The Discreet Charm of Solo Dev
It can be really great! But it also really sucks...
As technically a “solo dev” myself, I find that I am both fascinated and repulsed by other stories of lonely gamemaking. It can be incredibly navel gazey, as with Davey Wreden’s The Beginner’s Guide, and it can be borderline self-destructive. Eric Barone’s seemingly self-destructive tendencies were only vindicated as a result of an extremely understanding girlfriend and the fact that Stardew Valley made a truckload of money. The reality of most solo dev work is that you don’t meet with incredible financial success, calling into question whether it’s worth becoming a hermit and possibly destroying your relationships with other people all for a game.
Maybe that’s a bit melodramatic. Making a game doesn’t have to ruin your life, but if it nearly does, as with Barone, it makes for a more dramatic story and contributes to a bizarre mythos that great works only result from great suffering. It’s that same mentality that leads to crunch, to burning through people like they’re cheap firewood and not the very font of creativity that making games depends on. Oh well, there’s always another dozen recent grads we can underpay and overwork, all because games are considered a dream job.
In the latest Furidashi episode, we refer back to Jason Schreier’s reporting on the history of Stardew Valley’s development as something of a cautionary tale. Sure, Barone found success with his homage to Harvest Moon, but in Schreier’s telling, the ending to that story is far from triumphant. There’s something tragic in Barone’s success, and the man himself seems to know this.
[I]nsecurity kept creeping in. Barone felt like a tourist in a foreign country, trying to absorb decades’ worth of gaming knowledge as publishers wined and dined him. He had always liked video games, but until now, he didn’t know much about the culture surrounding them. “I was thrown into this crazy world all of a sudden,” he said. “I went from being an absolute nobody to suddenly being thrust into this scene, which I felt like a total outsider from… I’m just a guy who got lucky, and happened to make the right game at the right time.” (Blood, Sweat, and Pixels p. 82)
The odd reality is that if you find success as a solo dev, you rarely get to stay that way. The nature of the industry is such that, in order to keep that success going, you will be pushed to scale in ways that aren’t even possible, much less feasible, on your own. Stardew Valley worked, precisely because its ambitions were limited to what Barone himself could achieve on his own. Expecting a single individual to then figure out how to port their game to every single platform in existence is just too much. There are entire studios devoted just to doing that.
A Game’s Underlying Intent
Doing things on a more limited scale or with an indefinite, self-determined time frame, though, allows us to ask questions that most large studio operations preclude. Like, for instance, who or what is a game even for? Within an industry space, it’s hard to avoid always having to think of your game as a consumer product. Obviously, media represent an interesting interplay between the desire to express oneself creatively and the need to cater to the bottom line, but most studios cannot function without some source of revenue, be it from sales or a publishing contract or, as the Sokpop Collective does it, through a subscription based system.
Solo dev work can easily explode this assumption. A GM might create an elaborate homebrew setting for an existing RPG with new classes, backstories, locations, and abilities that only their friends ever get to see. Brenda Romero’s tabletop games like Train and Síochán Leat (“peace be with you” in Irish) tell very personal stories while also engaging the player in a kind of historico-ethical lesson. In my own work, I’m very interested in developing new storytelling mechanics that break down the presumed barrier between gameplay and story as “narrative wrapper.” In each of these cases, the dev has little or no concern for how the game “sells” but rather in people thoughtfully engaging with what they’ve created.
As a commercial game—you can buy it right now on Steam!—Wreden’s The Beginner’s Guide operates from this basic questioning of what and who a game is for. In it, a fictionalized version of himself tells the story of his interactions with a designer named Coda—almost certainly fictitious—and their various experimental games. As the game progresses, it’s clear that Coda has grown increasingly frustrated with Davey and starts to embed explicit critiques of their relationship in the games themselves. As an allegorical exercise, you could take this a number of ways: as Wreden struggling with his own success after The Stanley Parable through thinly veiled personifications or as a metaphor for the relationship between designer and player, how players’ demands on the creative process can become crushing and impossible to deal with. Regardless of how you take it, it’s clear that here the who and what of a game’s purpose is entirely up in the air, something for the player to figure out through their own gameplay experience.
The Beginner’s Guide is both more and less intentional than the work of someone like Romero. Where her games have a pretty clear object lesson in mind—about fascism or the nature of settler colonialism—Wreden’s work is more open-ended. He adheres to the game’s fictive reality so closely that it never veers into didactic territory. You might find the whole enterprise a little too quaint or exasperating, but it quite explicitly invites you to answer the who/what question, with Davey giving an email address where players can send their interpretations.
Yet, it’s almost more intentional, because without that drive to teach the player something, it goes out of its way to craft all the tiny little beats of what the player sees and hears. Romero’s games are far more open in the middle. They have a clear end in mind, but there are many pathways to that ending. The Beginner’s Guide may not have a definitive conclusion it wants to present, but the whole thing feels like it’s on rails. You play Coda’s games in a predetermined order, almost as if they were more like levels, and Davey’s voice is always there, much like the Narrator’s in The Stanley Parable, to overdetermine what you’re doing at any given moment. It feels more like wandering through an art gallery with a chatty docent, and not necessarily in a good way, like What’s Your Gender?, where that manner of constructing the game space and your relation to it is clearly intentional.
Seeking Validation
It’s interesting how often solo dev work means creating a game not just by but for yourself. Síochán Leat isn’t just about the English colonization of Ireland, it’s also about Romero’s own family history. Barone was inspired to make Stardew Valley, because he wanted to play more classic Harvest Moon games, but that series, as a result of a protracted trademark dispute, had taken an odd turn. He was, quite openly making a game for himself. That it was a runaway hit meant he clearly hit a nerve, but that’s not why it was made. There is something about being left to your own devices that makes it much easier to turn inward, to mine your own personal appetites and experiences in order to fuel the creative impulse.
We’ve talked about this on the pod, but in Sympathetic Memories, I draw on many different aspects of myself: my academic background in Japanese literature and culture, my fascination with contested contact zones like treaty ports, my love of weird narrative mechanics and systems, as well as my obsession with using gameplay to craft certain subjective states. The game, then, becomes an implicit offering of oneself, such that you can end up feeling very vulnerable. If people shit on the game, it feels very much like they’re shitting on you. If they love the game, it can start to feel like they admire you as well. They have to feel that way, you reckon, since there’s so much of you in it.
Which is why I feel far freer criticizing The Stanley Parable than The Beginner’s Guide. In the latter game, there’s clearly something Wreden is wrestling with, and using games to wrestle with my own psychological weirdness, I understand how hard that can be. It seeks validation, not in a “pick me” kind of way, but in a way that asks the player to confirm that what you, as the dev, are feeling about your own work and the contradictions it embodies is valid. It says, “you may not like what I’m doing here, but I need you to at least acknowledge that I’m not crazy to feel this way.” Maybe you are, maybe it is just all in your head. But that reality check is also valuable to the creative process.
Conclusion
Lauryn and I talked recently about the toll all of this can take on you as a human being. It’s nice to think about how invigorating being creative can be, but it’s also worth noting how a slavish devotion to the work can sap you of your energy and will to keep going. Half-finished projects might litter your PC, and there’s no small amount of shame you have to get past sometimes in order to return to them. When others are involved, like at a studio, they can support you when you’re not feeling great or push you to be better than you are at the current moment. This has its toxic side as well, but as a solo dev, you quite often find yourself in the position where the ordinary demands of life—housing, food, health, etc.—are pressing down on you such that you feel like you need to compromise your own work for a steady paycheck. If it all falls apart, who do you have to rely on?
Not gonna lie, that’s kind of where I’m at right now. I was unemployed for long enough that the pressure to take whatever job was on offer was a little too much to bear. I’m in the process now of carving out time for myself, not to go too hard, like I often do when starting a job. I don’t want people to ever feel like I can’t do the work, but that means sometimes I use “doing the work” to paper over what are, in fact, uneasy feelings that I need to confront head on rather than make a game about them.
Perhaps the next thing I work on will have nothing to do with me personally. It won’t relive past trauma, it won’t make me feel shitty about not being a teacher anymore, and it won’t need to desperately call out to the player to validate its worth. It’ll just be a game, and people can play it or not. That’ll have to be enough.