Welcome to Make the Game – my name is Matt Hackett. Come hang out with me and Sherveen as we chat about his game Midautumn and GDC talk Growing Your Code Library with Each New Project. Let's jump right in!

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Show notes

Thanks for listening! Head over to Midautumn on Steam and give it a wishlist if it looks cool to you. Hey a quick couple thoughts about Making Big Indie Games: first off, thanks for checking it out. Once the launch price ended I wanted to keep it going so I extended it another week ... and then decided to just stick with that launch sale price.

I know it's a big ask and, ya know, anyone listening to me knows there's an ocean of free game dev content on YouTube and a million other websites. So it's a premium package designed to show your support for me and what I'm doing and I appreciate that.

You are being played out by After the End which you are free to use in your own projects. Now it's time for you to go make the game!

Behind the Waterfall

I am trying to climb that wall but I keep slipping on this green, mosslike stuff ...

Anyway let's talk a little more about Making Big Indie Games. What a weird thing. It's a big, bold product, exactly the kind of thing that I've been wanting to make for years. Years! It's ambitious and super niche: just how I like it.

It's designed to make me uncomfortable (and it does). I don't really like putting myself out there, I don't really like being on video, and I don't really like charging money for things. Yet here I am doing a lot of that with MBIG. What gives?

Well, friends, I needed to feel the burn in a few ways. I can't really afford to be comfortable all the time. I've been down this independent road before, and unless you have a long runway, being comfortable in the indie space is dangerous.

The rest of this year will be uncomfortable for me. I'll be streaming a lot, I'll be writing a lot, I'll be on video and podcasting and vulnerable and exposing my process and shipping more stuff. MBIG was an intense project for me, shocking the system and reminding me of the reality, which is that Valadria needs to be sustainable for me to continue working on it.

Making Big Indie Games also scratched several itches for me:

  1. I've wanted to ship a product in one month for years now, since the LDG days. The idea is: go from conception to shipped in 30 days or less. This is hard and I like hard challenges. (Full disclosure: it took way more than 30 days, oops! Watch that scope creep.)
  2. Video is super itchy to me right now. I've got a nice camera my wife bought me for my bday last year, my brother keeps asking me to livestream, and I've finally cracked the code of how to use Final Cut Pro. I am 🔥 about video! And I believe in hitting the iron while it's hot.
  3. I obviously had a lot to say about how to make a bigger indie game, but I couldn't justify doing it all as a free episode of Make the Game.
  4. Getting super meta and covering the big games topic with a big product. Simply couldn't resist. B I G
  5. Charging enough to make me uncomfortable 😬. The advice I see (especially in this weird technoentreprenurisausfial space I've worked myself into) is to double your price. 💰😬 I didn't go quite that far, but it is a premium price for a tutorial package and enough to push me out of my comfort zone.

Additional advice I've seen is that: you've gotta give people the right opportunity to help you. MBIG's intimacy and price tag make me squirm, but some of you opted to pay even more for it. IDK what to say except thank you! It's so helpful while I'm in the early stages of this new journey.

MBIG is also part of something I call the 10x stretch ... but I'll have to get into that another time.

Thanks for joining me back here. Let's go dry off.

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