight, I believe we missed a huge opportunity in making the zeppelin our main fantasy. It's something that's not often seen in games, it's a great figure for the ambiance of the game, and I think it would have helped create a better meta-progression. We have an "Airship" view in the game, where players can improve their starting state for the next region they're going to explore, but it's a very basic UI. There was potential to make something more exciting there.

The reason for this failure is that we started this project with mechanics and not with the fantasy. We spent a long time figuring out what our core gameplay would be, testing it until it was fun. And only then did we ask ourselves what the fantasy should be. It turns out that putting a fantasy and a theme on top of gameplay is not easy. I don't mean to say it's impossible, some have successfully done it, but I believe it is much harder than starting with an exciting fantasy and building gameplay on top of it.

Lesson learned

Marketing starts day 1 of the creation of a game. The 2 key elements that sell your game are the genre(s) of the game, and its fantasy or hook. Do not neglect those if you want to make money with your game.

This mistake was in part caused by me being focused primarily on mechanics as a game designer. I often start a project with a gameplay idea, a gimmick or a genre, but rarely with a theme, emotion or fantasy. It's not a problem to start with mechanics, of course. But the fantasy is what sells the game. My goal for my next games, as a designer, is to work on finding a strong fantasy that fits my mechanics much earlier in the process, and build on it instead of trying to shove it into an advanced core loop.

Company strategy

Oooo boy did we make mistakes on a company level. By that I mean, with managing our money. We messed up pretty bad — though seeing stories that pop up regularly on some gamedev subreddits, it could have been way worse. Doesn't mean there aren't lessons to be learned here, so let's dive in!

Hiring too soon, too quick

Managing money is difficult! Or at least, we've not been very good at it. We made the mistake of spending money at the wrong time or for the wrong things several times. That mainly happened because we had too much trust in the future, in the fact that we would find money easily, either by selling our game or by getting public money or investors. If we did get some public funding, that was not nearly enough to cover what we spent, and so Dawnmaker was mostly paid for by our personal savings.

The biggest misplacement of money we made was to poorly hire people. We made two different mistakes here: on one occasion, we hired someone without properly testing that person and making sure they would fit our team and project. On the other, we hired someone only to realize when they started that we did not have work to give them, because we were way too early in the game's development. Both recruitments ended up costing us a significant amount of money while bring very little value to the game or the company.

But those failed recruitments had another bad consequence: we hurt people in the process. Our inexperience has been a source of pain for human beings who chose to trust us. That is a terrible feeling for me. I don't know what more to write about this, other than I think I've learned and I hope I won't be hurting others in the future. I'll do my best anyway.

Lesson learned

Hiring is freaking hard. Do not rush it. It's better to not hire than to hire the wrong person.

Too much investment into our first game

I've talked about it already in previous sections, but the biggest strategic mistake on Dawnmaker was to spend so much time on it. Making games is hard, making games that sell is even harder, and there's an incredible amount of luck involved there. Of course, the better your game, the higher your chances. But making good games requires experience. Investing 2.5 years into our first commercial game was way too risky: the more time we spent on the game, the more money it needed to make out, and I don't believe a game's revenue scales with the time invested in it.

Side note: we made a game before Dawnmaker, called Phytomancer — it's available on itch.io for 3€ — but because it had no commercial ambition, I don't think it counts much on the key areas of making games that sell.

Here are facts:

Dawnmaker cost us about 320k€ to make — read my in-depth article about Dawnmaker's real cost for more details — and only made us about 8k€ in net revenue. That is a financial catastrophe, only possible because we invested a lot of our time and personal savings, and we benefited from some French social welfare.
Most indie studios close after they release their first game. It's unclear what the exact causes are, but from personal experience, I bet it's in big part because those companies invest too much in there first game and have nothing left when it comes to making the second one — either money or energy. We tend to burn cash and ourselves out.
And there's an economic context too: investments in games and game companies have slowed down to a trickle the past couple years, and they don't seem to be going back up soon. Games are very expensive to make, and the actors that used to pay for their production (publishers, investors) are not playing that role anymore.

Considering this, I strongly believe that today, investing several years into making your first game is not a valid company strategy. It's engaging in an act of faith. And a business should not run on faith. What pains me is that we knew this when we started Arpentor Studio, and we wanted to make Dawnmaker in about a year. But we lacked the discipline to actually keep that deadline, and we lost ourselves in the process. We got heavily side-tracked by thinking we could get some funding, by growing our scope to ask for more money, etc. We didn't start the project with a clear objective, with a strict deadline. So we kept delaying and delaying. We had the comfort of having decent money reserves. We never thought about what would happen after releasing Dawnmaker, never asked ourselves what our situation would be if the game took 3 years to release and didn't make any money. We should have.

Lesson learned

Start by making small games! Learn, experiment, grow, then go for bigger games when you're in a better position to succeed.

Here are my arguments for making several small games instead of investing too much into a single bigger game. Note that these are targeted to folks trying to create a games studio, to make a business of selling games. If your goal is to create your dream game, or if you're in it for the art but don't care about the money, this likely does not apply to you.

By releasing more games, you gain a lot of key experience in the business of making games that sell. You receive more player feedback. You have the opportunity to try more things. You learn the tricks of the platform(s) you're selling on — Steam is hard!
By releasing more games, you give yourself more chances to break out, to hit that magic moment when a game finds its audience, because it arrives at the right moment, in the right place. (For more on this, I highly recommend this article by Ryan Rigney: Nobody Knows If Your Game Will Pop Off, where the authors talks about ways of predicting a hit and the correlation between the number of hits and the number of works produced.)
By releasing more games, you build yourself a back catalog. Games sell more on their first day, week or month, for sure, but that doesn't mean they stop selling afterwards. Games on Steam keep generating revenue for a long time, even if a small one. And a small revenue is infinitely better than no revenue at all. And small revenues can pile up to make, who knows, a decent revenue?
By releasing more games, you grow your audience. Each game is a way to reach new people and bring them to your following — be it through a newsletter, a discord server or your social networks. The bigger your audience, the higher your chances of selling your next game.
By releasing more games, you build your credibility as a game developer. When you go to an investor to show them your incredible new idea, you will make a much better impression if you have already released 5 games on Steam. You prove to them that you know how to finish a game.

Keep in mind that making small games is really, really hard. It requires a lot of discipline and planning. This is where we failed: we wanted to make our game in one year, but never planned that time. We never wrote down what our deadline was, never budgeted that year into milestones. If you want to succeed there, you need to accept that your game will not be perfect, or even good. That's fine. The goal is not to make a great game, it's to release a game. However imperfect that game is, the success criteria is not its quality, or its sales numbers. The number one success criteria is that people can buy it.

Dawnmaker's cinematic release trailer

Conclusion

I wanted to end here, because I think this is the most important thing to learn from this post-mortem. If you're trying to build a sustainable game studio, if you're in it for the long run, then please, please start by making small games. Don't gamble on a crazy-big first game. Garner experience. Learn how the market works. Try things in a way that will cost you as little as possible. Build your audience and your credibility. Then, when the time is right, you'll be much better equipped to take on bigger projects. That doesn't mean you will automatically succeed, but your chances will be much, much higher.

As for myself? Well, I'm trying to learn from my own mistakes. My next project will be a much shorter one, with strict deadlines and milestones. I will capitalize on what I made for Dawnmaker, reusing as many tools and wisdom as possible. Trying to make the best possible game with what time, money and resources I have. All I can say for now is that it's going to be a deckbuilding strategy game about an alchemist trying to create the Philosopher's Stone. I will talk about it more on my blog and on Arpentor's newsletter, so I hope you'll follow me into that next adventure!

Subscribe to Arpentor Studio's Newsletter! One email about every other month, no spams, with insights on the development of our games and access to early versions of future projects.

Thanks a lot to Elli for their proofreading of this very long post!

L'état de l'Adrian 2024

Adrian — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 10:00:00 +0100

Une sortie de jeu, enfin un peu d'argent pour Arpentor Studio, et une fin d'année difficile : c'est l'heure du bilan de mon année 2024 !

Projets principaux

Arpentor Studio

Le bilan d'Arpentor Studio sur 2024 est mitigé : d'un côté, nous avons réussi à sortir notre premier jeu, Dawnmaker, et c'est un petit miracle. De l'autre, nous avons généré un chiffre d'affaire d'environ 9 000€, et c'est très, très loin d'être suffisant pour faire tourner une entreprise. Il y a eu malgré tout quelques bonnes nouvelles en fin d'année, qui ouvrent des perspectives pour 2025.

Reprenons dans l'ordre. La première moitié de l'année a été totalement centrée sur finir et sortir Dawnmaker. Il a fallut faire quelques démarches administratives pour ouvrir un compte Steam et créer une page pour le jeu. Faire des demandes de solde pour les deux aides que nous avions reçues en 2022 (la BPI) et 2023 (la région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes). Et bien sûr faire la gestion courante de l'entreprise, remonter les factures, mettre à jour le budget, ce genre de choses. Comme l'année précédente, Arpentor Studio ne m'a pas demandé trop de temps de travail.

Le temps fort de 2024, ce fût bien évidemment la sortie de Dawnmaker, le 31 juillet. Comme prévu vu le nombre de wishlists que nous avions avant la sortie, le jeu est un échec commercial, avec environ 5 000€ de chiffre d'affaire le premier mois — c'est-à-dire, 5k€ qui sont réellement rentrés dans les caisses d'Arpentor Studio, mais sur lesquels on devra payer des impôts. En revanche, le jeu a été très bien accueilli par la critique sur Steam, avec un score de 93% de review positives. Je ne m'attendais pas à un tel score, et c'est une surprise qui fait du bien au moral. J'ai écrit un (long) billet de post-mortem de Dawnmaker que je vais publier courant janvier, dans lequel je reviens en détail sur tout ce qui touche au jeu.

Passée la sortie de Dawnmaker, il a fallut déterminer ce que nous allions faire d'Arpentor Studio. Alexis (mon associé) et moi avons décidé de ne pas continuer à travailler ensemble, et j'ai fait la proposition de lui racheter l'entreprise. Ce n'est pas encore acté mais nous avons trouvé un accord : Arpentor deviendra une entreprise unipersonnelle début 2025, dès que les démarches administratives seront faites. J'ai l'intention de garder l'entreprise et de continuer à sortir des jeux comme activité principale, avec peut-être de la prestation à droite à gauche pour faire entrer un peu d'argent.

Cependant, il s'est passé quelque chose de totalement inattendu en octobre : un éditeur m'a contacté pour reprendre en main la promotion de Dawnmaker ! C'est quelque chose qui n'arrive quasiment jamais, tant la sortie d'un jeu est le moment clé où il génère de l'argent. J'étais donc assez sceptique sur cette proposition, mais après deux mois de négociations, nous avons trouvé un accord ! J'ai donc le plaisir de vous annoncer que depuis le 12 décembre, Dawnmaker est sous la gestion de Acram Digital, éditeur polonais spécialisé dans les jeux de plateau numériques.

L'équipe d'Acram a repris en main la gestion et la promotion de Dawnmaker. Ils sont responsables de sa page Steam, ils l'ont ajouté à leurs différents bundles et outils de promotion, en échange de quoi ils prennent un pourcentage sur les ventes du jeu. Mais ils financent également le portage mobile du jeu, portage que je vais faire pendant les trois premiers mois de 2025. Dawnmaker devrait donc arriver sur vos téléphones portables au printemps ! Ce contrat est une excellente nouvelle pour Arpentor Studio et pour moi : ça fait rentrer de l'argent qui va permettre de stabiliser financièrement l'entreprise, ça me permettra de me payer un peu — ce qui n'est pas arrivé depuis plusieurs années — et ça va également me donner un peu plus de budget pour le développement de mon prochain jeu !

J'entame donc 2025 avec une situation plus stable qu'avant : Dawnmaker va continuer à faire entrer de l'argent, pas beaucoup mais pas beaucoup c'est toujours mieux que pas du tout, et j'ai un plan pour sortir un jeu dans l'année. Ça va être sportif, j'ai beaucoup de choses à faire et peu de temps pour les faire, mais j'ai la ferme intention de ne pas refaire la même erreur que sur Dawnmaker, à savoir passer deux ans et demi sur un jeu qui ne rapporte pas d'argent. Mon objectif pour 2025, c'est donc de faire un jeu en environ 6 mois, de le sortir, et d'espérer qu'il rapporte un peu plus que le précédent, juste assez pour que je puisse en faire un autre, et ainsi de suite. Et qui sait, peut-être qu'un jour j'en ferai un qui rapportera assez pour passer au stade supérieur ?

Dawnmaker

Ça y est : vous pouvez acheter Dawnmaker !!! ???? (Comment ? Vous ne l'avez pas encore fait ? Foncez ! )

En 2024, j'ai travaillé sur beaucoup de domaines autour du jeu :

Promotion — j'ai créé la page Steam du jeu, j'ai posté à de nombreuses reprises sur les réseaux sociaux, notamment reddit, j'ai envoyé des emails à des youtubeurs, j'ai rédigé plusieurs billets pour le blog et la newsletter, entre autres choses.
Game design — les quatre grands chantiers sur le jeu en 2024 ont été de rendre compréhensible le Smog (l'adversaire du joueur), d'ajouter un tutoriel, de finaliser la boucle de méta-progression en ajoutant une carte du monde et un marché, et de concevoir deux nouveaux personnages avec leurs decks et répertoires respectifs.
Programmation — il a fallu bien sûr implémenter tout ce que j'ai cité juste avant, mais également ajouter énormément de polish au jeu, des feedbacks et du juice, corriger des bugs, et améliorer plein de choses en se basant sur les retours des joueurs. J'ai d'ailleurs ajouté un formulaire dans le jeu pour que ceux-ci puissent facilement nous faire part de leurs commentaires.
Gestion de communauté — une fois le jeu sorti, nous avons reçu de nombreux commentaires de joueurs sur Steam et sur notre discord. J'ai répondu à autant de ces commentaires que possible, et j'ai aussi tenu au courant nos joueurs des mises à jour du jeu.

Nous avons sorti le jeu le 31 juillet, puis nous avons travaillé sur une mise à jour de contenu, dans laquelle nous avons ajouté plusieurs personnages jouables et plein de nouvelles cartes et bâtiments. On a sorti cette mise à jour le 7 octobre, avec l'intention que ça soit le dernier ajout de contenu du jeu. Depuis, j'ai publié une mise à jour mineure pour corriger des bugs et améliorer certains points frustrants. Je pensais que ça serait plus ou moins terminé pour Dawnmaker, mais non ! Comme je l'ai annoncé dans la section précédente, le jeu va sortir sur plateformes mobiles, j'ai donc encore plusieurs mois de travail pour implémenter le support des téléphones.

Malgré tout, c'est le résultat de plus de deux ans et demi de travail, avec deux personnes à temps plein et une dizaine d'autres qui ont participé ponctuellement. J'en suis ressorti épuisé, à la fois physiquement et mentalement. Les derniers mois de 2024 ont été laborieux pour moi, tant il était difficile de me remettre au travail, notamment dès qu'il s'agissait d'être créatif. Mais on a sorti un jeu, un jeu qui plait à une partie conséquente de son public, qui a fini par trouver, aussi incroyable que ça puisse être, un éditeur. Un jeu dont je suis très fier.

Le Grand Œuvre

Vous découvrez en exclusivité de nom de code de mon prochain jeu vidéo. Le Grand Œuvre, ou Magnum Opus, c'est le processus de création de la Pierre Philosophale, l'objectif ultime de l'alchimie. Et ça sera le thème de ce prochain jeu : vous y incarnerez un alchimiste qui, pour se soigner d'un poison mortel, cherche à créer la véritable Pierre Philosophale. Le jeu sera un deckbuilder solo, sans combat, à mi-chemin entre Dominion et Balatro. Il sera question de jouer ses cartes pour obtenir des ressources, améliorer ses caractéristiques, et utiliser une forge pour créer de nouvelles cartes et des pierres magiques. Le jeu aura une structure de roguelite : quand vous perdrez, vous devrez recommencer de zéro, mais à chaque fois avec quelques améliorations, de nouvelles cartes débloquées, une forge plus performante, etc.

Le jeu est actuellement en phase de conception, c'est-à-dire que j'ai écrit le document de vision (avec les piliers, le thème, la fantasy… ) et créé quelques prototypes pour valider le cœur du gameplay. J'attaque bientôt la préproduction, avec la création d'un prototype complet du jeu. Je vais pouvoir reprendre pas mal de choses que j'ai codées pour Dawnmaker, notamment l'éditeur de contenu, et je devrais donc pouvoir avancer assez rapidement sur ce jeu. Et il le faut, parce que mes deadlines sont serrées ! Le but, c'est d'avoir terminé le jeu entièrement en septembre de cette année. Dans 8 mois !

J'ai la chance d'avoir une petite équipe qui est motivée pour m'accompagner sur ce projet, deux artistes et un programmeur. J'ai hâte de vous montrer ce qu'on va créer ensemble ! Stay tuned!

Projets secondaires

Souls

Malheureusement, Souls est toujours en pause. Je l'ai ressorti le temps d'une partie cet été, pour me rappeler tous les défauts de la version actuelle, mais je n'ai pas pris le temps de retravailler dessus. Ça reste mon projet de cœur et j'ai bon espoir d'un jour me remettre dessus !

Blog

J'ai publié 7 articles sur mon blog en 2024, et j'en ai écrit un 8e qui n'est pas encore publié — le post-mortem de Dawnmaker, mon plus long article à ce jour avec plus de 7 000 mots. L'objectif de 6 articles publiés est donc atteint, et même dépassé ! La plupart de ces articles a fait double-emploi avec la newsletter, c'est du win-win.

Voici les articles que j'ai publiés cette année :

J'ai trouvé un système qui fonctionne, maintenant il faut tenir ce rythme en 2025 !

Bourgade

Après Dawnmaker, j'ai voulu me remettre dans le bain de la création en reproduisant quelque chose que j'avais déjà fait en 2020 : une game jam en solo. Bon, ça n'a pas marché : la semaine en question, j'ai reçu un coup de fil d'un certain éditeur qui s'intéressait à un certain jeu… Mais si je n'ai pas réussi à me mettre à fond sur ce jeu pendant une semaine, j'ai tout de même continué par ci par là pendant un peu plus d'un mois, et j'ai produit un jeu, disons, jouable, à défaut d'autre chose. Je ne l'ai pas encore publié parce qu'il n'y a aucune explication nulle part, mais je compte prendre le temps de le mettre en ligne, ne serait-ce pour qu'il ne tombe pas dans l'oubli de mon disque dur.

Ça s'appelle Bourgade et c'est un jeu de construction de village incrémental. Vous construisez des bâtiments qui produisent des ressources en temps réel, et que vous pouvez améliorer. Plus ils montent de niveau, plus ils produisent, mais plus ils coûtent cher. J'ai ajouté là-dessus une carte du monde sur laquelle vous pouvez envoyer des soldats piller des oasis, des héros qui partent en aventure, et des philosophes qui produisent des points de culture, la ressource qui permet de gagner une partie. Le jeu manque de contenu et de profondeur dans les systèmes, et surtout d'explications, mais le cœur est là. Reste à voir si ce cœur est plaisant et trouve un public, et si ça vaut le coup de continuer à développer Bourgade. Réponse dès que je prends le temps de faire des playtests !

Autres jeux

J'ai complètement laissé de côté tous mes autres projets créatifs en 2024. Parmi les jeux dont j'ai parlé l'année dernière, celui de « Cube Light », inspiré par l'expérience d'un draft de Magic: The Gathering a le plus de potentiel, ou en tout cas, c'est celui sur lequel j'ai le plus envie de revenir. J'ai également plusieurs autres idées dans les tiroirs que j'aimerais prototyper, mais j'ai du mal à voir comment je vais faire ça vu le planning que je m'impose sur l'année à venir pour terminer et sortir Le Grand Œuvre. Qui sait, peut-être que j'arriverais à faire quelques pauses créatives ?

Mes recommandations de l'année

Voilà pour mon bilan de ce que j'ai fait en 2024 ! Il est l'heure de terminer ce billet sur une note plus légère, avec mes recommandations culturelles de l'année.

Mon jeu vidéo de l'année

Sans aucun conteste, Balatro est mon jeu de l'année. C'est un jeu incroyable qui réussit l'exploit d'avoir des systèmes parfaitement équilibrés. C'est une assiette en équilibre sur une aiguille.

Si vous n'en avez pas entendu parlé, Balatro est un roguelite de poker. Vous commencez chaque partie avec un deck de 52 cartes classiques (2 à 10, valet, dame, roi, as) et vous devez réussir à faire des scores de plus en plus élevés en faisant des figures de poker. Trois cartes de même valeur pour un brelan, cinq cartes de même famille pour une couleur, etc. Évidemment il y a un twist : vous obtiendrez au fur et à mesure de la partie des jokers, qui vont vous donner des bonus de points en fonction de nombreux paramètres. L'un vous donnera plus de jetons chaque fois que vous jouerez une paire, l'autre multipliera par 2 votre score si vous avez un carré, etc. Ajoutez à ça des cartes de tarot pour modifier les cartes de votre deck, des planètes pour améliorer le score de vos combinaisons, et plein d'autres choses encore, pour faire un jeu incroyable que je vous recommande chaudement.

Mon jeu de plateau de l'année

J'ai peu joué à des nouveaux jeux cette année, mais les deux que j'ai préférés, je les ai reçu pour Noël. Autant vous dire qu'au moment où j'écris ces mots, je n'ai pu y jouer beaucoup, mais c'est l'un d'eux que je nomme quand même : Legacy of Yu.

Legacy of Yu, c'est un jeu vidéo en jeu de plateau. C'est un jeu solo (mais on y joue ensemble avec ma compagne) avec une structure de roguelite : vous recommencez chaque partie de zéro, mais à chaque fois avec quelques changements. Au fil des parties, un livre des récits vous indique de retirer telle carte et d'ajouter telles autres, modifiant ce sur quoi vous pourrez tomber aux prochaines parties. On incarne un fonctionnaire chinois chargé de mettre fin aux crues dévastatrices du Fleuve Jaune. On y recrute des villageois qu'on pourra utiliser pour obtenir des ressources ou de la main d'œuvre, on affronte des bandits, et on doit creuser des canaux le long du fleuve avant que la crue ne nous rattrape. Le jeu se déroule en campagne, chaque nouvelle partie étant influencée par les précédentes, jusqu'à ce qu'on gagne 7 fois ou perde 7 fois.

Du haut de mes deux parties, je suis très fan des sensations du jeu. On construit son moteur de génération de ressources, on sent la pression constante de la crue et des bandits, on planifie son tour et on anticipe les suivants. Il y a beaucoup de choix, et les ajouts obtenus vont tantôt faciliter le jeu en nous donnant un pouvoir supplémentaire, tantôt le rendre plus difficile en ajoutant des événements négatifs ou des brigands plus puissants. J'étais sceptique de jouer à un jeu de plateau solo, tant la pratique est liée à son aspect social pour moi, mais ça marche vraiment très bien.

Ma BD de l'année

Je me rends compte en rédigeant ces recommandations que j'ai, en fait, simplement moins consommé d'œuvres culturelles en 2024. Au moment de choisir un jeu de plateau, j'ai pris le dernier auquel j'ai joué, et au moment de choisir une BD, je constate que j'en ai lu vraiment très peu cette année. Il y en a une que j'ai tout de même trouvée mieux que les autres : La Cuisine des Ogres – Trois Fois Morte.

C'est l'histoire d'une petite fille abandonnée qui se fait enlever par le Croque Mitaine. Elle en réchappe miraculeusement, mais se retrouve coincée dans le pays magique où vivent ogres, chats qui parlent, kraken et autres créatures mystiques. L'histoire est prenante et le dessin superbe. Ce n'est pas une BD très ambitieuse, mais elle fait très bien le plus important : raconter une belle histoire.

Mon livre de l'année

Le Dieu d'Automne et d'Hiver n'est pas le livre que j'ai préféré cette année — ce privilège revient à Je suis Pilgrim — mais c'est celui que j'ai le plus envie de recommander, pour trois raisons. D'abord, parce que c'est quand même une lecture que j'ai adorée : c'est de la bonne Fantasy, le personnage principal est attachant, l'histoire sur fond d'enquête policière est bien ficelée, et le système de magie, très soft, fonctionne parfaitement avec le reste sans qu'il n'y ait de deus ex machina ou autre ressort « TG c'est magique ».

La deuxième raison, c'est que c'est écrit par une autrice française, Pauline Sidre, qui monte en niveau. Le précédent roman que j'ai lu d'elle, Rocaille, était déjà très bien, mais avait quelques lacunes. Ici on sent que la qualité est montée d'un cran, et c'est très agréable.

Et enfin, c'est publié par Sillex, un petit éditeur qui cherche à faire mieux dans ce milieu difficile, notamment en rémunérant mieux les autrices et auteurs. L'occasion de soutenir des gens biens !

Conclusions sur l'année 2024

2024 se termine sur une note difficile. Il y a eu l’énorme fatigue après la sortie de Dawnmaker, cumulée avec trois mois chaotiques où se sont chamboulées réflexions sur le prochain jeu, négociations avec un éditeur, prototypage d'un nouveau jeu et vacances plus ou moins reposantes.

2025 s'ouvre sur un challenge important : apprendre de mes erreurs et faire mieux. Ma plus grosse frustration avec Dawnmaker, c'est d'avoir passé beaucoup trop longtemps dessus. Je compte sur moi pour ne pas reproduire ça avec Le Grand Œuvre, et le terminer en 8 mois. On en reparle tout au long de l'année ! D'ici là, merci encore de suivre mes aventures, prenez soin de vous, et à très vite.

How much did Dawnmaker really cost?

Adrian — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 16:00:00 +0200

About a year ago, I wrote a piece explaining how much we estimated making Dawnmaker would cost. Well, Dawnmaker is finished, so as promised, I'm going to revisit that and show you how much it actually cost to produce our game! Yay, more money talk!

In June 2023, I made a budget for Dawnmaker that projected the game would cost a total of 520k€ to make. A year later, I can announce that the total budget is around 320k€. Why such a big difference? Because we never managed to secure funding, and thus had to cut a lot of what we wanted to do. We did not hire a team for the production of the game, did not even do the production of the game, did not pay ourselves, and reduced our spending to the minimum.

I'm writing that the budget is 320k€, but that does not mean we actually spent that much money. The amount of money that transited through our bank account and was disbursed is about 95k€. The remaining 225k€ are my estimation for how much Arpentor Studio would have spent if Alexis and I had paid ourselves decent salaries for the whole duration of the project. So in a sense you could say that Dawnmaker only cost 95k€, and there's some truth to that, but it's also a lie. Our work has value and needs to be accounted for in budgeting. Because in the end, this is money that we lost by not doing something else that would have paid us.

Where did the money go?

So we spent 95k€ over the course of 2.5 years. Here are the main expense categories we had:

Even though we barely paid ourselves — we did for 4 months at a time when we thought we were getting a bunch of money, but ultimately did not — salaries are still the biggest category. If you include contracting, which is also paying people to work on our game, that makes up for 60% of the game's budget. The rest is split between Company spending (lawyers, accounting, etc.), events and travel (like going to the Game Camp every year), regular fee for online services (hosting, email, documentation) and a touch of hardware. Plus all the remaining small things that don't fit the other categories, like an ads campaign.

The financial outcome of Dawnmaker

320k€ is an incredibly big sum for such a small company, especially if you compare that to how much the game made. At the time of writing, about 6k€ made it into our bank account. Our players seem to really enjoy Dawnmaker, according to our 94% positive reviews on Steam, so I guess we can call it a critical success. But financially it's far from one: we need another 314k€ to break even!

One metric that I'm thinking about those days, as I prepare the next project, is the revenue per working day. On Dawnmaker, as of writing, Alexis and I made about 6€ per working day. That's less than one tenth of the minimal wage in France, and that's without counting the money that came out of our pockets — otherwise our revenue per day would be negative.

If you're reading this and you're thinking of starting a game studio, here's the biggest advice I can give you: start by making small games. Reduce the risk — the financial cost — by making games that are small, but take them to the finish line. You'll gain experience, you'll make yourself a portfolio that will be helpful to raise funding later, and if you will have a much better chance of having a decent revenue per working day. But I'll discuss this in more details in a future post.

Dawnmaker is 20% off!

Yesterday we released a major, free update for Dawnmaker, our solo turn-based strategy game. We've added 3 characters, each with their own deck and roster of buildings, as well as a ton of new content. To celebrate, we're discounting the game, 20% off for the next two weeks. If you want to experience our city building meets deckbuilding game, now is your time to get it!

Buy Dawnmaker on Steam Buy Dawnmaker on itch.io

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18 days of selling Dawnmaker

Adrian — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 14:50:00 +0200

We released Dawnmaker 18 days ago, and I'm due for a report on numbers. Everybody loves numbers, right? Here are ours!

First a little context: Dawnmaker is a turn-based, solo strategy game mixing city building and deckbuilding. Basically, it's like a board game but digital and solo. We've been working on this title for 2.5 years, as a team of two people: myself, doing game design and programming, and Alexis, doing everything art-related. We've had some occasional help from feelancers, agencies and short-term hires, but it's mostly been just us 2. Dawnmaker is our second game, the first one being Phytomancer, a small game we made in 6 months and released on itch.io only.

We did not find a publisher for Dawnmaker — not for lack of trying — and thus had a very limited budget. The main consequence of this is that we skipped the production phase. We had a very long preproduction (about 2 years) and then went straight to postproduction in order to release what we had in a good state. Effects of this decision can be felt in some reviews of the game, complaining about the lack of content. We had big plans for new mechanics, but cut most of these in order to ship.

Marketing on Hard Mode

The second consequence of not having a publisher is that we did all the marketing ourselves. It was hard, not very good and not very efficient, but we did our best. We did not have a well-defined go-to-market strategy, and did things a bit organically. I'm comfortable with Twitter so I started using it, joining some communities like #TurnBasedThursday. I also did a bunch of reddit publications that worked quite well, though none of them went viral. Alexis is more of an instagram person so he handled that, as well as tiktok. Reddit is really the only social network that brought us actual wishlists and sales, the others had no impact that I could see.

Scratch that: YouTube is the platform that actually brought us wishlists and sales. We had a few videos, some by medium-sized youtubers, that brought big spikes in wishlists — see the graph below. And surprisingly, our launch trailer is currently being shown by YouTube on their front page, which is bringing us a nice boost in visibility! But that's pure luck: as far as I know, we have absolutely no control over the YouTube algorithm, and are all subject to its whims.

OK, let's start showing some numbers. Here's our lifetime wishlist actions graph:

The spike at launch is free visibility offered by Steam: we did nothing other than making the page public on Steam. I assume it happened because we had tags that work well on Steam: city builder and deckbuilder mainly. At that time, the page only had screenshots and a basic description. No trailer, no demo.

I feel like we got lucky with our marketing. As I told earlier, we had no real go-to-market strategy, we just tried things. I spent a lot of time in the last 3 years reading about marketing, from howtomarketagame.com, GameDiscoverCo and other such sources. Basically I've been applying lessons learned from these sources, trying to make as little mistakes as possible — though we still made a lot of them, like: not having a go-to-market strategy… The reason why I feel we got lucky is that most of the spikes shown above came from unsolicited sources. Nookrium and Orbital Potato just happened to pick up our demo because they saw it during the Deckbuilders Fest. automaton-media.com, a popular Japanese website, made an article about Dawnmaker totally out of the blue — we did not even have a Japanese translation at the time. And when we did send keys of the game to youtubers and streamers, almost none of them responded. I feel like we just made our best to exist, being in festivals and social networks, and then waited for the Universe to notice.

Considering the lack of marketability of Dawnmaker, I'm still pretty proud that we reached Popular Upcoming on the front page of Steam a day before the release. We had a tad less than 6k wishlists when we reached that Holy Grail, and 7029 wishlists when we hit the release button.

Launching into… the neighbor's garden

Pricing the game was difficult. Our initial intention was to sell it for $20. But we never did our production phase, so our content was way too lacking to justify that price point. We decided to lower the price to $15, but then talked about it with a few French publishers. All of them agreed that it should be a $10 game, not because of the game's quality, but because in today's market, that's what players are ready to pay for the content we have. Pricing the game less also meant that players would feel less resistance in buying the game, hopefully leading to more sales, compensating for the money gap. And it would lower their expectations, leading to better reviews. We actually saw that: quite a few comments talk about the lack of content, but still give a positive review thanks to the low price.

Considering all this, here's how Dawnmaker sold:

These are our numbers after 18 days of being on Steam. We're currently sitting on 8.8k wishlists, with a conversion rate of 5.8%. We are getting close to 900 units really sold (total sold minus refunds). These numbers are very much in the range of estimations based on surveys from GameDiscoverCo. We'll be selling about 1k units in the first month, just like anticipated. It's good that we did not do less than that, but it's still far from what we would need to recoup. No surprises here, neither bad nor good.

The game shipped with English, French and Japanese localizations. The Japanese translation came really late in the process, the Steam page coming just 3 days before the release. Bit of a missed opportunity here that we didn't have it before we "went big in Japan" (the automaton-media.com article), I guess? We'll never know! Anyway, here are our sales per country:

Quick side-note: we also put the game on itch.io, where we sold… 2 units of the game!

On a positive note

These numbers are not high, and are not nearly enough to make a studio of 2 financially stable. I intend to write a postmortem of Dawnmaker where I'll go deeper into all our failures. But for now, let's finish this section with more positive things. First, the reception of the game has been quite great! We have 94% positive reviews, with 53 reviews at the time of writing, giving us a "Very positive" rating on Steam, which I am very proud of. It is incredibly heartwarming to see that the game we spent 2.5 years of our lives on is loved by players. We have 50 players who played the game for more than 20 hours, and that's, seriously, so so cool:

And if we did not have a big spike at launch, our players are still playing today:

That's it for the current state of Dawnmaker! We intend to ship a content update by the end of September, adding a bit more replayability, and then we'll likely move on to other projects. Hopefully more lucrative ones!

I'm happy to answer any questions you have, so shoot them in the comments.

The frustration of (never really) finishing Dawnmaker

Adrian — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 19:00:00 +0200

We are 5 days away from the release of Dawnmaker! It is a time of excitement, of stress of course, but also of regrets as we realize that there are so, so many things that we will not be able to add to our game. Let's introduce today's topic with a short video that is very à propos:

Download the MP4.

A game is never truly done. There's always the next thing you want to add, the little detail you want to change, the obvious problem you want to solve. But we cannot work on our game forever, because we simply need to sell it at some point and, hopefully, get some money to pay the bills and the foods. Such is the weight of reality on our dreams.

So we had to just make the cut somewhere, and decide on a release date. July 31 it is! Why? We wanted to release earlier, but there was a Steam Next Fest in early June, quickly followed by the Steam Summer Sale in early July, two events during which it is not advised to release a game. We've read that releasing on a Wednesday is a bit better for indies because there are usually less games coming out. So there we ended up! (That sounds easy but it took us a while to find a date that worked well for us… )

In just 5 days, Dawnmaker will be available for all to buy, to play, and to judge. That's a terribly exciting experience, but also a terribly scary one. Because we know that the game is not perfect. We know that it has weak points, that it is lacking in some places. But we have to release it anyway, we have to put it into your hands, and we have to accept that, yes, this is the game we're going to sell.

Believe me: it is truly heartbreaking to see all those things that could have been, all the ways this game could have been better, if only we had had more time, more money, more people… We are going to release a product that is not exactly what we had in mind, but a product that is what we have been able to create in the time we allowed ourselves.

In an attempt to amuse you, and maybe to grieve these features that will never be, let's go through some of the main elements that we wanted to add to Dawnmaker but couldn't.

Scientific research

The science part of the game has always, in our plans, been so much deeper than it currently is. In the game, science can be spent in some buildings to generate Eclairium. That's fairly basic. We had much bigger ambitions for that aspect of the game: we wanted science to be spent to research new technologies. Some scientific buildings were meant to have a scientific line, each step giving a one-off or a permanent bonus. For example, a research would have improved the production of your fields, another would have made harvesting better. Some would have replaced cards in your hand with a better version.

The reason why this never happened was that it required a lot of programming. We needed to change the way the core of the game worked, to add a big layer of complexity allowing to handle these types of effects. It also required some heavy UI work, which was partly done by Agathe when she worked with us, but that we never integrated. Sorry Agathe, it is very unlikely that this work of yours will ever be in the game.

Drafting cards

Deckbuilding is the poor child of Dawnmaker. When you mix two genres like we did, you usually end up favoring one over the other. We definitely did that with the city building part, at the expense of the deckbuilding part. But I have a hunch that we could have made the cards a lot more interesting for a cost that was not too high. Here's what I had in mind, but never had the time to try.

Some buildings in the game give you a card when you build them. That card is always the same, you know what it will be before choosing to buy the building. I wanted to change that, at least on some of the buildings, to instead make them offer you a choice between 3 different cards of the same type and level. So instead of an Exploration post always giving you an Exploration card, it would let you choose a new card from three random level 1, industry cards. Sometime you would get to pick an Exploration, sometimes you'd get an Optimization, and sometimes, rarely, you would find a card that you had never seen before.

From an economical point of view, this would also have allowed us to produce a lot more content for very little cost: since our cards do not have illustrations, adding a new card to the game would just be a matter of designing it. As the game currently stands, adding a new card means adding a new building, which means creating a new graphical asset for it, which is expensive! I sincerely wished I had thought about this much earlier in the development of Dawnmaker, but I did not, and here we are not having this in the game.

Starting characters

Much like in Slay the Spire, we wanted to have a little cast of characters that you could choose from when starting a new game. They would not have been as distinct as in Slay the Spire, but would allow player to start each game with a different deck and roster of buildings. We had plans for 3 different characters, each opening a different way of playing the game.

Nomad buildings

You might have played with the buildings that give you resources when you build something adjacent to them, and thought that they were weak? Well, that's because we made them planning for another kind of buildings: nomads. We wanted to have buildings that could be moved from one tile to another, triggering the adjacent build effects each time. We think it would have added a more puzzle-y element to the game.

Smog effects

When we added the cards to represent the Smog's behavior, we knew we had an opportunity for more than just Luminoil consumption. Basically, anything that a building could do, we could make the Smog do. We wanted to have the Smog give you Curse cards, half your Luminoil stock, destroy or deactivate some buildings, and so on.

I'm going to stop here because there is a lot more small things that I wished we could have added to Dawnmaker. But the game is what it is, and we're still very proud of all the work we've done over the last 2.5 years!

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The challenges of teaching a complex game

Adrian — Fri, 03 May 2024 16:00:00 +0200

When I was 13, my mom bought me Civilization III from a retail shop, then went on to do some more shopping. I stayed in the car, with this elegant box in my hands, craving to play the game it contained. I opened the box, and there discovered something magical: the Civilization III Manual. Having nothing better to do, I started reading it…

That game manual was THICK.

More than 20 years later, I still remember how great reading that book felt. I was propelled into the game, learning about its systems and strategies, discovering screens of foggy maps and world wonders. It made me love the game before I had even played it! Since then I've played all Civilization games that came out — including Humankind, the unofficial 7th episode — and loved all of them. Would I have had the same connection to these games had I not read the manual? Impossible to tell. Would I have read that book had I not been trapped in a car with the game box on my laps? Definitely not! Even the developers of the game knew that nobody was reading those texts:

“The authors and developers of computer games know too well that most players never read the manual.”

Here's me now, 20-something years later, having made a game of my own and needing to teach it to potential players… Should I write a full-blown game manual, hoping that a little 13-years old will read it on a parking lot?

Heck no! Ain't nobody got time for that!

Let's make a tutorial instead

Dawnmaker has been built almost like a board game, in the sense that it has complex rules that you have to learn before you can play. Physical board game players are used to that: someone has to go through the rules before they can explain them to the rest of their players group. But video games are a different beast, and we've long moved away from reading… well, almost anything at all, really, and certainly not rules. You can't put each player into a car on a parking lot with nothing else to do other than reading the rules of your game. If you were to present the video game player with a rules book, in today's world of abundance, they would just move on to the next game in their unending backlog.

Teaching a game is thus incredibly difficult: it has to have as little text as possible, it has to be fun and rewarding, and it has to hook the player so that, by the end of the teaching phase, they still want to play the actual game.

It's with all those things in mind that I started building Dawnmaker's tutorial. I set two main rules in place: first, use as little words as possible, and second, make the player learn while doing. The first iteration of the tutorial was very terse: you only had a small goal written at the top of the screen, and almost no explanations whatsoever about what you were to do, or why. It turns out, that didn't work too well. Players were lost, especially when it came to the most complex actions or features of the game. Past a certain point in the tutorial, almost all of the players stopped reading the objectives at the top of the screen. And finally, they were also lacking a sense of purpose.

So for all my good intents, I had to revise my approach and write more words. The second iteration, which is now live in the game and demo, has a lot of small tooltips that pop up around the screen as the interface shows itself. I've tried to load information as slowly as possible, giving the player only what they need at a given moment. I think I approximately quadrupled the number of words in the tutorial, but such is the reality of teaching a complex game.

The other big change I made was to give the player a better sense of progression in the tutorial. The objectives now stay visible in a box on the left-hand side of the screen. They have little animations and sounds that reward the player when they complete a task. Seeing that list grow shows how the player has progressed and is also rewarding by itself.

Teaching the game doesn't only happen in the tutorial though, but also on the various signs and feedback we put around the game. Here's an example: during the tutorial, new players did not understand what was happening with the new building choice that was presented. The solution to this was not to explain with words what those buildings where, but to show a feedback. Now, whenever you gain a new building, you see that same building popping up in the center of the board, then moving towards the buildings roster. It's a double win: they understand that the building goes somewhere, they see where, and they are inclined to check that place and see what it is. I guess one feedback is worth a thousand words?

This version of the tutorial is still far from perfect. But it is the first thing players interact with, and thus it is a piece of the game that really has to shine. We'll keep collecting feedback from new players, and use that to polish the tutorial until, like Eclairium, it shines bright.

BTW: unlike Eclairium, diamonds do not shine, they simply reflect light. Rihanna has been lying to us all.

Next event: Geektouch in Lyon

If you're in Lyon or close to it, come and meet us at the Geektouch / Japan Touch festival in Eurexpo on May 4th and 5th! We'll have a stand on the Indie Game Lab space (lot A87). You will of course get to play with the latest version of Dawnmaker. We hope to see you there!

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Killing two birds with one deck in Dawnmaker

Adrian — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 11:00:00 +0100

Let's face it: Dawnmaker still has some important flaws. We're aware of that, and we are working on those flaws. One of the biggest remaining problem with the game was that one of its core mechanics, the oppression of the Smog, was… well, not explained at all. If you didn't have a developer behind your back to tell you, there was almost no way you could understand it.

What's the oppression of the Smog, you ask? It is the fact that the Smog gets stronger the more the game progresses, and thus makes you consume luminoil faster. It's a simple formula that grows every time you shuffle your deck of cards: when that happens, your luminoil consumption increases by the level of your aerostation. We tried a few, small things to explain that mechanism: we added an animation to the Smog, making it grow darker and closer to your city, when the oppression increases. We also had a line in the luminoil tooltip showing how much luminoil is consumed by this oppression. But that was not nearly enough, and I started thinking about how to solve this with a complex UI inspired by Frostpunk. I am glad I did not go with that, as it would have been a nightmare to implement, and I now believe it would not have helped much.

I sure am glad I did not try to implement this…

So, while I was busy not solving this problem, another one got to the front: the progression issue. You see, we have been struggling a lot with the meta progression we offer in Dawnmaker. We've made attempts at doing it Slay the Spire-like, with a map of limited paths and rewards after each stop. That doesn't work very well, the roguelike structure (the progression on the world map) around an already roguelike structure (a single region / city) was weird and sometimes frustrating. So we started thinking about doing it differently, more like Hades does it with its mirror. There would be a new resource that you'd gain after securing each region, and that resource could be spent in order to improve your starting party, making each new region a tad easier to secure.

We like this idea, but it causes another problem: if the game gets easier and easier, there will come a point when it will become boring, as the challenge will be lost. We thus need to have a progression in the difficulty just as we have one in the player's strength. Hades does that with the Heat system, where you can choose how you increase the challenge each time you play. We cannot easily do something similar, so I once again started thinking about a complex question: how can we increase the difficulty of the game? What levers to we have to do that in a way that is challenging and doesn't feel too artificial or frustrating? There's an easy answer to that: the length of the game and the number of lighthouses, which we use in the currently called "Discovery" game, where we increase both the level to reach and the number of lighthouses to repair in order to win a game as you progress on the map. But that is not enough for a long-term progression, as it would quickly feel completely artificial. Luckily, there was another feature we could use, and did not: the oppression of the Smog. That is were those two problems converged, and led me to a single solution solving both: turning the Smog's behavior into a deck of cards.

Using cards to represent the Smog's behavior increases the affordance of the game: Smog cards look like buildings cards, and they sort of work like them. It's a card that has an effect, that you can read at any time, and because it uses the same wording, abilities and display as the buildings, it's easy to interpret it. Changing the behavior simply means changing the card, and we can do a whole bunch of animations there to show that happening. We can also add tooltips around those elements to explain them further. That's a first big win! Now the second one is that we create and handle those decks in our content editor, and we can create as many cards and decks as we want. There we have it: near infinite difficulty progression, simply by making different Smog cards, and assembling them differently in various decks!

Note that we haven't done anything like that yet. So far we have only reproduced the previous system with cards. But the potential is here: when we start working on the meta progression, we can be confident that we'll have the tools to make the difficulty progress as well.

We definitely killed two nasty, vicious flying creatures with one deck. Neat!

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Dawnmaker a une page Steam ET un trailer

Adrian — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 15:16:00 +0100

Dawnmaker, le jeu sur lequel je travaille dans le cadre d'Arpentor Studio, depuis plus de deux ans, a désormais une page Steam et un trailer. Je vous laisse découvrir ça :

Ça vous a plu ? N'hésitez pas à ajouter le jeu à votre liste de souhaits sur Steam !

L'état de l'Adrian 2023

Adrian — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 14:00:00 +0100

L'année 2023 est terminée, donc comme depuis trois ans, c'est l'heure de dresser un bilan de ce que j'ai fait ces douze derniers mois. Je démarre cette retrospective avec la sensation de n'avoir « rien » fait, mais c'est parce que je me suis concentré essentiellement sur un seul et unique projet, notre jeu Dawnmaker. Vous allez le voir, l'année a en fait été bien chargée pour moi. En route pour le bilan !

Projets principaux

Arpentor Studio

Notre société, cofondée avec Alexis, a stagné cette année. Nous sommes toujours deux, même si nous avons été trois à deux moments dans l'année, avec Aurélie au sound design en début d'année puis Agathe au UX / UI design pendant deux mois. Nous n'avons quasiment aucune entrée d'argent, nous ne nous payons pas, et avons également réduit au minimum les dépenses de fonctionnement pour tenir le plus longtemps possible.

Mécaniquement, la gestion du studio m'a demandé moins de temps cette année. J'ai dû faire un dossier de demande de solde pour une subvention de la Région, plusieurs itérations sur le budget de Dawnmaker pour des négociations (qui n'ont malheureusement mené à rien) avec un éditeur, et l'entretien administratif mensuel — envoyer les factures à notre expert-comptable, essentiellement.

La principale erreur sur laquelle j'ai appris, et redressé la barre, en 2023 porte sur la stratégie d'édition de notre jeu. Depuis début 2022, nous avons établi une feuille de route qui implique l'arrivée d'un éditeur, partenaire qui prend en charge le financement et la publication de Dawnmaker. C'est, je crois aujourd'hui, une erreur, a fortiori dans le contexte actuel de l'industrie du jeu vidéo : les éditeurs traversent une période de disette financière, liée à de nombreux facteurs — bulle financière de 2021 suite au COVID et à la forte augmentation des habitudes de jeu, de nombreuses très grosses sorties en 2023, décalées là aussi à cause du COVID, qui ont phagocyté les ventes de jeux indépendants, et bien sûr les taux d'intérêts bancaires qui ont explosé. Résultat, en 2023, les éditeurs sont frileux et il est devenu très difficile de leur vendre son jeu.

Baser la stratégie financière de son entreprise sur l'apport d'un partenaire externe, sur lequel nous n'avons aucun contrôle, me paraît donc un risque énorme. C'est pourtant la stratégie de l'immense majorité des studios de jeu vidéo aujourd'hui, pour une raison très simple : ça coûte très cher de produire un jeu vidéo ! De notre côté, nous avons la chance aujourd'hui de pouvoir travailler sans salaire, grâce notamment au RSA. C'est cependant une situation qui n'est ni enviable, ni viable sur le moyen terme.

Face à tous ces éléments, j'ai décidé de modifier notre stratégie pour Dawnmaker. Nous ne planifions plus le fait de trouver un éditeur. Notre plan principal, désormais, est de sortir le jeu nous-même (en « auto-édition »), dans un délai qui nous permet à la fois de le mener vers une qualité satisfaisante pour un produit commercial, et de ne pas nous couler financièrement. Nous avons donc deux échéances : début mars, nous devons avoir terminé la vertical slice du jeu, une version qui contient tous les systèmes du jeu mais avec une partie seulement de son contenu. C'est un produit de très bonne qualité, proche de l’état final attendu, et qui est donc représentatif de ce qu'on veut faire. On se donnera ensuite environ trois mois pour chercher à nouveau un éditeur, tout en menant une campagne marketing et en ajoutant quelques améliorations au jeu en fonction des retours de nos testeuses et testeurs. Si courant mai nous n'avons pas sécurisé de financement, nous sortirons alors le jeu nous-mêmes — très probablement fin juin. Ce sera une version « amputée » du jeu, loin du contenu que nous souhaiterions avoir, mais une version malgré tout fonctionnelle et de qualité professionnelle. Et bien sûr, si un éditeur s'engage sur notre jeu et le finance, nous reprendrons le plan secondaire, qui consiste à faire une vraie phase de production, recruter quelques personnes en plus, et sortir, probablement début 2025, une version complète du jeu.

En conclusion, Arpentor Studio avance, mais c'est difficile. 2024 sera une année décisive pour le studio, avec soit l'arrivée d'un éditeur pour notre premier jeu, soit sa sortie. Dans tous les cas, ça devrait faire entrer de l'argent dans l'entreprise, ce dont j'ai hâte !

Dawnmaker

Le projet Cities of Heksiga a changé de nom et s'appelle désormais Dawnmaker ! J'ai passé l'essentiel de mon année 2023 à travailler dessus, sur trois aspects principalement : la programmation, le Game Design — la conception des règles du jeu et de son contenu — et le marketing.

Dawnmaker a beaucoup changé pendant cette année. Le jeu est passé d'un rendu 2D très (très) basique à un rendu en 3D en début d'année, puis est revenu vers la 2D pendant l'été. Le passage du jeu vers la 3D était prévu de longue date, mais s'est avéré être une erreur. Quasiment tous les éditeurs à qui nous avons montré le jeu nous l'ont fait remarquer. La question qui nous a fait revenir en arrière a été : « quelle est la valeur ajoutée de la 3D pour le jeu ? » On a eu bien du mal à y répondre…

Nous avons donc fait machine arrière — pas vraiment, puisque j'en ai profité pour coder tout le rendu avec une nouvelle techno optimisée pour la 2D. Grand bien nous en a fait : le jeu est vraiment beaucoup plus beau maintenant ! Il tourne également mieux sur ma machine vieillissante, ce qui est un bon signe pour le sortir sur téléphones portables. J'ai aussi amélioré notre éditeur de contenu pour qu'Alexis soit le plus autonome possible sur l'intégration des assets des bâtiments.

Voici une petite fresque de la progression du jeu en 2023 :

En janvier

En mai

En novembre

Au delà de l'aspect graphique, nous avons ajouté beaucoup de contenu (une quarantaine de nouveaux bâtiments, une vingtaine de nouvelles cartes), des mécaniques importantes (notamment une boucle de progression à la roguelike), et beaucoup de choses pour améliorer la jouabilité du jeu (de nouvelles interfaces, notamment grâce aux contributions de Menica Folden, du drag&drop pour jouer les cartes, des petites animations un peu partout… ).

Comme annoncé dans ma retrospective 2022, Dawnmaker a énormément progressé cette année, et il est passé d'un prototype à un vrai jeu vidéo. Il reste cependant encore beaucoup de choses à régler : la boucle de progression n'est toujours pas fonctionnelle, il n'y a aucun accompagnement à la prise en main pour les nouveaux joueurs, il faut retravailler encore une grosse partie de l'interface du jeu… Et tout ça, idéalement pour mars 2024 ! Autant vous dire que : c'est chaud. Mais la sortie du jeu approche, et ça, ça fait plaisir ! Peut-être que vous pourrez acheter Dawnmaker en 2024 ?

Projets secondaires

Souls

Comme l'année dernière, je n'ai quasiment pas eu l'occasion de toucher à Souls, mon vieux projet de jeu de cartes compétitif. Mais : « quasiment », car oui, je l'ai tout de même ressorti de sa boîte, et j'en ai fait une partie. Ça été l'occasion de me remémorer là où j'en étais, et surtout tous les défauts de la version en cours. Je ne travaille toujours pas activement dessus, mais j'ai bon espoir de m'y remettre un peu en 2024.

Blog

En début d'année, je me suis mis l'objectif de publier 6 articles sur ce blog, un tous les deux mois. L'objectif est presque atteint : j'en ai publié 5.

La majorité de ces articles est en anglais, car ils ont également servi de contenu pour la newsletter d'Arpentor Studio, lancée cette année.

J'ai eu un peu de mal à me lancer dans l'écriture régulière, mais je me suis créé un système en cours d’année — en gros, un rappel tous les deux mois — et depuis, je m'y tiens correctement ! J’ai bon espoir de continuer sur ce rythme en 2024, pour continuer à partager avec vous mes expériences.

Autres jeux

En 2023 j'ai enfin rejoint une association locale de créateurs de jeux, la Compagnie des zAuteurs Lyonnais (CAL). C'est un groupement informel d'auteurs et autrices de jeux de société, qui se réunit dans les bars à jeux lyonnais régulièrement. Ce fût l'occasion pour moi d'enfin entrer dans ce milieu, de tester des prototypes très chouettes, et surtout de montrer les miens, de prototypes. Parce que oui, j'ai malgré tout continué à travailler, épisodiquement, sur des protos de jeux.

Le premier a pour nom de code « Little Brass Imhotep », car il est conçu pour être à la croisée des expériences de jeu de Little Town, Brass: Birmingham et Imhotep: The Duel. Le concept central est le suivant : il y a un plateau de 5 par 5 cases, sur lequel les joueurs vont construire des bâtiments. Ces bâtiments peuvent être activés pour donner des ressources ou des points de victoire. Les joueurs disposent d'ouvriers, qu'ils vont placer à l’extrémité d'une ligne ou d'une colonne, et ce faisant vont activer tous les bâtiments de la ligne ou colonne. Construire un bâtiment permet de marquer des points de victoire et de créer ou d'améliorer un moteur, mais donne aussi des opportunités à l'adversaire de l'exploiter.

Les premiers playtests ont fait apparaître de nombreuses lacunes dans le système de jeu, notamment une trop grande symétrie sur les ressources et les effets qui rend la mécanique principale, construire des bâtiments, peu attirante. Le prototype en est pour l'instant resté là.

Mon second prototype de l'année est né de la volonté de croiser l'expérience d'un draft de Magic — probablement mon expérience de jeu préférée — avec le cycle de feedback très court d'un autochess. La première version du jeu, nom de code « Cube Light » (oui je sais je suis nul en noms), donne ceci : sur une table de 8 joueurs, chacun⋅e reçoit un deck de 4 cartes (les mêmes pour chaque personne), puis va commencer à drafter des paquets de 4 cartes. Ensuite, chaque joueur se constitue un deck de 7 cartes, en jetant une de ses cartes. Puis on joue un match en 1 contre 1 : chaque joueur pioche trois cartes, puis simultanément va répartir ses 3 cartes, face cachée, sur trois lieux disposés au milieu de la table. Une fois les cartes placées, on les dévoile chacun son tour. Bien sûr, chaque carte a des effets variés, de même que les lieux, il faut donc placer ses cartes au bon endroit, et anticiper les prochaines cartes que l'on piochera, pour créer des combinaisons puissantes. À la fin du deuxième tour, la manche est terminée, et on compte la puissance cumulée des personnages joués sur chaque lieu. Un joueur qui a strictement plus de puissance que son adversaire sur un lieu contrôle celui-ci, et le joueur qui contrôle le plus de lieux gagne la manche. On recommence ensuite une nouvelle phase de draft, en ayant changé les places des joueurs. On construit un deck de 10 cartes, on fait une manche en trois tours. On répète ça sur 4 manches, et à la fin de la dernière manche le joueur qui a le plus de points de victoire remporte la partie !

Je me suis rendu compte, pendant que je produisais ce prototype, que ça se rapproche énormément de Challengers, un excellent jeu sorti en 2022, et dont le pitch est assez proche du mien — reproduire l'expérience d'un autochess en jeu de plateau. Mon objectif cependant est d'avoir une expérience plus proche de celle de Magic, c'est-à-dire d'avoir plus de décisions stratégiques, à la fois pendant le choix des cartes (la phase de draft) et pendant les manches.

Le premier playtest a laissé apparaître de nombreux axes d'améliorations, mais le cœur du jeu fonctionne bien et constitue une base solide. J'espère prendre du temps cette année pour reprendre ce prototype et en faire un jeu fun, au moins pour mon groupe de joueurs de Magic.

Mes recommandations de l'année

Et voilà pour le bilan de mon travail sur 2023 ! C'est l'heure de terminer ce bilan par une partie plus fun. Cette année à nouveau, j'aimerais vous partager les quelques découvertes culturelles que j'ai le plus appréciées ces douze derniers mois.

Mon jeu vidéo de l'année

2023 a été une année pauvre en jeux vidéo pour moi. Peut-être est-ce le fait de passer mes journées à travailler sur un jeu qui m'empêche d'apprécier pleinement les autres ? Peut-être est-ce parce que j'ai utilisé beaucoup de mon temps de jeu à étudier des jeux en lien avec Dawnmaker ? Ou bien est-ce un simple concours de circonstances qui fait qu'aucun jeu ne m'a vraiment happé, ou marqué, cette année ?

Quoi qu'il en soit, le meilleur jeu auquel j'ai joué cette année est Baldur's Gate 3. Je suis un immense fan des deux premiers titres, sur lesquels j'ai passé énormément de temps étant ado. J'abordais le troisième opus avec beaucoup d'appréhension, mais il ne m'a pas déçu. Le jeu donne vraiment la sensation de jouer à un Baldur's Gate pur jus, mais moderne. Certains personnages sont très attachants, l'histoire est prenante, et le contenu est gigantesque. C'est presque le seul vrai point noir pour moi d'ailleurs : je n'aime pas passer à côté de quelque chose dans un jeu, du coup j'ai passé trop de temps à tout fouiller. Et je sais que j'ai malgré ça raté des tas de choses, parce que le jeu est ainsi conçu.

Bref : Baldur's Gate 3 mérite son titre de Game of the Year.

Mes jeux de plateau de l'année

Trop difficile de choisir un seul jeu cette année, alors en voilà deux : Spirit Island et Brass: Birmingham ! Deux gros jeux, dans lesquels il faut beaucoup réfléchir, l'un coopératif et l'autre compétitif.

Spirit Island, jeu coopératif donc, vous met dans la peau des esprits protecteurs d'une île qui se fait envahir par des colons. Chaque esprit a un gameplay différent, des capacités spéciales, et un lot de cartes de départ uniques. En solo ou avec vos alliés, vous devez développer vos ressources (gagner plus d'énergie pour jouer vos cartes, obtenir de nouvelles cartes plus puissantes… ) et utiliser vos cartes pour détruire les envahisseurs, les empêcher de construire des villages ou des cités, et de répandre la désolation sur votre île luxuriante. C'est vraiment un jeu excellent, dans lequel chaque tour est un gros puzzle à plusieurs, où il y a des interactions entre les capacités des joueurs. Et bonus : sa complexité limite assez fortement l'effet « joueur alpha », quand un joueur dirige tous les autres.

Brass: Birmingham, à l'inverse, est un jeu compétitif dans l'Angleterre de la révolution industrielle. Pur jeu de gestion, il faut y construire des bâtiments — mines de charbon, fonderies, usines, manufactures… — pour développer ses ressources et marquer des points de victoire. On y construit également des canaux ou chemins de fer, on y vend des ressources, et on s'adapte aux cartes de sa main pour se positionner sur la carte. Il y a un gros aspect planification qui est contrebalancé par l'importance d'être opportuniste par moment. Ce n'est pas le jeu numéro 1 sur boardgamegeek pour rien !

Ma BD de l'année

The Nice House on the Lake, tomes 1 et 2, gagnent la palme d'or de la BD 2023 ! C'est un comic — une bande dessinée américaine — de science fiction, un huit clos qui démarre très simplement et tourne, très rapidement, vers quelque chose d'angoissant. Il y a des interludes qui montrent un futur dramatique, un personnage très énigmatique qui est au centre de l'intrigue, des enjeux qui se développent progressivement pour atteindre une ouverture, à la fin du tome 2, qui donne vraiment envie de lire la suite ! Difficile d'en dire plus tant tout le plaisir de la lecture se trouve dans la découverte de cette intrigue, mais grosse recommandation de ma part.

Mon livre de l'année

Chose incroyable, en 2023, mon livre préféré n'est pas une fiction, mais un livre de productivité : How to take smart notes. L'auteur y présente une méthode de prise de notes créée par le sociologue Niklas Luhmann. La méthode est simple, mais demande une certaine assiduité pour qu'elle développe tout son potentiel. En résumé : prendre des notes temporaires, constamment, puis régulièrement les transformer en notes « permanentes », des notes autosuffisantes, rédigées, et surtout systématiquement mises en lien avec d'autres notes. L'idée est de se constituer une base de notes, qu'on relit régulièrement, en suivant des liens et surtout en en créant de nouveaux à chaque fois que c'est pertinent. C'est à la fois une manière de mieux apprendre, en se forçant à écrire ce qu'on apprend et les idées qu'on développe, et à la fois une manière de structurer sa pensée et d'articuler ses idées, pour les transformer et en faire des outils novateurs et impactant.

Conclusions sur l'année 2023

Bon, ben, quelle année bizarre — comme prévu. Bosser aussi longtemps sur un unique projet, ou presque, c'est éreintant. Heureusement, on a pu montrer du concret au cours de l'année, grace notamment à notre serveur discord et à la newsletter que j'ai lancée. Mais à l'heure du bilan, l'impression que rien n'a avancé est vraiment forte, bien que totalement fausse. Fin 2022, je déclarais que j'avais encore beaucoup d'énergie, là, je dois avouer que c'est moins le cas. Je compte sur cette année 2024 pour chambouler un peu tout ça et me rebooster !

Sur ce, je vous remercie chaleureusement de m'avoir lu, je vous souhaite une très bonne année 2024, et je vous dis à bientôt sur ce blog pour une grande annonce sur Dawnmaker !

The ruins of Dawnmaker's lost continent

Adrian — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 10:00:00 +0100

Today we are releasing a new version of Dawnmaker, with two big changes. The first one is the 2D board, which I talked about in my previous blog post. The second one is a new feature called "Ruins and Rewards". That feature… adds ruins and… changes rewards. Yeah. Pretty good name, right?

As with everything we do in this game, there is a good reason. So let's start with why we're changing things: feedback from our players! (But also feedback from a publisher, and observations from watching people play, but hey, ultimately it's players giving feedback directly or indirectly.)

There are four (4!) issues we're trying to address with this new feature:

The first decision in a run is too complex: you need to choose which buildings you'll want to have for your next game, before you've even got to play with your current buildings.
During a game, there are no decisions impacting the overall run. The game lacks interactions between the micro loop (building a city to secure a region) and the macro loop (improving your tools to reach the last region of the continent).
There are not enough variations between games, the board is always the same (with the small exception of lighthouses).
The game lacks an experience, a moment that is truly exciting, memorable, something that players can enjoy and tell their friends about.

Ruins

The first thing we decided to add was ruins. It was supposed to be part of a bigger feature that we call "the terrain", where we wanted to add various types of tiles throughout the board, like lakes, mountains, swamps, things like that. To reduce the scope, we chose to add only the ruins for now.

So how to they work? Ruins are scattered on the board when you start a game, but you'll never find one directly next to your Aerostation. Once you've brought light to a tile containing a ruin, you can explore it. It costs you two elders (the action points) and gives you a choice between three options:

The first option unlocks a new building. It is added to your roster of buildings, and you will be able to find it in your market (if you have reached the level of that building). You'll keep it until the end of the run, so it will be available to you in your next games, until you either defeat the final region or lose.

Sometimes you might not be interested in that new building, or you might have more short-term objectives that require resources. The other two options cover that: you can choose to not gain the new building (and you won't have another chance to unlock it during this run) and instead gain materials immediately, or science over the next three turns.

You never know what you'll find in a ruin until you explore it, so there's a bit of mystery there. You also have to make a decision between short-term goals and long-term development, improving the interactions between the micro and macro loops. Finally, we're hoping that exploring a ruin will be a good step towards making the game more exciting and memorable — but we'll need to add more juicy effects to truly make it sensational.

Rewards

Adding this ruins feature, and especially the part that gives the player new buildings, means that we need to re-think our rewards. Which is a good thing, because as I said in the intro, the first decision of the game (choosing between three packs of buildings) was too hard. It was also confusing players that they did not get to play the buildings they had chosen immediately.

So we've completely changed the rewards you get after securing a region: no more buildings — you need to explore ruins to get them. Instead, you get a choice between replacing a card from your starting deck with a new, better one (chosen amongst three options), or permanently removing a building from your roster — meaning it will not show up in your market anymore. This makes the first decision much simpler. We intend to add more types of rewards later on, but we wanted to playtest this simple version first.

And that's all I have for today! We're hoping this new feature will make Dawnmaker more enjoyable, and we'll be back soon with more good stuff for our game.

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Removing Dawnmaker's 3rd dimension

Adrian — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0200

If you've played Dawnmaker in the last 6 months, you will have noticed, hopefully, that the board was rendered in 3D. After having received a lot of questions and criticism about that feature, we've decided a few months ago to redo the whole board rendering in 2D. After two months of work, I am proud to announce that Dawnmaker will soon have a new version containing only two dimensions! Today we're going to dig deeper into the why and how of this transition.

The point of 2D

The debate of doing 2D or 3D has been a long discussion internally. What turned the tides was the Game Camp: we showed the game to a few publishers who almost unanimously criticized the fact that the game was in 3D. One question that really struck with me was: what value is 3D bringing to the game? We honestly struggled to answer that question, and so went back to the drawing board, wondering what it would take to switch the game to a 2D rendering engine, how long it would take, and what long terms benefits it would bring.

There were 3 main reasons why we decided to do 2D. First, over the course of the rest of the game, it would cost us less to get to the level of quality we wanted to reach. It is easier to do pretty assets in 2D than it is in 3D: in 2D, most of the rendering is done outside of the game, whereas in 3D the game itself has to do a lot of work to render pretty things. Doing 2D removes a lot of programming work, from complex rendering pipelines to optimizations.

The second reason is that doing 2D is intrinsically less uncertain. Rendering things in two dimensions is a lot easier than it is in three, and programming is also a lot simpler. Doing 2D reduces the potential for bugs, inconsistencies between different computers, operating systems, etc.

The last reason is that we intend to release Dawnmaker on mobile phones. And phones are a lot less powerful than PCs. Doing 3D on a phone requires another level of optimizations, especially regarding graphics rendering. We'll have different problems for mobile platforms with our 2D rendering (I'll get back to that), but we expect they will be a lot easier to manage than having to deal with advanced 3D rendering techniques for smaller devices.

Rebuilding the board

So we moved our game to a 2D rendering system. What did it mean? First, a lot of re-programming features of the game: showing the board, animating things like the creation of a building, redoing the Smog entirely (but in a better way, so that's good). It also means re-thinking our assets production pipeline. With 3D rendering, Alexis could work on a building in 3D, export it with its animations, and we could quite simply import it into the game and render it. With a 2D rendering system, it gets a bit more complex. Animations require using a large number of sprites (or images, it's the same thing), that you show one after the other to create movement, just like a movie. But loading many images can take a lot of memory really fast. So, we have to be smart about how we do animations: we cannot have 200 sprites for each building of the game — we intend to have about 150 buildings in the final game, meaning about 30,000 images to load. That would be too much for many devices, including computers. Instead, we are going to split the buildings into separate elements: the base of the building, and a few animations that we'll reuse on several different buildings. This way, we intend to have one unique sprite for each building, and a few dozens of animations, vastly reducing the size of the game and the memory load.

OK, that was a bit technical, my apologies to those of you who don't care much about that level of details. Here's a treat for you to thank you for reading our newsletter: a glimpse into the new 2D board! We've changed the artistic direction a bit, using this opportunity to improve some textures and decorations, like grass and trees.

The board in 3D, as currently available in our demo.

A glimpse of the new 2D board, that will be released in a future version of the demo.

This piece was initially sent out to the readers of our newsletter! Wanna join in on the fun? Head out to Dawnmaker's presentation page and fill the form. You'll receive monthly stories about how we're making this game, and the latest news of its development.

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Dawnmaker's endless conundrum of infinite replayability

Adrian — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0200

Over the last few months we've had the opportunity to show Dawnmaker to a lot of people, and notably a few publishers. We had the good fortune of receiving very valuable feedback on the game, which allowed us to identify two important problems with it, or at least, with its demo. The first problem is that our artistic direction isn't compelling enough, but that will not be today's topic — though we are, of course, working on it.

The problem we're going to discuss today it that of replayability. Some of our players, and most of the publishers we talked to, have expressed that they do not feel inclined to restart a game after they lose. Once you've understood the patterns of the game, restarting a new game feels like doing the same thing again, and it is boring. That feeling was especially pronounced for players losing in the 2nd or 3rd region of the demo: you have to restart at level one, a level that you have already mastered and don't feel like going through again.

This is a pretty big problem for a game that wants to have a high replay value, which is what we're aiming for. So today, I'm going to tell you about the key thing we're currently adding to the game as a first step to solve this issue.

The Challenge Mode

The challenge mode is the "roguelike" way of playing Dawnmaker, and is aimed to be the main play mode for players who are familiar with the game. It is composed of 2 main parts. First, each time you start a new run, you get a (semi)random roster of buildings. "Semi" because we want to make sure you can still win and have some fun, so we're making sure you won't have a list of buildings that is just unable to win. But, apart from a few checks, that roster will be random and you will have to deal with what you've been given. Sometimes you'll have obvious synergies, other times it will be harder to figure out a way to victory. We're fine with that, as that means each run will be different.

The second element is: rewards! Each time you finish a city and secure a region, you'll get two main rewards. The first one is a booster of buildings. You will receive 3 new buildings, that get added to your roster and thus will become available in your market starting with your next city. The game will feature a world map, allowing you to choose which region to go to next, knowing what buildings you will receive — somewhat like the map in Slay the Spire.

The second reward you'll receive is a card to add to your starting deck. You'll get to choose a card that was in your deck at the end of the last city, and put it in your starting deck, while removing another card from the deck. We expect this will make the early game much easier. Generally the first level becomes less interesting as you progress: by giving you stronger starting cards, you should be able to upgrade faster. We also hope this will lead to interesting and unexpected situations.

We are doing three things with this challenge mode: adding more randomness, which increases the diversity of situations ; adding more choices, which is what players strive for in strategy games ; increasing the power of your starting deck, reducing the time to get to the interesting parts in the later regions.

Our first internal playtests indicate that it's working as intended: the game is more enjoyable for us (players who have already played the game a lot), more challenging, and has a lot more depth. We're looking to having that feature ready in a few short weeks, and when it's ready we'll roll it out in the demo and let you all have a go at it!

Lastly on this topic of replayability, we have another feature cooking up to increase it: random terrain! How about having some lakes, mountains or ruins on your map when you start your new city? We're preparing that, but it will be a topic for another newsletter.

(I hope y'all enjoy my attempts at doing cliffhangers in a newsletter!)

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How much does it cost to make a game like Dawnmaker?

Adrian — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0200

While we were preparing for this year's Game Camp in Lille, we had to work on our pitch for publishers. Part of that was refreshing our budget and making it as accurate as we could, so that 1. we know exactly how much money we need to ask for in order to comfortably finish our game and 2. publishers can see how much the game would cost and compare that to their revenue estimates.

So, how much does it cost to create a video game like Dawnmaker? I thought it would be interesting to give you a breakdown of our current numbers.

Even a rather "small" game like Dawnmaker costs a lot of money to make. Our current estimation is that the game will require, from its beginning to its official release, 520k€ to make.

The art of not paying ourselves

At the time of writing, we have invested about 170k€ in the game. Does it mean we have actually spent all that money? Nope, because for most of the duration of the project until now, Alexis and I haven't paid ourselves. But that doesn't mean we're working for free: our work is still valued, and enters the budget. I estimate that we have currently not-paid ourselves 90k€ — that's what the company should have paid for our salaries : remove about half of it in various social contributions and taxes to get what we would have received.

The remaining 80k€ is money that we've actually spent. We've had a few freelances and employees that we paid. We've moved to some events (like the Game Camp this month) to talk to publishers and show our game. We're paying for services, like our documentation system, our email system, etc. And then there's the rest, all the little things that you don't necessarily think about but that add up to a significant amount of money: lawyers, accountants, payroll, insurances and so on.

Where did that money come from? A big chunk of it is personal savings put into the company by Alexis and I. The rest is public funding: we've received financial help from the BPI (the French Investment Bank) and the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. We're quite lucky in France that we have a good ecosystem of public funding, mainly with the CNC (National Cinema Center) and the BPI, and those days with more and more regions contributing as well.

On to the future

I said earlier that our estimated total budget was of 520k€. If we remove the already "spent" 170k€, that leaves us with a remaining 350k to spend. Those are mostly composed of salaries: ours of course, but also those of the team we want to assemble. We intend to grow to a team of 7 people in order to take Dawnmaker to the finish line. Our ideal team would be: a game designer (that's me), an art director (that's Alexis), a programmer, a 3D modeler, a UX / UI designer, a community manager and a producer. Of course, this is a projection given our current vision for the game, and it might evolve based on, well, many things: our vision, our finances, our partners, various opportunities, etc.

Anyway, my point is that it takes a lot of people to make great video games (there are exceptions of course — I'm thinking about you Miju Games), and people need to be paid for their work. We also have a principle that we want to pay people, and ourselves, decently. Hence, each individual contributor would cost between 3.5k and 5k€ to the company monthly. Multiply that by 7 people, over about 10 months, and you get an estimate of 300k€. The remaining 50k are for running the company, as I mentioned before: paying services, moving folks around, and so on. The more people you have, the more those little things add up!

After we've released Dawnmaker, I want to write another post about cost and compare what I wrote here today with what the actual cost of the game will be. We all have a tendency to under-estimate costs, let's see how we will turn out!

This piece was initially sent out to the readers of our newsletter! Wanna join in on the fun? Head out to Dawnmaker's presentation page and fill out the form. You'll receive monthly stories about how we're making this game, and the latest news of its development.

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L'état de l'Adrian 2022

Adrian — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 15:00:00 +0100

Il est l'heure, tardive, de faire le point sur mon année 2022 ! Vous allez le lire, l'année a été chargée, ce qui explique que j'ai un peu de retard dans la rédaction de ce billet… Mais pour me faire pardonner, je vous ai mis quelques recommandations culturelles à la fin !

Voici donc un résumé de ce que j'ai fait en 2022…

Projets principaux

Arpentor Studio

Mon projet principal en 2022 a évidemment été le studio de jeu vidéo que nous avons créé avec Alexis. J'ai raconté l'essentiel de l'histoire dans mon billet Starting a Games Studio [en], mais je voudrais revenir ici sur d'autres aspects de cette aventure, notamment sur certaines erreurs que nous avons faites.

En début d'année, nous avons rejoint l'incubateur Let's GO, porté par l'association régionale Game Only. Ce fût une excellente décision que de postuler, ce programme nous a apporté énormément de connaissances, de contacts, d'opportunités, et puis des bons moments de fun aussi ! Mais ça nous a mené à faire une erreur fondamentale : nous nous sommes laissés porter par les connaissances qu'on nous livrait, sans nous demander si c'était vraiment pertinent de s'en servir à ce moment-là.

Concrètement, nous avons modifié notre plan initial. Nous voulions nous concentrer sur la création d'un jeu relativement rapidement, entre un an et un an et demi. Entraîné par les formations, notamment sur les financements, nous avons révisé ce plan pour le faire grossir, impliquer plus de gens, dépenser plus d'argent pour pouvoir en demander plus, etc. Ce changement de stratégie a eu plusieurs conséquences :

Nous avons passé énormément de temps à faire des dossiers de financement, des pitch decks et autre documents de recherche d'argent, et pas assez à travailler concrètement sur notre jeu. Nous avons du coup pris beaucoup de retard sur la production de celui-ci. Hors sans jeu un minimum abouti, sans une vraie démo qui montre notre savoir-faire, impossible d'espérer signer un contrat avec un éditeur — ce sans quoi nous ne pourrons de toute manière pas terminer notre jeu.
Nous avons anticipé sur l'arrivée de financements qui, il s'avère, n'étaient pas aussi faciles à obtenir que prévu. Nous avons commencé à nous rémunérer Alexis et moi, nous avons recruté une employée, nous avons engagé des frais de déplacement sur des salons… Le fait de n'avoir pas obtenu le principal financement public sur lequel nous comptions nous a mis face à une situation qui aurait pu devenir critique : la faillite. Heureusement pour nous, nous avons su nous rattraper suffisamment tôt. Malheureusement, ça impliquait de nous séparer de notre employée, d'arrêter de nous salarier, et de réduire nos frais dans le futur.
Nous avons fait grossir notre jeu, ajoutant de nombreuses fonctionnalités, jusqu'à atteindre un point où j'estimais qu'il nous aurait fallut une équipe de plus de 10 personnes pendant un an et demi pour réussir à finir le jeu. Là aussi, nous avons su largement réduire la taille du jeu et revenir à quelque chose de plus raisonnable pour nous, sans (trop) compromettre la vision que nous avions.

Cette année a du coup été éprouvante pour moi, à faire un peu les montagnes russes : on a passé une partie de l'année à rêver d'une grosse production, de financements faramineux, de faire un jeu très ambitieux. Et puis le parpaing de la réalité s'est écrasé sur la tartelette aux fraises de nos illusions, et il a fallut revenir à des choses plus raisonnables, prendre des décisions difficiles, faire du mal à des gens.

Malgré tout ça, ou grâce à tout ça, j'ai énormément appris en 2022 : sur la production d'un jeu, la stratégie d'entreprise, le recrutement, les relations avec les éditeurs… Le timing n'était pas toujours le bon pour apprendre ces choses-là, mais je sais qu'on s'en souviendra le moment venu, et que ça n'aura pas servi à rien. L'essentiel, comme me disait récemment un grand homme, ce n'est pas de ne plus faire d'erreur : c'est de toujours faire de nouvelles erreurs.

Si je devais recommencer demain, je ferais en sorte de garder ce plan de commencer petit, et de grossir tout doucement. Commencer par faire quasiment des jeux de Jams, en quelques jours seulement, puis faire un jeu en un mois, puis en deux, puis en quatre, etc. L'idée étant de monter en compétence doucement mais sûrement, sur toute la chaîne de production d'un jeu vidéo, et de se faire connaître en sortant régulièrement du contenu. C'est un modèle qui a bien fonctionné pour d'autres studios, et qui me semble vraiment sain pour quelqu'un comme moi qui n'a pas 10 ans d'expérience dans l'industrie. C'est aussi, je crois, une bonne manière de créer une entreprise financièrement stable dans ce milieu difficile.

Pour conclure, Arpentor Studio va bien. En fin d'année, nous avons fait en sorte de bien redresser la barre, et nous nous dirigeons actuellement vers un cap qui nous semble plus cohérent, plus sûr. On ne sortira probablement pas de jeu en 2023, mais progressera énormément dessus, on fera grossir l'équipe, et on mettra en place tout ce qu'il faut pour sortir le meilleur jeu possible en 2024.

État : en cours.

Cities of Heksiga

Qui dit studio de jeu vidéo dit forcément jeu vidéo. Ça n'est pas vraiment un secret (même si j'en ai peu parlé), nous travaillons depuis un peu plus d'un an sur un jeu que nous appelons actuellement Cities of Heksiga. C'est un jeu de stratégie solo, pour PC et mobile, qui se déroule dans un univers de Fantasy Steampunk. C'est en quelque sorte un jeu de plateau numérique, à la Terraforming Mars par exemple, qui mélange deck building (améliorer un deck de carte au fil de la partie en acquérant des cartes de plus en plus fortes ou synergiques) et pose de tuiles sur un plateau. Je ne vous en dit pas plus pour le moment parce qu'on a encore beaucoup de choses à stabiliser, mais ça viendra bien assez tôt. Sachez qu'on vise actuellement une sortie pendant la première moitié de 2024.

Sur ce jeu, je suis responsable de la programmation (le jeu est codé avec des technologies du Web, en TypeScript, avec une interface qui utilise Svelte) mais aussi du game design, c'est-à-dire de la conception des mécaniques du jeu. Alexis quant à lui est responsable de la direction artistique, de la création de tous les assets graphiques, et de la narration du jeu. Nous sommes également accompagnés par Aurélie, qui créé la musique et tous les effets sonores qui viennent embellir l'expérience.

En 2022 j'ai travaillé sur plusieurs prototypes du jeu (j'en compte au moins une douzaine d'après notre documentation), itérant chaque fois sur les mécaniques centrales du jeu pour trouver une formule qui fonctionne. J'ai fait quelques prototypes papier, mais je suis rapidement passé sur des versions numériques, parce que nos mécaniques impliquaient tout un ensemble de calculs et d'actions automatiques difficiles à effectuer manuellement.

Le prototype de Cities of Heksiga au 12 janvier 2023

J'ai également travaillé sur des outils, notamment un outil de gestion du contenu du jeu : j'ai une interface très simple qui me permet de créer rapidement un nouveau bâtiment, ou de mettre à jour un bâtiment existant, puis d'exporter ça en un seul clic. Le fait que nous utilisions des techno Web me permet d'être très efficace là-dessus, et j'ai bon espoir de mettre en place un workflow de game design aux petits oignons d'ici quelques mois.

Fin 2022, nous terminons, enfin mais difficilement, notre phase de prototypage. C'est-à-dire que nous avons consolidé les mécaniques centrales du jeu, que nous les avons validées (bon, pas vraiment, mais c'est en cours et j'ai confiance) et que nous pouvons maintenant passer à la suite : créer une vraie démo qui déchire, et étoffer doucement le jeu en ajoutant de nouvelles mécaniques et du contenu.

Comme je l'ai dit dans la partie précédente, nous avons passé trop peu de temps à travailler sur ce jeu cette année. Mais ça a présenté un avantage : nous avons eu le temps de le faire tester, de prendre des retours posés et construits sur les forces et les faiblesses de nos différents prototypes. Au final, nous avons pu identifier des problèmes fondamentaux et les corriger, ce qui aurait été plus difficile si nous avions eu plus la tête dans le guidon. Un mal pour un bien !

En 2023, Cities of Heksiga devrait vraiment prendre forme, et passer d'un prototype à une véritable démo, puis à une vertical slice, une version représentative de ce que nous voulons que le jeu final soit. Nous prévoyons actuellement de sortir le jeu dans la première moitié de 2024.

État : en cours.

Projets secondaires

Souls

Souls, mon jeu de cartes compétitif en ligne, a fait une grosse pause en 2022. Au milieu de tout le reste, je n'ai tout simplement pas eu le temps de me remettre dessus. Mais tout mon travail à côté a pour objectif de monter en compétence et de créer un contexte dans lequel il sera possible de faire de Souls un succès. Donc quelque part, ça avance quand même !

État : en pause.

Board Game Jam 2

Voici mon gros projet secondaire de ces derniers mois : l'organisation d'une Jam de création de jeux de plateau. C'est une idée que mon ami Aurélien et moi avions depuis trèèèès longtemps, qui s'est enfin concrétisée début 2020 via l'association Game Dev Party… mais qui s'est fait couper en plein milieu par l'annonce du premier confinement. Je suis donc très heureux d'avoir enfin pu mener une vraie Board Game Jam jusqu'au bout !

Mais qu'est-ce que c'est que ce truc, me demandez-vous ? Une Jam, c'est un événement de création, initialement de jeu vidéo, en équipe, en général sur un week-end. On réunit une cinquantaine de personnes dans un même lieu physique, ils se répartissent en groupes et passent leur week-end à créer de toutes pièces, depuis zéro, un jeu vidéo. À Lyon, l'association Game Dev Party a fait de l'organisation de ces événement sa spécialité depuis 2011 — et j'en suis membre organisateur depuis 2012. Une Board Game Jam, c'est le même principe, mais pour les jeux de société.

La table de matériel mis à disposition des participant⋅e⋅s

L'événement a eu lieu mi-janvier, et s'est soldée par une franche réussite : environ 40 participant⋅e⋅s pour 9 jeux créés pendant le week-end. Le week-end s'est déroulé sans accroc majeur (oublions les quelques couacs techniques du dimanche soir), les gens avaient l'air heureux, et les jeux produits étaient incroyablement engageants et variés.

Je suis particulièrement ravi de cette formule. Travailler sur un jeu vidéo présente un réel challenge technique : il faut programmer, il faut illustrer, il faut sonoriser… Le temps d'itération est relativement long, entre le moment où on a une idée et le moment où on peut réellement la tester, clavier, souris ou manette en main. Avec le jeu de société, ce temps d'itération est très largement réduit. Une nouvelle idée de carte ? Un bout de papier, un crayon, et hop, la carte est créée et prête à être testée.

C'était épuisant de porter cet événement, mais je suis fier de ce qu'on a réalisé, et je compte fortement sur d'autres personnes pour organiser de nouveaux événements de ce type. Parce que c'est quand même super frustrant de voir tous ces gens créer des jeux et de ne pas participer !!!

État : terminé.

Blog

Je me note donc, pour mon moi du futur, de faire attention à rester ouvert : c'est éprouvant d'avancer sans que rien de concret ne « sorte », sans avoir la satisfaction d'avoir terminé quelque chose. Alors, Adrian de 2022 : n'oublie pas de parler de ce que tu fais, de montrer tes avancées, même si c'est moche, même si ça marche mal, parce que ça te donnera la sensation de progresser, et que ça t'aidera beaucoup !

Raté ! Je n'ai publié que deux articles en 2022 : How I did my market research on Steam [en] en mars puis Starting a Games Studio [en] en août. Ce dernier a été un énorme travail, que j'ai fait sur plusieurs mois, mais ça reste très insuffisant pour moi. Heureusement, j'ai quand même partagé mon travail, mais ailleurs : sur un serveur discord qu'on utilise pour les playtests de notre jeu, et au sein de l'incubateur Let's GO. Je n'ai pas ressenti le besoin de plus écrire, même si ça reste un objectif que j'aimerais tenir un jour. J'ai beaucoup appris de gens qui ont partagé leurs expériences avant moi, et je souhaite rendre ce service moi aussi. C'est dans cette démarche que j'ai écrit ces deux billets, mais je pense que je peux en faire plus.

Allez, objectif pour 2023 : 6 billets dans l'année, soit un tous les deux mois !

Mes recommandations de l'année

Pour conclure ce billet, j'ai envie de faire un truc nouveau : vous recommander quelques œuvres culturelles qui m'ont marquées cette année.

Mon jeu vidéo de l'année

Sans conteste, c'est Planet Crafter qui a été mon jeu de 2022. On y mélange survie, exploration et construction de base sur une planète inhabitable, et notre objectif est de la terraformer. Le jeu est en early access, mais son contenu est déjà énorme, et les mises à jour ont toutes été très bénéfiques. J'ai pris quelques grosses claques en découvrant certains lieux, j'ai passé des heures à me construire une belle base, la progression est excellemment maîtrisée, il y a toujours quelque chose à faire, bref : je vous recommande de jouer à Planet Crafter !

PS : j'ai découvert via le CanardPC de janvier que les créateurs de Planet Crafter sont un couple de Toulousains. Ils ont fait ce jeu à deux. C'est très impressionnant. :-)

Mon jeu de plateau de l'année

J'ai été conquis par Terraforming Mars: Expédition Arès. Ce mélange des cartes du merveilleux Terraforming Mars original avec la mécanique d'actions partagées de Race for the Galaxy a complètement fait mouche chez moi. C'est tout ce que j'aime : de l'engine building pur, avec de la planification, un poil de bluff, et juste ce qu'il faut de ressources. C'est accessible, et ça se joue (relativement) vite, entre 1h et 1h30.

Ma BD de l'année

Je décerne le prix de la BD de l'année à Bolchoï Arena, de Boulet et Aseyn. Le tome 1 date de 2018, mais je n'ai découvert la série qu'en 2022 à l'occasion de la sortie du tome 3 — pour une série prévue en 5 livres. Dans cette histoire de Science Fiction, on suit les pérégrinations d'une jeune femme dans le Bolchoï, monde virtuel en ligne particulièrement gigantesque qui reproduit à l'identique l'univers connu. Jusqu'à, bien sûr, qu'il se passe des trucs de ouf qui posent des tonnes de questions. On y retrouve de l'aventure, de l'exploration, de la géopolitique, des questions existentielles sur le rapport aux mondes virtuels, et bien plus mais je peux pas dire quoi pour pas spoiler. J'ai très très hâte de lire la suite, les trois premiers tomes sont excellents !

Mon livre de l'année

Andy Weir, auteur du livre de SF The Martian, qui a été adapté au cinéma dans un film éponyme avec Matt Damon (très bonne adaptation soit dit en passant), a sorti deux autres livres : Artemis et Project Hail Mary. Si Artemis est une lecture très agréable, Project Hail Mary a été une claque monumentale. Le personnage principal cynique à souhaite, la narration par flashbacks qui fait monter la compréhension et les enjeux, et un incroyable twist au milieu du livre qui change complètement la donne : j'ai adoré ce livre, et je ne peux que le recommander à tout le monde, c'est une merveille.

Conclusions sur l'année 2022

2022 fût une année encore plus éprouvante que ce que j'avais prévu. Mais j'ai énormément appris, sur beaucoup de choses. J'ai été tour à tour programmeur, game designer, producer, entrepreneur, recruteur, organisateur… Ça fait beaucoup pour un seul homme, c'est épuisant, mais je ne regrette pas ! Dans tout ça, j'ai tout de même vraiment réussi à me préserver, à ne pas me surcharger de travail, à prendre de (longues) vacances, et c'est une très bonne chose. Je ne suis pas cramé, j'ai encore plein d'énergie pour 2023, et je suis confiant sur l'avenir.

Bonne année 2023 à vous toutes et tous, chères lectrices, chers lecteurs, et merci de tout cœur de me suivre dans ces aventures !

Starting a Games Studio

Adrian — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 16:00:00 +0200

Since we released Phytomancer in October 2021, my associate Alexis and I have been working on our next steps: building our second game, and building the company that will make it. Today, I want to share the process we went through to create that company, and explain why we went through each of those steps. I will not discuss administrative tasks, as that is quite specific to France. Instead, I want to focus on what makes our company unique: who we are, what we do, where we're going.

Oh, and, there's a little announcement at the end of this post… ;)

Building a game studio

Photo by BP Miller on Unsplash

Building a company is something I've known I was going to do since I was 15. I remember going through a "career advice" session at school, where we laid out a simple plan: go to a computer science school, then do a one-year degree in commerce, then build a company to do computer software things. I took some detours on that road, but I'm glad I'm finally there!

The plan, of course, evolved a lot over the years. From reading about the workers-owned company model of Motion Twin to my frustration about hierarchy at Mozilla [fr], my vision of an ideal company got more refined. When I finally got started on this adventure back in December 2020 [fr], here are the few things that I knew I wanted for my company:

It has to be organized in a horizontal way: no bosses, no power abuses, no unjustified hierarchy.
It produces video games for a living, potentially other forms of cultural products later on. I have a say on what it produces and how it is made.
I do not want to be the only employee of that company, I want to work with others.

As it turns out, building a company with those expectations is not so simple. I had to go through a bunch of steps. Here's what I did:

Find partners to create the company with.
Define the core values of our company.
Establish a mid-term strategy for our company.
Create a business plan for our next game.
Get help and support building the company up.

I'm going to go into details for each of these steps, but first, let me share some resources that I found incredibly helpful in getting my head around this whole "creating a game studio" deal:

[article] 8 Questions to Ask Yourself When Starting a Games Studio — Tanya X. Short founded Kitfox Games, and here she shares 8 things that are super important to ensure your game studio survives. This is a must-read if you're creating a studio.
[video] Intensely Practical Tips for Growing an Indie Studio — A GDC talk by Alexis Kennedy about his experience creating and growing several game studios. There is a lot of great advices in here.
[video] Studio Design: Building a Foundation for Success and Avoiding Business Disaster — Another GDC talk, this time by Jason Della Rocca, that talks explicitly and exclusively about creating a studio in order to make it financially successful.

Step 1 - Finding partners

This step was, by a wide margin, the hardest one for me so far. After I left Mozilla in April 2019, I happily worked on my card game [fr] for about 7 months. But at some point I realized that I would not be able to tackle such a big project by myself. That's also when I remembered that I had a goal of creating a workers-owned games studio. I had to find other people to join me on this journey.

Photo by Christopher Paul High on Unsplash

My main problem was that I had no-one in my close circles willing to do it with me. The few people I wanted to work with sadly had other (great) plans, and thus I was alone. So I figured I would use the magic of the Internet to find like-minded folks. I posted a few articles on this blog to explain what I wanted to do, shared them on social media, and soon enough I had about twenty people wanting to talk to me about that project. That was scary.

Over a few weeks, I interviewed all of these fine people. I turned down only one of them, because I thought they were making a mistake — they wanted to drop out of school to join me. And then I ended up with a very different problem: I had too many people to work with! But there was also a big contradiction in my head. Something just didn't feel right in the way I was doing this. Let me explain.

I launched this process wanting to build this company in a cooperative way. I didn't want to be the leader or the boss, I wanted us to be a group that would cooperatively create a game studio. But at the same time, I had a much higher investment in this project than everyone else. I had been working on it for a while, had started it, had recruited everyone involved at that stage, and I had a vision for what it would be. I also intended to invest a lot of my personal money into it.

I was torn! I wanted to create the studio in an idealistic way: everyone is welcome, everyone is equal, everyone is involved in every decision from the start. But that required letting go of my control over this project. That required risking that my vision would not be followed.

I had a fundamental problem of trust. I did not know those 20 people. I had never worked with them. I was not able to trust them with my vision, my energy or my money. During some of my conversations, we said that associating ourselves was like getting married, but stronger. I clearly did not know any of them enough to get married with them. It took me a while to understand this, but when I did, it unlocked a lot of things for me.

One very important thing that happened to me, psychologically, was to accept that even though I wanted to create a very horizontal structure, the people involved were not and could not be equal. My involvement in this project is fundamentally higher, simply because it is my childhood dream, because I've been working on it for a long time, etc. It doesn't mean I can't create a company that works horizontally. It just means that, even in a structure that wants to be horizontal, there are inequalities, and that it is not a bad thing. We just need to identify them, acknowledge them, and make sure that everyone involved accepts them.

What did I do then? I got focused on a smaller task. Out of the 20 people that I talked to, there were 2 that I knew previously — one ex-colleague, one from a local association. We decided to start again with just the 3 of us, to slowly build that trust, and while we were at it, to build our first commercial game. That's how Phytomancer was born: we wanted to make a game in 3 months, from start to finish, put it up for sale, and verify that we could trust each others to create a company together. Very quickly in the process we agreed that we would need to get other folks on board: we only had the programming and game design skills among us. So I published a new post on my blog, but this time looking for specific skills and with a much more defined scope.

I won't go into details about how the Phytomancer project went, for I have done it already. If you're interested, please read Four Months of Horizontal Game Production. What matters for today's story is this: I was able to find someone that I could work with and that I was willing to associate with. Yes, only one person — out of the 7 folks I started the project with. It turns out finding someone to get married with is not easy. :-) That person is Alexis, who graduated in arts and game design, who can do pretty much everything graphics-related and even knows a bit of programming. Not only does he have a complementary skillset to mine, we also happen to very much agree on our visions of the company.

This first step, finding partners I could trust, took about 10 months. I envy all those entrepreneurs that just happen to know the right people when they start. But at the same time, I think there is real value in the process I had to go through. Alexis and I have already worked together on a real game, we have built a real trust that makes us confident, and that will take us far. We've had time to create a working relationship, to identify how we react and behave, and we know how to resolve our conflicts. That, I believe, is extremely valuable for the future of our company.

Recommendations on this topic

[article] Start with Who — Heard about Simon Sinek's "Start with Why"? Here's a case for starting with "Who" instead, especially when creating a community. I believe that applies strongly to starting a company.
[video] Game Studio Leadership: You Can Do It — A GDC talk by Jesse Schell, about running a game studio. Here I'm referring specifically to the part that starts at about 12:05, where he talks about finding people to start a company. That part's been really helpful to me.

Step 2 - Defining our values

The hard part being done, it was time to actually start working on our studio. I've never created a company before, so I did a lot of reading and watching and listening to folks sharing their experience. That's why I'm putting all those recommendations at the end of each section: they are great resources that helped me understand how it was done.

One of the most important things to do when creating a company is to understand why you're doing it. Why not just go work for an existing studio? Why specifically a game studio? Why a cooperative? These are questions that I found difficult to answer. I knew I wanted those things, but it was hard to explain exactly why. But this is crucial, especially when you're building it with other people. You have to agree on a certain set of fundamentals for your company. Those are called the "pillars", and we split them into 3 parts: our raison d'être (why we exist), our vision and our values.

Photo by Chris Brignola on Unsplash

Raison d'être

The raison d'être is literally our reason for being. It answers the question "why does our company exist". This is turned to the past, and serves to explain why we decided to create yet another company instead of joining an existing one. It also explains some of the major decisions in the next pillars. For example, here is the "raison d'être" we settled on:

We want to create a cooperative organization where we will have full creative control over our cultural productions.

We oppose authority that is not consented by those on which it is exerted. We believe that a cooperative organization is the optimal way to work together.

These are the intrinsic reasons why Alexis and I want to create a new company, and why we want to create it the way we do.

Vision

Next up is the vision. This one is turned towards the future: what ideal do we want to reach? This one matters because it gives us a shared sense of where we're headed. We have a clear direction, and that helps us making decisions. In our case, here's what we wrote:

We work in an organization whose main activity is creating and selling cultural artworks.

This organization works in a cooperative way, without non-consented authority, and combines efficient production with well-being in the work space.

We offer our audience artworks that make them think, learn and grow.

We dedicate a portion of our resources towards stabilizing and growing a network of cooperative companies that share our values.

This is the future we dream about. It's what we've set out to reach. Some of those things will be harder to do than others, and we might not be able to do them before a long time, but that's fine. What matters is that we've written it down, we agree on it, and we can reference it when the time comes to make tough decisions about our company.

Values

Finally, values are anchored in the present. They answer the question: "what are our fundamental beliefs?" These are the things that are the most important to us, today. They help define what we do and what we do not do. You could say that they are our "grand ideals", that absolutely have to be understood and shared by everyone in the company. Here are ours as of writing:

We maintain a work space that prioritizes the well-being of all members of our organization. That work space must be caring, inclusive, tolerant and encouraging diversity.

We ensure that all members of the organization understand the reasons behind our decisions and processes.

Any form of authority in the organization derives from the attribution of a role to a person. That authority is clearly defined and voidable.

We refuse to exploit cognitive biases in order to encourage our public to pay more money than they intended to spend.

These are the things we do from day one. We do not compromise on them. If we do something that doesn't fit our values, we have a big problem and we need to solve it as soon as possible.

Why should we do this work?

Photo by "My Life Through A Lens" on Unsplash

We defined our pillars for 3 main reasons. The first one is because it is very, very easy to assume that others think the same way you do. We human beings do that all the time. But in our case, a small assumption might later on cause a huge conflict. We actually had something like that come up while we were working on our raison d'être. We both agreed that we wanted to work in a cooperative way, but for different reasons. One of us deeply believed in cooperation as a core value, something that was absolutely not negotiable whatsoever. The other simply thought it was the most efficient way to work together. What would happen if, in a year or two, we came to the conclusion that cooperation was not the most efficient method for our company? We would have to face a really big conflict, something that touches our fundamental beliefs. By doing this work early, we were able to identify our difference, discuss it constructively, and preemptively make a decision.

Reason #1: to make sure we actually agree on the fundamentals of our company.

The second reason is conflicts. Conflicts are going to happen. There's no way around it. What we can do, though, is create a tool to help resolve conflicts. And that's exactly what those pillars do! By writing them down, you get a clear piece to reference to whenever you happen to disagree on something. It won't magically solve all your problems, obviously, but it will definitely help.

Reason #2: to provide a tool to help resolve conflicts.

Finally, even if these pillars are mostly an internal tool, I believe they are an excellent way to communicate externally, especially regarding recruiting. If you know your values and write them down, it's easy to share them and make sure the people that apply to join you are on board with them.

Reason #3: to help recruiting people that are a good fit for your company.

There's one important thing to note though. Those pillars are not meant to be set in stone. They can and should change over time, as your company changes. They should reflect your reality at all times. There's nothing more frustrating than having a dissonance between the pillars of a company and the way it actually works. That's why it's important to regularly look at your pillars, and make sure they're still valid for you. That will help you either correct your company's actions or correct everyone's understanding of the company.

Recommendations on this topic

[article] Mission, Vision and Values – Part 1: Why you need them, and how to define them — A short essay about this topic, with a more generic point of view.

Step 3 - Coming up with a strategy

Our next step was to decide on our long-term strategy. We know we want to make video games, but what kind? Where do we see ourselves, ideally, in 2, 5 or 10 years? What are the big things we want to achieve? What skills do we need to acquire or develop in order to get there?

Photo by Zoe Holling on Unsplash

Why are those questions important? Why not just focus on our current game? Because we intend to build a company that lasts, and doing that requires to look into the future. More precisely, if you don't anticipate your company's future at least a little, you risk falling into a number of traps. Here are the ones that I am aware of.

The main risk is simple: producing a video game is an excruciating process. Once you've finally finished your game and released it, then spent another month fixing last-minute bugs and issues, doing some amount of support, and so on, you'll be down on your knees. And at that precise moment, you'll have to start working on the next game. Engaging in a creative process when your energy bars are at their lowest is not a good idea. But you're running a company, you cannot simply rest and not do anything for a while — unless you have a shit-ton of money but hey, if that's the case, good for you! Anticipating on this is important. You must know what your next project will be before the current one is finished. If you have a strategy, a shared vision of where you want your studio to go, it will be easier to agree on what the next game should be.

But there are other reasons for defining your strategy. It helps decide what kind of skills you want to nurture in your studio, either by getting internal experience or with recruitment. It helps decide what sort of games you want to make, in order to get ready for your "big goal".

And finally, it forces you to look at the bigger picture, instead of focusing on your current project. That is especially important for budgeting. If you want to make another game after the current one, how much money (meaning, time) will you have after the first game is finished? How long will you have to find new sources of income or funding? Is it realistic to spend all your studio's money now? When should you stop development and release to make sure you'll be able to stay afloat? Having a long-term strategy helps you answer these vital questions.

Let's look at what we've done and intend on doing. We know we want to focus on strategy games. It's a genre that both Alexis and I enjoy, and for which I have some game design experience. We know I have this card game I've been working on a while now, and we both think it has great potential. We also know that we want to create and explore original fantasy worlds. So we agreed on a long-term goal: we want to bring our studio to a place where it will be ideally suited to tackle my online, competitive strategy card game. How do we get there?

We need to build some experience on strategy games, card games, online competitive games and world building. So our first game is going to be a strategy card game set in an original world. Our second game will likely be an online competitive game, probably building on our experience making a strategy game. Then we'll evaluate if we're ready to build our "big game".

We estimate we need to reach a size of about 10 to 15 people to be able to take on our big project. We don't need to hire 10 people right now, but we want to have a regular growth to reach that number in about 5 years. So we're currently focusing on identifying the key skills we need right now, and recruit just one person that fits that role. We'll hire the next one when it's relevant, keeping in mind the kind of skills we need for the long-term.

For example, we're planning to go into competitive online play, so we need to start building a community of dedicated players as soon as possible. We're going to work on our branding, on community management and communication, on building a core of players that will follow us through our next adventures. But since we don't have that skillset internally, we intend to hire someone focused on those tasks. If we were only focusing on our current solo game, that would seem like a mistake. But we know that, long term, it will have a huge impact.

We have a plan. It might change, it probably will, but at least we have a vision for our future, and we take that into account for our day-to-day decisions. I believe that is a strength that will play an important role in the long-term success of our studio.

Recommendations on this topic

[article] Your Studio’s Next Game Is More Important Than You Think — Tanya X. Short, already cited earlier, goes into details about why you need to have a strategy if you want to build a lasting game studio.

Step 4 - Making a business plan

Our goal, as I mentioned earlier, is to create a company that is sustainable. In order to reach that goal, we need to generate money, and we need to make sure that we always have enough money to pay all the things we have to pay: our own salaries, social contributions, taxes, accountants and lawyers, tools and services, and so on. This is the disenchanted heart of running a company.

Photo by Robert Harkness on Unsplash

There are many tools to use to manage a company's finances, but when you're just starting like us, the main one is the business plan. It's quite a simple tool, answering a simple question: what will your income and expenses look like for the next few years. When do you expect to earn money, and how much? What do you expect to pay for, when, and how much? Collect that information, put all of that in a spreadsheet, use some simple formulas to make sure that it all works out, and you have a plan!

Now the big question is: how do you find all that information? The answer is, of course: it depends! I'm going to talk about our specific case of starting a studio and making a premium PC game. There are 4 categories of information I'm considering:

General company expenses
Game production expenses
Funding
Game revenue

General company expenses

These are fairly simple to figure out. It's things like salaries, accountants and lawyers, travel and conferences, buying hardware and software, tools and services, taxes and insurances, etc. That list can be quite long depending on your activity. In our case, it's isn't, mostly because we're starting as simple as we can. We only listed 11 lines for our general expenses, but we very likely forgot many more. That's not a big problem: the goal is not to be comprehensive, but to get a general idea of the feasibility of your plan. We just need to make sure we covered the most important expenses, and then account for a little more to handle what we forgot.

Game production expenses

These are all the expenses related to making our game. In our case, as we don't have much experience, we went for a very simple list: external contracting, localization, software licenses, testing and Steam. The numbers we put in there are rough and probably wrong. Once again, the goal is not to predict the future perfectly but to validate that the plan can work.

This part is also evolving a lot as we make progress on our game. It's very difficult to anticipate what your production will look like when you're at the beginning of your prototyping phase, but as your vision for the game becomes more and more detailed, you'll get a better picture and will be able to make better predictions.

Funding

Making a video game requires that you have some initial money to cover the expenses that we listed above. Funding, whatever its form and source, is thus required. It can be personal savings, love money (from friends and family), investments, government funding, or anything else. It can be, and probably is in a lot of cases, a mix of several sources. This is where the real guessing starts: based on your expenses, you know approximately how much money you need, and when. You can then start making various plans: what if I get a bank loan of 100k€ in June? How much does that cost me over time? Does it get me through to the end of my project? What if I only get half of that money?

Having a way to visualize this information was great for me. I put all the information I listed above in a simple spreadsheet. One row per expense or income source, one column per month for the next 3 years. Then I filed the boxes, and added simple computations at the end of each row and column, answering those questions:

how much do we spend this month / this year?
how much do we earn this month / this year?
how much money will we have left at the end of this month / this year?

Using that tool, I can run simulations while knowing really quickly if it's working or not. Is there any month where we have negative money? The plan doesn't work. Is there any month where we have less money than we intend to spend on the following 2 months? The plan is highly risky. Do we having enough money left at the end of the project to move on to the next one? The plan can work!

Of course this is highly fragile. The data is full of guesses and mistakes. But if your plan puts you in a state where you just don't have any money left before you finish your game, then it's really important to know it and change the plan. This tool also helps figuring out what your deadlines are for finding money. For example, in one of our earlier simulations, we had a plan where we needed to find 100k€ before June this year, or the company would fail. That was a plan that we considered likely to fail, and thus we drafted a different simulation that gives us more time to find that money.

Game revenue

Now for the fun part! All of the previous categories were about making your game, but maybe the most important question is: how much is it going to earn you? Once you know that, you can answer some simple but crucial questions: is this game going to earn me more than it cost me? If not, should I actually make it? Will I be able to make another game after this one?

How can you figure out how much is your game going to earn, you ask? By doing… Market Research.

What's market research? Basically, it's three steps:

Find games similar to yours.
Get data about how much they sold.
Estimate how much yours is going to make based on that data.

This is big topic, and I actually published a dedicated article about it recently, so I won't repeat myself here and instead encourage you to go read it: How I did my market research on Steam.

Recommendations on this topic

[article] Making the Budget of Thimbleweed Park — The creator of Thimbleweed Park goes over how he handled their budget. Lots of information, things to remember, and a very simple spreadsheet to get a general view of your whole budget.
[article] What genres are players looking for on Steam? — If you want to make a living by selling games on Steam, it's a good idea to know what the Steam user base likes to buy. Chris Zukowski has a bunch of great articles on his blog about that.
[tool] Games-Stats.com — Games-Stats is a great tool that I used to do market research for our next game. It gives estimated revenue for games based on number of reviews, has search filters, ranking by tag, and so on.
[tool] Game Data Crunch — Game Data Crunch is another great tool to do market research. This one I used mainly for its filtering, as it allows to filter by several tags. Super useful when you're mixing genres and you want to see what other games have done it before!

Step 5 - Getting help

Building a company, especially if it's your first one, is super tough. The first few years are said to be the most difficult, and even with my limited experience, I can only agree. As of writing, I've been working on that project for about a year and a half, and we've had our official company for a few months. Getting started has been incredibly difficult: there are so many things to know, to think about, to handle at all times. Even with access to a lot of free knowledge on the Web, I found myself wondering if what I did was actually relevant or even just correct. The good news is: there are lots of people out there who can help you!

Photo by Dimitar Belchev on Unsplash

First and foremost, there are two key "companions" — probably a bad word as they are usually not colleagues but external consultants — that you need to find to create your studio: an accountant and a lawyer. The accountant is going to help you with everything that is related to the daily administration of your company, looking at your finances, doing taxes for you, and answering your questions about recruiting, funding, and much, much more. These people work with companies all the time, and they know a lot more than you do. Find one that you work well with, and ask them questions! It's their job to answer you as best as they can, to make your company succeed so that you can keep paying them! :D

The lawyer comes in less frequently, at least in our experience, but for key legal points. For example, we hired a lawyer to help us write our statutes and declare the actual, legal creation of the company. We'll ask them again soon about writing contracts for our first employee. They're helping us with our associates' pact. We meet with our lawyer less often but when we do it's really high value: we do not want to mess with legal stuff, as that can be very costly down the road. And if, at some point, you get into legal trouble, it's great to have someone you can turn to, who knows your company and your context.

Last but not least, I highly recommend joining a business incubator. My associate and I were reluctant at first, but finally decided to join a local incubator (dedicated to video games studios!) and I do not regret a single Euro we've payed them. The value is through the roof: masterclasses and workshops are nice, of course, but what really did it for me is 1. access to a large community of studio leaders with a vast amount of experience and 2. being part of a group of young studios doing the same things that we do. Even if you do not go with an incubator, keep this in mind: you are not alone in doing this. There are many, many people creating companies every year, going through the exact same steps that you do. If you can find others and talk with them regularly, that's going to be a great help for you: you'll gain knowledge, but also moral support — and boy is that needed when you're creating a company!

There's a lot more to creating a company than just these 5 steps, but I believe they are the most important ones to know about, especially if your goal is to create a studio that will live for years. Finding money is probably the sixth topic, and the next one in terms of progression — at least it is for us — but it's also a huge beast by itself. I've been doing a lot of that in the past few months, and I learned a lot, so I might write about that next. But first, I have to tell you about something special to me…

Welcome, Arpentor Studio!

I am proud to announce that everything I told you about here led to the creation, in March 2022, of Arpentor Studio! We are a new game studio based in Lyon, France. We have a flat hierarchy and work in a cooperative way. There are only 2 of us for now, but we intend to grow slowly and regularly over time. We want to specialize in deep strategy games in original Fantasy setups. Our first game is going to be a card game mixing deck building with city building.

Follow Arpentor Studio!

Thanks for reading this long piece! I hope I did not sound too pedant. I know we're a new company and my experience is limited, but I've been nerding about this topic for a while now and I hope this knowledge will be useful to others. Let me know if you have comments or questions in the comments below or on social platforms. And if you've enjoyed this piece, please consider giving us a follow on social networks! ;)

How I did my market research on Steam

Adrian — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 17:00:00 +0100

Late last year, my associate Alexis and I started working on our next commercial game. Our goal being not only to make games, but also to build a company and make it financially sustainable, we did market research very early in the process. Today I want to walk you through how we did that specific market research.

My goals with this article are, of course, to share my current knowledge with others, but also, hopefully, to learn from people who know better than I do. You see, this was my very first market research, and I've used what tools and knowledge I have to make it as solid as I could. But I'm just a beginner in this field, and I'm sure there are tons of things I've missed.

So, fellow junior game developer: here's how you can get started doing your market research. And dear senior developer: please share your tips and criticisms about my method! :)

What's my game?

The first part to doing market research is of course to know what to look for. You want to find out about your competition, past (mainly) and future. But to figure out who your competition is, you need to understand your game, your audience and your target platform.

In our case, we intend to create a game that's a mashup of different genres: deck builder, city builder and roguelike. The game is a solo, turn-based, strategy card game. We don't really understand our audience just yet, but we know that it's players who like to think strategically, take their time to play optimally, and enjoy card games. We're leaning more on the "deck builder" side than the "city builder" side.

As for our market, we're specifically targeting Steam. And this whole post is going to be only about researching the Steam market. I have no experience with looking for other PC platforms (like GOG or the Epic Game Store) nor any consoles. And as far as I understand, mobile is a entirely different beast. So, let's just focus on Steam.

Summary

Figure out the genre of your game.
Figure out the Steam tags of your game.

Who's my competition?

Once you know your game, you can start looking for its competition. Start making a list of games that are similar to your game in some aspect. You probably have a few games in mind when thinking about this, and that's a great start. But you probably won't know your entire competition, so you'll need to do some actual research to make sure you have a full understanding of the market. This is where I get to share the first tools I used.

In our case, our games of reference where:

Slay the Spire — the most successful roguelike deck builder as of writing;
Dorfromantik — a chill game where you build your map one hexagonal tile at a time;
Humankind — a 4X, but we're looking specifically at the city construction part.

These are great as inspiration, but not so much as comparison points for the game we're building. All of them were huge successes that we do not hope to reproduce, and they are not quite the same as the game we're building. So we started looking for games closer to the one we intend to build.

There are several tools that came in handy to help us. The first one was Steam itself. There are two useful features on steam: tags, and "More like this game". Both are great for discovering games. Using tags is simple: figure out the tags that match your game, and browse them on Steam. For example, we knew our game was going to be a deck builder with roguelike elements, just like Slay the Spire, so we looked at the Roguelike Deckbuilder tag page on Steam. Lots of great data points there, with top sellers, top rated, but also upcoming games in the genre.

The "More like this" feature is also a great way to find new games. We started with Slay the Spire, and looked at what Steam recommends as similar games. Again, this is super useful for finding games that sold well, but also games that are not out yet, as those have a dedicated section. We basically browsed that page, going from game to game, adding to our list the games that were relevant.

However, in our case, we were not looking for just one tag or one genre, but for games that were at the intersection of several. When looking a tag or games similar to an established game, we found plenty of games, but few that overlapped with the other genres or tags we cared about. This is a problem specific to building games that are a mashup of genres: the games of one genre might not be representative of what you're building. We looked at "More like this" games in other genres, starting from city builders I played, trying to go down the list. But ultimately, we needed a better tool to look for games that were in between those two main genres of our game.

Enter Game Data Crunch. This is one of several websites that crawl public Steam data and show it in ways that's helpful for market research. One very sweet feature is the possibility to search for several tags at a time. In our case, we started with the list of games with the Deckbuilding tag. Then we added, via the User tags list to the right, the City Builder tag. And boom! We had a list of 15 games that have both tags. We've used that tool with several other combinations of tags, and that was really helpful in figuring out exactly what our competition was.

Here's the list of 14 relevant games we ended up with, based on research using the above methods:

Slay the Spire (Mega Crit Games, 2019)

Summary

Look at the tag page for relevant tags on Steam.
Look at the "More like this" page for your games of reference on Steam.
Use a tool like Game Data Crunch to do some more fine-tuned exploration of genres and tags.

How much can I make?

Now the really important question we're trying to answer with a market research is: how much are we going to earn with our game? And it's also the hardest information to find out, as there is very little publicly available data to help. The video game industry is known for being very secretive. But things are getting better thanks to folks that are willing to share, to studies that help us make estimations, and some publicly available data, notably on Steam. There are tools out there that use all of that data to derive revenues of many many games. I'll tell you about the one I used.

But first, a bit of theory. The main data point that is publicly available on Steam is the number of reviews. There's historical data about that, and thanks to folks who have run studies, we can use it to estimate revenue. There is one number that is known as the Boxleiter number (apparently coined from Mike Boxleiter who had the original idea, and later updated as the "New Boxleiter" number by Simon Carless). This number tells us that for each review, there were approximately 40 units that were sold. (Note that this number varies year to year, in 2020 the estimate was between 38 and 41 units per review. Read Simon Carless's article linked above if you want to know more.)

Before We Leave (Balancing Monkey Games, 2021)

So, using that "magic" number, the price of game, and various other available data points (like sales or regional pricing), some tools provide estimates of a game's revenue. One such tool is Games-Stats.com, and I used it to my market research for our current game. Games-Stats offers an estimation of the total revenue that each game available on Steam generated over their lifetime. And if you pay for the Pro version, you can also get access to more detailed data, like revenue over time. They have historical data going back to early 2020, when they launched the tool, if I'm not mistaken.

So, how did I use that tool? I was interested in revenue during the first year. For each game that I listed in the previous section, I looked at the data on Games-Stats.com. If it had historical data for the first year, I just took that number and put it in a spreadsheet. Otherwise, if the game was too recent or too old, I estimated the first year revenue. For old games, I just guesstimated. For recent games, I looked at the first week revenue and multiplied that by 3 (once again relying on work by Simon Carless).

Two important bits of info before I go on. First, these are estimates. They are not real numbers, and can be completely wrong. But chances are, over a big enough number of games, your average should be kind of correct? Some numbers is better than no numbers anyway. Second, this is raw revenue, meaning the amount that folks payed in total for buying the game. It's definitely not what the developers made: you have to remove Steam's platform cut, taxes, and probably other things. Either take those into account in your business plan, or, if you just want an idea of how much money you'll get, divide the number by 2.

So, here's the data that I gathered:

Game	1st Year Revenue
Slay the Spire	$25 000 000
Dorfromantik	$1 600 000
Ratropolis	$1 300 000
Kingdoms Reborn	$1 200 000
Spellcaster University	$930 000
ISLANDERS	$730 000
As Far As The Eye	$630 000
Before We Leave	$260 000
Dream Engines: Nomad Cities	$150 000
Kainga: Seeds of Civilization	$100 000
Concrete Jungle	$30 000
Fantasy Town Regional Manager	$15 000
Feudalia	$1 000
Sky Tale	$1 000

The average revenue is ~$2,3M and the median is $445 000. There's an obvious outlyier in my list with Slay the Spire, and two games that really didn't bring any revenue, so I wanted to look at the results without those extremes. With just the middle 11 games, the average is $631 363 and the median is $730 000.

Dorfromantik (Toukana Interactive, 2021)

From there, I wanted to build scenarios to measure against my business plan. I decided on a "target" that I find credible based on this data: 500k€ of first year revenue. I have a "low" scenario, where we only make about 100k€ in the first year. And there's a "high" scenario where we go through the roof and make more than a million euros. But that one is here just to have a dream, I don't plan on it happening.

Anyway, I can now use that data for two things. First, to make sure that my budget is lower than the expected revenue, and that at the end of the project we'll at least break even. Second, to show potential financial partners how much we expect to make and how that makes our business plan credible.

Summary

For each game you listed, look it up on Games-Stats.com and note its first year revenue.
Compute the average and median revenue of those games.
Make several scenarios of expected revenue for your game based on that data.

That's it folks!

This is how we made our market research for our next game! I have no idea if this the best way to do it, or even if it's just a good way, but heh, it's helped us! We actually had two prototypes we wanted to choose from, and using this method we were able to very quickly eliminate the other prototype, as a simple market research showed that it would not generate nearly enough revenue.

I hope this will be useful! And if you have ideas, tools or methods you want to share to improve the process, I'll be very glad if you could share them in the comments below.

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L'état de l'Adrian 2021

Adrian — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 15:00:00 +0100

J'ai du mal à y croire, mais l'année 2021 se termine déjà. Voici donc le moment de faire le point sur cette période qui marque concrètement un tournant dans ma carrière : je suis désormais officiellement créateur de jeux vidéo. Pour preuve : des gens ont dépensé de l'argent pour jouer à un jeu que j'ai créé !

Au moment de faire le bilan de cette année, je me rends compte que ce premier jeu, et sa suite, m'ont pris toute mon énergie et tout mon temps. Si l'année dernière j'ai pu être créatif, prototyper des jeux, apprendre énormément sur la conception de jeux, en 2021 je me suis au contraire focalisé sur des choses beaucoup plus terre-à-terre. Voyons donc ensemble ce que j'ai fait ces douze derniers mois…

Projets principaux

Voici les trois projets qui sont les plus importants pour moi, et auxquels j'ai dédié l'essentiel de mon temps — ou pas.

Souls

Mon projet de jeu de cartes compétitif en ligne, sur lequel je travaille depuis 7 ans, a malheureusement été le grand perdant de cette année 2021. Si j'ai mis au point un nouveau prototype papier, auquel j'ai fait jouer quelques rares personnes, je n'ai pas pu le concrétiser en une version numérique que j'aurais pu faire tester à plus grande échelle.

La bonne nouvelle, c'est donc que j'ai une « nouvelle » version, et que celle-ci fonctionne vraiment bien. Les sensations de jeu que m'ont rapporté les chanceux qui y ont joué sont celles que je cherche à faire ressentir depuis longtemps. Le jeu tourne bien, les choix sont intéressants, et surtout ça ne ressemble à aucun autre jeu que je connaisse.

Mais Souls a un énorme problème : c'est un projet très compliqué à mener à bien. Les raisons sont multiples. D'abord il y a la compétition : le marché des jeux de cartes à collectionner en ligne est bouché par quelques acteurs bien ancrés (Hearthstone, Magic Arena, Legend of Runeterra) et aux moyens faramineux. Dur de faire son trou à côté de ces jeux sans avoir soi-même des moyens financiers solides. Conséquence de cette compétition, pour sortir un jeu qui intéresse les joueurs, il faut un niveau de qualité très élevé. Hearthstone et Legend of Runeterra sont des jeux très bien réalisés, aux interfaces ultra léchées, qui sont très faciles à utiliser. Si je veux faire de Souls un véritable succès, il faut donc que je me donne les moyens de créer un jeu impeccable. Et pour ça, y a pas de secret : il faut de l'expérience et de l'argent. J'ai donc choisi de mettre Souls en pause, en le gardant comme objectif à long terme. Pour l'instant, je me concentre sur des projets plus petits, mais qui me permettent de monter en compétence dans des domaines qui serviront, à terme, à faire de Souls le jeu dont je rêve.

État : en pause.

Studio coopératif

J'ai écrit « je » dans mon dernier paragraphe, mais j'aurais pu dire « nous » ! Eh oui, du côté studio de jeux vidéo coopératif, les choses se sont concrétisées. J'ai un futur associé, Alexis, avec qui nous allons bientôt monter la structure juridique. Nous avons un nom de studio (qu'on annoncera lorsque tout sera créé / déposé), et nous avons un nouveau jeu dans les tuyaux (là aussi, j'en reparlerai en 2022). Bref, tout se passe bien de ce côté, et 2022 sera une année extrêmement riche à nouveau. Mais comment en suis-je arrivé là ?

Si vous avez lu mon bilan de l'année dernière, ou que vous suivez un peu mon blog, vous avez dû voir passer mes appels à collaboration. À la suite de ça, j'ai passé les trois premiers mois de l'année à essayer de constituer une équipe pour créer le studio. J'ai géré ce processus de manière assez catastrophique : j'ai discuté avec une vingtaine de personnes intéressées par le projet. Des gens motivés, intéressants, aux profils variés, bref : c'était super motivant. Mais je me suis rendu compte, au bout de quelques semaines, que ce n'était pas la bonne approche. J'ai voulu, dès le début, créer quelque chose de commun et le construire avec tout le monde, de manière très horizontale. C'était une erreur, et j'ai mis du temps à le comprendre. Mon objectif est de créer une entreprise, dans laquelle je veux investir beaucoup d'énergie et d'argent, et pour laquelle j'ai une vision déjà bien définie. Or je me suis retrouvé à interagir avec une vingtaine de personnes que je ne connaissais pas, avec qui je n'avais jamais travaillé, et donc en qui j'étais fondamentalement incapable de faire confiance. Avant de se jeter la tête la première dans une création de studio, il fallait d'abord créer de la confiance.

Donc j'ai repensé mon approche : j'ai constitué une petite équipe de trois personnes, et nous avons décidé de commencer par créer un jeu ensemble. Nous voulions faire un petit jeu, mais surtout aller jusqu'au bout du processus, pour bien valider qu'on peut travailler ensemble. On a donc pris un peu de recul, on a conçu une idée de jeu, et on a préparé un cadre pour la création de ce jeu. Partant de là, j'ai relancé une campagne de recherche de collaborateurs : nous étions deux programmeurs et un game designer, nous voulions nous adjoindre les compétences d'un⋅e artiste, d'un⋅e sound designer et d'un⋅e expert⋅e en marketing. Ce petit groupe constitué, nous avons commencé à travailler sur Phytomancer, qui deviendra, quelques mois plus tard, mon premier jeu commercial. J'en reparle dans la section suivante !

Cette approche a été très bénéfique. D'abord parce qu'une équipe de 8 personnes est bien plus simple à constituer et à gérer. Ensuite parce qu'avoir un projet de jeu, bien défini et bien cadré, a grandement simplifié la constitution de l'équipe et le lancement du projet. Et enfin parce que ça nous a permis de rentrer très rapidement dans du concret : la création d'un jeu vidéo. Par ailleurs, c'était un projet sans réelle contrainte : on ne comptait pas dessus pour gagner de l'argent, on ne se payait pas, il n'y avait pas d'entreprise derrière, bref, c'était idéal pour se tester. Toute personne à qui ça ne convenait pas était libre d'arrêter à tout moment, et c'est d'ailleurs arrivé, puisqu'en ayant commencé à huit, nous avons terminé à quatre.

Phytomancer, enfin, nous a permis de vérifier que nous étions bien aptes à travailler ensemble. Et grand bien nous a fait, puisque ce n'était pas le cas ! Une fois le projet terminé, j'ai donc continué mon aventure avec une seule des personnes qui ont bossé sur Phytomancer : Alexis, qui a fait une bonne partie des assets graphiques du jeu, ainsi que toutes les animations du jeu. Après une courte pause, nous avons entamé le travail sur la suite des événements pour nous : d'un côté la création d'une entreprise, et de l'autre la préparation de notre prochain jeu.

Nous avions deux idées avec un peu de potentiel pour notre prochain projet, l'une pour un jeu rapide à créer mais sur un marché très petit, l'autre plus complexe et plus long, mais sur un marché très porteur. Après avoir créé un prototype simple pour chacun des jeux, nous avons rapidement décidé de nous lancer sur le jeu plus complexe. D'abord, l'étude de marché du premier jeu montrait des perspectives de revenu très limitées, mais surtout, nous sommes tous les deux très emballés par le concept du second jeu. Depuis début novembre, nous travaillons donc à la préparation de la création de ce jeu. J'ai fait une étude de marché plus poussée, avec des estimations de revenu et de temps de production. On a écrit plusieurs plans de financement, du plus optimiste au plus pessimiste. Et bien sûr on a longuement discuté et documenté ce que l'on veut faire de ce jeu !

En parallèle de ce travail, nous avons également construit les fondations de notre studio. Nous avons écrit nos piliers : raison d'être, mission et valeurs, qui définissent notre projet commun dans cette entreprise. Nous avons documenté notre fonctionnement, afin de clarifier nos processus et de permettre à de nouveaux arrivants de se les approprier rapidement. Et nous avons discuté, rediscuté, et rerediscuté d'un potentiel nom pour notre studio… C'est incroyable de se dire que c'est probablement la partie la plus difficile !! Mais a priori, on a trouvé un truc du tonnerre, cette fois c'est la bonne… Je vous annonce ça ici dès qu'on aura tout mis en ordre, déposé la marque, etc.

État : actif.

Phytomancer

Comme dit précédemment, j'ai sorti mon premier jeu commercial en 2021 ! La création de ce jeu s'est étalée sur environ sept mois, de mars à octobre. Il y a eu un mois de préparation et recrutement, puis six mois de production concrète. Nous étions 8 personnes au tout début (Alex, Alexis, Ana Maria, James, Laurent, Mathieu, Pierre et moi), et plus que 4 pour les deux derniers mois (Alex, Alexis, James et moi). J'ai raconté une bonne partie de l'expérience que ça a été dans mon billet (en anglais) : Four Months of Horizontal Game Production.

Phytomancer a occupé plus de la moitié de mon année. J'ai fait l'essentiel de la programmation du jeu, et un peu de gestion de projet. J'ai aussi géré une partie de la communication lors de la sortie du jeu, en postant sur divers réseaux sociaux notamment. Ça a été une expérience incroyable, une énorme montée en compétence sur des domaines très divers. Il est très difficile de se rendre compte de la quantité de travail qu'il faut pour terminer un jeu. On pense avoir fait 80% du travail, et il en reste encore 80% à faire. Un bon jeu, c'est beaucoup de détails, de petites choses qui améliorent la vie du joueur, de signes et de feedback qui rendent la compréhension intuitive, etc. Toutes ces choses prennent un temps fou.

Je ne pense pas qu'on ait fait un travail parfait sur Phytomancer, loin de là, mais nous avons fait de notre mieux dans le temps qu'on s'est donné, et je suis sincèrement fier de ce que l'on a produit. Et évidemment : le prochain jeu sera meilleur !

Phytomancer est disponible à la vente pour 3€ sur itch.io.

État : terminé.

Projets secondaires

J'ai pu en 2021 consacrer un petit peu de mon temps à des projets annexes. Malheureusement, je n'ai avancé sur aucun des jeux de plateau que j'ai entamé l'année dernière. Difficile de dire si j'y retoucherai en 2022, mais ça me ferait plaisir.

Game Jams

J'ai participé cette année à deux Game Jams — des événements, généralement sur 48h, de création d'un jeu en équipe ou en solo. D'abord la GMTK Jam 2021, organisée par Mark Brown de la chaîne youtube Game Maker's Toolkit, chaîne qui parle de game design et dont j'apprécie beaucoup le contenu. La GMTK Jam est orientée gameplay original, et le thème cette année était « Joined Together ». J'ai publié un billet (en anglais) qui raconte ma participation : Your Soul has been Shattered.

Et j'ai également, enfin, à nouveau participé à une jam de la Game Dev Party, cette asso lyonnaise dont je fais partie depuis 2012. C'était notre première jam en présentiel depuis fin 2019, et c'était un plaisir de retrouver cette ambiance si particulière. Le thème de cette jam était « négation ». J'y ai participé en tant que game designer, et j'ai proposé le concept suivant : un jeu de plateforme dans lequel on commence avec tous les pouvoirs possibles, mais à chaque fois qu'on remplit un objectif du jeu, on perd un de ces pouvoirs. Le but est de terminer le jeu en contrôlant, à la fin, un personnage très faible. Nous avons constitué une équipe composée de Maeva (graphiste), Cédric et Robin (développeurs), et Jean et Maxime (compositeurs et sound designers). Le jeu que nous avons produit s'appelle Herrant et il est disponible au téléchargement sur itch.io.

Publications sur mon blog

Je m'étais donné pour objectif, fin 2020, de communiquer plus sur mon blog, pour partager mon expérience de création de studio, mes recherches en game design, etc. Si je n'ai publié que 10 billets sur l'année (sans compter celui-ci), je suis satisfait de leur qualité. Mes deux belles réalisations sont d'abord ma série sur les jeux de cartes à collectionner numériques, puis mon post-mortem sur la production de Phytomancer.

A Study of Digital Card Games m'a demandé beaucoup de temps de rédaction : presque 9000 mots répartis sur 6 articles, avec à chaque fois des relectures de plusieurs amis, mais également de la recherche sur certains sujets, des discussions, etc. C'était un gros travail que je suis fier d'avoir mené à bout ! En terme de visibilité, c'était une bonne réussite étant donné le sujet très niche : entre 100 et 300 vues sur chaque article. Rien de fou, mais à mon échelle, c'est très bien.

Four Months of Horizontal Game Production, en revanche, a pété les scores avec plus de 1500 lectures ! Ce fût grâce, notamment, au bon accueil qu'à reçu l'article sur le reddit /r/gamedev/. Ce billet est un retour de mon expérience sur les quatre premiers mois de la création de Phytomancer, sur ce que nous avons bien fait mais surtout ce que nous avons mal fait.

Je suis content d'avoir réussi à publier plus qu'avant sur mon blog, mais j'ai bien noté une grosse baisse de régime ces derniers mois. Je cherche donc à m'y remettre, et à partager notamment plus sur mes questionnements d'entrepreneur, sur la manière dont nous créons notre studio, mais également sur la création de notre prochain jeu.

Conclusions sur l'année 2021

Comme je l'avais prévu dans mon édition de l'année dernière, 2021 a été une année riche ! Pas forcément du point de vue créatif, même si j'ai pu me remettre dans le game design ces derniers mois, mais complètement du point de vue de la concrétisation de ma nouvelle carrière de développeur de jeux vidéo. J'ai sorti mon premier jeu commercial, j'ai mieux intégré l'industrie du jeu vidéo, notamment à Lyon, et j'ai appris énormément, vraiment énormément, sur la création d'un studio, sur la production d'un jeu, sur la manière de s'organiser en équipe horizontale, et sur bien d'autres choses encore autour de ce nouveau métier que je fais désormais.

Quant au futur, les choses s'annoncent très bien : notre studio sera créé dans les prochaines semaines () et nous avons un plan qui me semble solide pour la création de notre prochain jeu. Notre duo avec Alexis est fonctionnel et complémentaire et, je l'espère, nous mènera loin. Bref : j'ai confiance en l'avenir !

Si j'en crois les plans que nous avons fait, 2022 va être une année étrange : nous ne prévoyons pas de sortir notre prochain jeu avant 2023. Ce sera donc une année qui sera marquée par un million d'événements importants, des recherches de financement aux partenariats, en passant par les démos et les tests, les conventions, le réseautage, etc. Mais sans sortie de jeu. Sans réalisation concrète.

Je m'attends à une année éprouvante, notamment parce que nous entamons une longue période de travail (au moins un an et demi) durant laquelle nous aurons la tête dans le guidon. Je me note donc, pour mon moi du futur, de faire attention à rester ouvert : c'est éprouvant d'avancer sans que rien de concret ne « sorte », sans avoir la satisfaction d'avoir terminé quelque chose. Alors, Adrian de 2022 : n'oublie pas de parler de ce que tu fais, de montrer tes avancées, même si c'est moche, même si ça marche mal, parce que ça te donnera la sensation de progresser, et que ça t'aidera beaucoup !

Quant à vous, chères lectrices, chers lecteurs, merci de suivre mes aventures, et je vous souhaite une excellente année 2022 !