Companies have values. Studios are companies and thus studios have values.

They at least say they have values, they state them. But it’s pretty hard to tell if they actually live them or believe in them.

As part of the Baby Ghost program we’ve been thinking about company values a lot. Because I like to process my thoughts by writing, I’m going to do some brain dumping about how we’ve approached the exercises, what values we’ve landed on, and how to make our values explicit through our actions.

Finding our values as a studio - first draft​

I like to start all my homework with a bit of research. So when given the assignment of brainstorming our values I first searched for lists of other company values.

All the places I’ve worked have had values, very few of those places took them seriously. So starting this assignment feels a bit like “choose the values you’ll eventually fail to live up to”. But that’s not approaching the assignment in good faith or with optimism. There’s nothing wrong with planning for success.

A piece of advice we got was to “go wild” with our values, even if they seem weird or difficult or extreme.

From marketing our existing games to more early concept work for our new game.

Since our existing games were done for game jams they didn’t really have much of a development cycle, you kind of jump straight into production for game jams. I remember very clearly sitting down on January 1st and getting started on character sprites for Spellphage with very little preparation. I had made Pinterest boards for a few of them, maybe did a few messy sketchy Lauren attempts, but that was it.

For Fate Weaver we’re giving ourselves way more than a month. We still want to keep development tight but we are still aiming to have a playable demo out before the end of the year. This feels like a luxurious amount of time at the moment but I know it’s going to feel like nothing soon.

This does mean that I still need to be smart about the art style we go with. For an MVP of a demo we’ll still need 20 Fate Cards, 5 Land cards, 10 items, and hopefully 2 characters. It’s still a decently large amount of assets so I want to choose a style that’s not too difficult to pull off consistently.

So I’ve been experimenting.

From game design to game marketing. A near fully entwined pair. With the amount of games published year over year, marketing has become less optional than ever.

So I’ve been learning how to market.

I can’t say I love it, nor can I say it feels like a science. Modern marketing feels like Tweeting to zero followers and hoping someone stumbles by.

But I’ve been spending time in marketing places and trying to learn from those who don’t see it as a nebulous black box.

How to Market a Game​

If you search for anything concerning marketing a video game you’re going to quickly come across Chris Zukowski. Over the last few years he’s become the expert on marketing video games and Steam trends. If you see people doing videos on YouTube about what genres of games to make and which ones to avoid, they are likely pulling from the work that Chris has done.

He has a website where he blogs regularly, he runs a Masterclass to get you marketing faster, he runs an active Discord, and he really seems to constantly be doing talks all over the place.

The thing I really like about Chris’s content is that he gives the vibe that he really wants people to succeed with their game. He shares so much data, making it publicly available, saving individual marketers and researchers so much time.

From game design classes to paper prototyping our new game. We’re moving fast over here.

Paper prototyping is the idea of making a physical version of your game so that you can play it as quickly as possible. This doesn’t mean making nice art assets or finding the perfect meeple. It’s very much the idea of a minimal viable product that gets you playing faster.

This doesn’t work for all video games of course. There isn’t much benefit for trying to paper prototype a platformer or a huge open world game. Unless you can boil down a part of those games into a form that can be simplified enough to play by hand.

By having quick access to a playable version of your game idea you can start testing out your design. Do the rules make sense? Is it too easy? Can a player complete the game? Does it need more cards or less cards? If you can paper prototype it, you can test it, toss it, iterate on it, in less time than it would take to program your original idea. It’s this time save that makes paper prototyping so useful. Instead of spending a month developing a minimal digital version you can have something going in an hour. You can even have other people playing it before even opening a game engine. As a young studio with minimal runway, this felt like the obvious path forward for our new game.

So we cut some sheets of papers into smaller rectangles, created a few cards, and started playing.

Game design isn’t a brand new field to me, but I can’t say that I ever studied it formally.

I’ve been playing video games since before I can remember, some of my earliest memories being watching my parents try to beat the first world in Super Mario World on a SNES they won at a gas station on a road trip. They never really played again after that, my brother and I took over the system and eventually breezed past that first world.

Video games have always been a hobby, one that for a long time that I wanted to make into a career. But that still didn’t really lead me to thinking about the deeper levels of game design. Not until I started trying to make games myself, which crashed pretty quickly back in my 20s. And then not again until I started writing D&D adventures.

While D&D is already itself a game with rules and expectations, writing my own one-shots and more serious adventures really helped me get the feeling of what makes games good.

I didn’t realize it back when I was writing A Stolen Sun because I didn’t have the words for it, but the design choices that felt best to be were the ones that I now see aligning with MDA framework. I wanted to create choices and unique rules in my adventures that paired Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics all together. It’s those design choices that make systems feel alive and “realistic”. Not in a “it happens in real life” way, but in a way that when thought about can make logical sense to a brain. Instead of mechanics that a brain might see as strange and try to reject.

Now coming up with those rules is one thing, but then having to execute them as a DM is a whole other side of the coin! In a way it makes it harder to pull off in a TTRPG because in a video game a computer gets to pull it off instead.

So then still the question, why get back into it now?

Our next game​

As we go through the motions of a game studio; creating a Steam Developer Account, setting up a website, creating press kits, we also need to think of what’s next.

We have two visual novels so far and we’re ready to move away from the traditional visual novel format (visuals, text, choices). Which honestly, is basically just “throw a few more game genres in there” and now you’ve got yourself a narrative game instead of a visual novel.

Since every Steam page costs 100$ to launch we started thinking about how to capitalize on what we have already as a foundation and make it more game-like. This led us to the work we’re doing on Fate Spinner which I wrote about in my last blog post.

But we didn’t just want to jump in blind, we’re both fairly education and learning oriented so reaching a solid understanding of the foundational text, language, and history of game design was important to us. So we started to study.

After valiantly trying to keep posting through my sickness in March and April, I finally lost the energy to keep up. All my energy was going into getting through the days and staying present at work. Hobbies are always the first thing to suffer when the going gets tough.

And as a person who works best with momentum and consistency, losing my stride is one of the worst things that can happen to my practice.

I’m now in the stages of trying to get re-interested in drawing. Doing focused practice isn’t “fun” but I did it regularly because I do find myself improving because of it. But that doesn’t make it desirable. So instead of trying to get back into WAPs and anatomy studies and doing the classic “draw what you want” approach.

Currently that means having a bunch of half-finished pieces hanging around with no idea if I’m ever going to finish them or not. But they have gotten me drawing again.

We launched our studio website the other week and while I’m happy with it I do feel like it’s lacking in art. I’d love to do little cartoon versions of myself and my wife but cartoon versions of real people is something I’ve never been great at. This week's study of guitar playing poses is me starting the baseline work for that as I know I’m going to do a few attempts of my wife playing guitar.

Day 1 - Drawing from imagination​

While I at least understand how guitars are held and played, keeping a large object in proportion to a body is still difficult for me.

This 3 image reference study stretched into 2 weeks as I got distracted by other art projects and also had my energy drained due to on-going health problems.

And then Blue Prince was released and I forgot that blogging was a thing I did.

But a long weekend has given me the downtime I need to return to my hobbies and project and also Blue Prince.

Reference Images​

The big masked creature is by Bryn Jones @artwithbryn. Trying to find the source really highlighted for me how awful it is when artists only have an Instagram page. I don’t want Facebook/Meta touching my computer so I’m not going to log into Instagram on my computer, which means I can only see the last 9 posts from a user >_>

The squirrel is Acorn collector by mousse on DeviantArt.

And the boat on the waves, my piece used as colour scheme inspiration, is by Dmitrij on Dribble.

This week started off as a reference study. I had my 3 references selected, got through some thumbnails, did some different colour compositions and even started painting.

But then there was a joke; What if Pink Pony Club, but it’s Pawmi instead of Pony. As context, a Pawmi is a recent gen Pokemon. This is a Pawmi:

The next day I went to see what colour shiny Pawmis are, and well, they’re pink. The joke basically writes itself. So I paused my reference study and drew Pawmis for a few days.

Time for a casual WAP week with axolotls. Partially inspired by the axolotl I drew during Root week, I thought it might be a good time to really look at them and see what features I might have missed in my quick cartoonification.

Day 1 - Drawing from imagination​

I really couldn’t remember what their feet looked like.