No Time, No Budget, No Problem: Finishing The First Tree

[Music] my name is David Whaley and I made a game called the first tree and as you can see from the title there was no time no budget no problem but it's kind of I don't know why I wrote that because there was a lot of problems and finishing my game there was a lot of sacrifices but it worked out it was successful and that's what I'm gonna talk about with you guys today so if you don't know what it is the first tree that should be playing so the first tree is a third-person exploration game about a fox looking for her missing Cubs and also about a second parallel story being told about a son reconnecting with his father in Alaska and this was a project I made to get out these emotions of me losing my own father to a heart attack early in life or in 2010 and so I made this and I wanted to share that story with people and for hobbyist project it did a little better than I thought I was able to show at this Smithsonian American Art Museum showed at PAX West and it was cool to to UM to like let that little story and like gain traction with people and maybe you're thinking that's not a super unique story for like an indie game an indie game success story but what usually gets people's attention is that I finished the game while working full time as a technical artist at a VR company called the void I was raising two kids and making sure that my partner Elise had time for her art career and then I made the game without very much money at all so when the game launched on Steam September 14 2017 it cost me $10,000 to make and that includes my website conventions music everything the time was about 18 months of nights and weekends or about thousand hours and its first year it made a hundred and fifty thousand that was my gross revenue and consoles came a year later he's able to use those funds to pay for a console port port with the assistance of do games and that made 150000 in his first month three consoles so yeah it was awesome as like a dream come true and a lot of people ask me how did you do that with so little time and money what you've probably heard about is how the game had a lot of reddit traction and I got good at submitting this content these gifts and seeing how they would perform and so when on launch day I could have the marketing dream come true and then get on the front page of Reddit which got got me about 3 million views on that gif and two hundred thousand steam page visits and so and then on consoles in November 2018 when the console released came out I was able to do it again and so why did it do so well that's a question I ask myself a lot and I would say luck did have a big part to it but it's not the entire answer the facts are that I submitted a lot of submitted a lot of gifts everywhere and it was consistent posting over 18 months some of the posts did great some of them didn't and it basically comes down to how do you eat an elephant or a fox in this case you eat at one bite at a time so those those years of experiment and that taught me what works what also taught me a lot is that I made another game before the first tree just to challenge myself because I was I come from a film and design background I'm not much of a coder at all so I made my first game it was a first-person exploration game called homas where one starts and I used maze mostly just unity assets and playmaker and through a lot of bundles and extreme discount I was able to make $15,000 and it also taught me what not to do when releasing your first indie game I launched at midnight because I was like oh that's what movies do they do a midnight premiere I'll try that I changed my launch date last minute for some reason I had no one covered the game on day one I had no email list only 200 Twitter followers and there was a lot of popularly requested features for steam like trading cards and subtitles that I waited to patch in later so I've distilled what I learned from that first experience into what end to my launch plan for the first tree and how would I sum up like my launch plan for the first tree the best thing is I would say is its low time high impact strategies I'm not sure that's like a business that won't be taught in business schools anytime soon well what it just means to me is like you don't have a lot of time you need to be as productive as possible and try to like take that risk of making a high impact even if it's kind of it's a little more risky so the rest of my talks divided into two sections how I developed the game with little time and money and how I marketed it so first just finding that time to finish your game that's that's hard especially you know if you're a parent you know like how exhausting life can be so this was kind of our rough plan with me and my wife Elise I'd work full-time and then also at least needed time for her art career so we we looked we hired neighborhood like teens to see if they could watch our kids for about $7 an hour so I had to get home from work work 45 minutes and then get the quality time together and then at the end of the night probably fit in two hours of development and that gave me about 10 hours a week and usually you know there were sacrifices there and like I couldn't I wish I have played more of all of your guys's indie games but I definitely haven't I didn't play many games or watch many movies usually like to get quality time with Elise its we'd watch like people getting hurt on YouTube compilation video at the end of the night and at the void like I don't think you need a game development day job to like make your passion project come to life I I will say though like there there is some crossover benefit I remember again I'm not much of a programmer but I was learning about Singleton's the first time and I were using that in a project at the void and just learning about that helped me fix a Steamworks initialization bug that it caused me a ton of grief so that's cool when that stuff crosses over but I don't know if it's necessarily required okay so you found the time now what do you do with that now this is something I would even say like I used to be a little embarrassed about this but I'm now a huge believer in using publicly available assets that you can license and prototyping it's great but just using it as a springboard to save yourself valuable time and like creating it like revising it and changing it to add your own creative twist that's the reason my game was finished that's why my game released is because of these these resources I like I probably could have made a lot of this stuff myself but I estimated it saved me roughly 600 hours and while I did have to spend a little bit of money it was nothing compared to like hiring a full-time composer or even voice actors I did the voice acting I pressured my wife to do the voice acting she did great I wish I didn't do that so maybe we should have hired an actor but you just got to do what's best for you this is like an example of how I tried to make these you know this beautiful environment pack by Michael Gustafson try to make it my own and so yeah I would I would even say like it helped other artists too when the game was successful in the marketing the all the music was done by composer named Josh Cramer and his music is is gorgeous and it was only thirty to fifty dollars a song and so when it did when the game did well he was able we were able to kind of form a partnership and help get his music out there more so this is the third thing about finishing your game is I tried to challenge myself never to have a zero percent day I have this gift running because I love like UX and UI design and I remember I was so burnt out I did not want to work on it at the game anymore but I love doing this stuff so my thought was if you can work just aim for a 1% day and get those small wins then you can it will encourage you to do the harder stuff that you hate to do so whether it was just answering an email or doing a small color change I tried to work on my game every single day so what are the cons of doing these low time high-impact strategies for development well I did have to compromise my vision a little bit like I I'm inspired by the games like fire watch and journey but of course it couldn't be like that it was just me using licensed assets so I tried to you know my game had to reflect that it was a shorter games like one and a half hours to two hours long and I launched it for $8 on Steam when it came out another problem is recognizable stock assets which I am surprised that it wasn't as a big of a deal as I would have thought I probably skimmed about 10 comments about my game and only about 10 to 15 even mentioned that they recognize the art assets or the music so and even usually common commenters would say get mad at those people making fun of it saying it's not an asset flip dude he tried to make it his own so that's pretty cool I will say that with music especially with YouTube copyright IDs if you're using stock music those will get flagged and that would make content creators a little upset so if your game is dependent on like that you know sharing those videos online that's something to keep in mind and then a really big problem was the extremely messy project it was like a dumpster fire of a unity project and that caused a lot of problems with the console porting but luckily do games they were awesome and they helped a lot with fixing it working with my work style so that's something to keep in mind as well yeah that was one of the original pac---- so what's the one pro for all those cons well the one pro is you've finished your game and that's the most important thing ever and it doesn't mean it's perfect it just means it's presentable so in this day and age you all know that marketing you have to do that concurrently and so that's what I tried to do with a typical week I would do about three hours of making a gif and posting that gif and then doing that for like 12 to 18 months and it what I usually do every week was I shared on Twitter usually using the game hashtags screenshot Saturday and then made with unity on Friday unity retweeted means several times and that's probably oh my god like a third of my followers I posted on tumblr with hashtags the reddit gamed of theirs screenshot Saturday threads in that and yeah the beginning did have a lot more marketing work it was top-heavy in that regard but that's why I encourage you guys to make your trailer as soon as possible create your website as soon as possible and create your steam page with tags and so you can just get those organic wish lists so that's what I try to do it just took a long time as a drop by drop accumulation now with the marketing I wanted to first focus on finding your hook before development which people ask me what was like the magic ingredient that your game was able to resonate with people so much and this one I kind of happened by accident the cynical side is it like if you took two popular things people would love it but if you take a brand-new original thing then people like they don't know how to react and so with the first tree you know I took my love of journey and I also there was a people there are people out there who were like fans of anything that had a Fox in it and you know I picked the Fox because it was you know there was a personal connection and I was like a wife's my wife's family name but people like they they marketed it for me because they loved the idea so much and so I don't think you know I think the optimistic side of that is I think it's good to remind gamers of things that they love I don't think it's a bad thing the other thing is because you know I come from an artist's background visuals first development took took priority and that was something that the makers of Blitz said as well they tried to make gifts as soon as pops as possible so they can market it and that's why I would encourage you guys to get the website and trailer and steam page up I wouldn't even waste time on screen shots when I when I would share screen shots online gifts were shared ten times more and the best part of all this is getting getting doing this first as it gives you data like what game ideas what scenes from your game resonate best with people and that's the data you can use when you make your trailer and then you'll make a really killer trailer because you have the data of like oh that that post has so many likes people really like that shot so anyway what is like the point of all this what what what what's the call to action for all that marketing well my plan was with the email list and the wish list and something I called the social media blitz which happens on launch day I would get on the new and trending tab that was the goal of all this was to gather those wish lists and it's because of in this day and age how important steam is with day one purchases and it's even first our purchases because that's how you please the algorithm gods and that's how you get on the front page of steam and you want to get on the front page of steam because the amount of traffic is insane even with a viral reddit post which had you know hundreds of thousands of views the steam traffic on the first day I think that's the first two days it was 88% of everything and so the new and trending tab you need to get on it and that was that was my goal with that and that's why I want to read it was to get like a huge influx of traffic to catch the algorithms attention and so that's kind of what happened that and that's what's happened with a lot of other indie games there's a lot of great gifts that have been shared on the gaming subreddit which has 20 million subscribers and if you know if you know where to look you can find good examples I know a data scientist he analyzed a lot of the top reddit posts and he said he mentioned that there's usually time involved like been working on my game for three years or there's a motion in the in the title like even this what the golf gift this says like for people who hate golf catches people's attention I think it's important not to be a sales guy but just be like a friend showing off something that you're really proud of part of this I guess part of what I learned is that it's not just read it there's a lot of places you can post and I had to do it a lot like just in one year I posted 41 times on imager and I'd say like most of those didn't do well but then a few would gain traction and get on the front page of imager and then that's what would help build up my wish list and my email list so here's some examples of good reddit posts that I posted as a kid I always dreamed of releasing a game on an Tindall console today it happened after two years of work and no knowledge of code I still launched my Fox adventure game today the first tree it doesn't seem like much but getting footprints working in my game is huge for me which it really was and this one has kind of a comedy angle stress-testing bunny herds in a game with unforeseen consequences that one was retweeted by david bowie's son on twitter yes oh thank god got a lot of attention here's some post that didn't do well the first tree launch trailer releasing on Steam September 14th super Fox the first tree points of light towards the first tree some other things that helped me is I never saw I've never seen a post on the gaming server to do well that launches that links to a store page or even a website always linked to a gif and then in the comments you can have a call to action just one link to your store page I've had comments removed for linking to too many store pages because it wreaked of self promotion and that leads me to a problem a lot of developers have with Retta is the self promotional rules and I would say it just takes a little bit of preparation but that yes you like you can use reddit you just need to create an account one two three months priority or launch hopefully you're posting more like more before that and you just have to remember that only 10% of your submissions can be about your project comments don't count you have to submit things so that's what I did like I loved music I love the game dev subreddit so I'd post I'd post once a day of stuff I liked so that I was legal and then I would say remember the call to action I I did do on my web site I did an email list that was like one-time email no spam I was a little worried like I hate spam and I thought that would help get more emails but I don't comparing my numbers to other developers I didn't see any difference in that so I would say just say you won't spam them and just get those emails because those are the people that those are your like dedicated fans and they'll probably buy the game the first couple hours of launch this is my web this is my website traffic and this is kind of shows you what those marketing efforts did like imager was nice and it would happen pretty regularly but of course get on the front page of Reddit that was a huge bump had 15,000 visits that day something I dropped the ball on is I should have had my steam store page up by the time that reddit post was up because it came out a month later and so my steam store page could have got wish list and so yeah that's why I need to get that steam store page done ASAP so leading up to launch is what these were my numbers and this was in 2017 indie game development like the marketing world moves fast but my numbers were 12,000 steam wish wish lists 4700 Twitter followers 4400 mailing list subscribers 1,300 tumblr followers and then I had a hundred thousand views on my youtube trailer and what that equated to was eleven thousand sales my first week and then that was also a seven percent conversion rate of my of my wish list because I also gained an additional fifty thousand wish list for being on the new and trending tab for five days so my social media blitz what I was talking about earlier was my plan was the biggest problem that my indie game could face is that it would fade into obscurity and would become invisible and get buried so bug fixes we're gonna wait parties we're gonna wait my whole goal on launch day was just to just get get the visibility out there to get people aware of it and I wasn't gonna stop until something stuck which that reddit gif it did stick so that's when I took a break but these were all low time high impact strategies and I was just really hoping for one of those things to push me over the edge to get on the new and trending tab now you're probably saying well what if that big launch reddit post failed well I don't want you guys to get too bummed out because I was on the new and training tab before that reddit post took off actually which kind of surprised me and I attribute that to my mailing list those those are those you know number one fans they bought the game immediately and just in the first hour that made a difference if your bid if your gaming subreddit post fails then I would encourage you to use smaller sub reddits like the Unity subreddit and indie gaming that can drive traffic and just keep at it during all of launch day so anyway in conclusion like I started this as a hobbyist like I was doing on the side while taking care of my family and was interesting how one thing led to another like my successful steam launch it led to me getting access to switch switch publishing and helped me pay for porting the game which led to a successful console launch and now like I wasn't planning on it but I was able to quit my job at the void to be a full-time indie developer which is amazing to me thank you I will say like life isn't that different from when I was working at nights like I'm actually like I thought there'd be like a linear graph of my productivity from getting that much more time and it hasn't been that way I would I feel like I was just as productive with 10 hours a week than I am with 40 hours and so it's it's pretty cool like it just it was one foot in front of the other and that's what led to me being a full-time indie developer and just doing it this way of what we talked about it taught me a lot on what Corner's can be cut and when what can't be cut and how working to launch makes all the difference and then I wanted to end with this quote from an anonymous player I've gotten hundreds of emails from people who really like they've just shared how much the game meant to them and this is what she said said in that moment it all resolves for me everything the game my life the last couple months the loss of my mother all of it thank you so much for the first tree for closure for peace for even if only in a video game and for the briefest moment given me a chance to speak to her again so I guess you would say I'm begging you guys to finish your game because other people need your game just like other people needed the first tree and I'm so glad I was able to finish that in the share with people thank you for listening I think we have time for a few questions hi I'm Garrett hi so you're on your reddit post you said all of very successful game launches are like I've never been I've never made a game before I did this in like two years or whatever did you use that title as intentionally as like this is like a formula sort of or was a more organic I would say was organic I will say people on reddit like they will like they know when you're being fake they want like they want you to be sincere and that was something I tried to focus on was just this came from my heart I didn't try to follow a formula but I think it's interesting to analyze that data yeah so yeah thank you for your question I really like the arts I love the game I just wanted to ask you about how you achieve the pretty consistent art style while using stock assets so oh I should be repeating the question he asked how did I make consistent art style with using public assets and that's a good question I think it helps with me because I feel like I could make a lot of those assets as a technical artist and as a you know as a artist but I was able to like I just use it as a springboard to save time like I'm not good at rigging so I buy like those animations with the Fox but I can change a texture map and so I was able to do that I was able to change the trees to what I need and modify the rocks like that came in the asset pack so I will say like it takes work like I needed to I needed to modify those assets but it saved me time instead of making everything from scratch cool thanks a lot thank you and just make sure I understood right you did you do have it released on the switch yes okay then my question was well it sounded like getting on the steam page was what gave you access to releasing on switch store I was just wondering like what the comparison and buys was from the steam store versus the switch store because you know they're two very different audiences usually so you're asking about like sales figures yeah um switch did well for me and I've learned a lot about the console marketing efforts with steam it's so like algorithm driven and with the consoles there's people behind the games they feature so they give you opportunities to like submit trailers to like the official Nintendo YouTube channel and submit blog posts for their websites so I would say yeah they're a little different but still getting that organic traffic it boosts you on the top sellers list on the switch a shop and then that gets the attention of the marketing team in the tin dough and then they're able to feature my game also in like top indie games of November or December or something and so again that helped a lot it's just the point of like the successful steam launch is to prove that oh my game has legs and that's why they were able to take a risk and give me a valuable dev kit because oh the games did well on Steam that's great so thank you hi so first of all I was wondering I haven't played your game I think it looks great but I haven't played it you say that you have to compromise because of course the scope of the game does not roll so Oh amazing can I ask you a small question a little older question sure okay so first of all like how long was the average of how long every game because of all these compromises so yeah he asked if if I try to compromise the vision how long how long would it have been if I didn't compromise anything what you're asking or can you tell us both versions how long it would have been if you hadn't compromised and how long it is now if I didn't have to compromise anything and then I got it like a team of employees working for me I think I would have liked like polished controls I would have had more levels right now it's about two hours to complete and I think four to five hours is good for like a consumable type of like this it is like it's minimalistic gameplay like it's lots of exploration I would have liked more puzzles in my game and that was something I just didn't have time to polish so I guess yeah that's the best way I can answer your question yes one more thing how much I because I know you have been developing and marketing the game how long or when used when you started marketing your game were you exclusively in spending your entertainment market or we do also marketing and developing at the same time I was doing at the same time which I think is really important and that's why I like I said visuals first development style like that's when you have something the show as early as possible so I would spend about three hours a week marketing the game and then about seven hours doing development and getting the game ready for primetime oh thank you yeah thank you thank you for the insightful talk okay did you maintain a personal Twitter and separate game twitter or one in the same and what's your reasoning I didn't I I mean I had the same Twitter for both my game I guess this guy gets into another topic of like I love I love like seeing games is like you know we we have game studio names which is fine that's awesome but because it was a very personal story and a very personal game I wanted to be with my name on it it was my story like my voice acting also with the help of several assets which was really amazing that these artists and programmers let people license it but the story was written by me I think it's I think it's fine to have a separate Twitter especially if it's like your game studio and that future games will be coming out of it because for me I expect that like my future games will still like be like personal stories from me that's what I want if I was like creating a new studio with friends I probably do something different I keep that my personal one but yeah your mileage may vary of course thank you thank you hey so your talk appealed a lot to me because I'm in the same so thank you well I want to ask you about the music and how you how you found the music that you were interested in how you serve like created the relationship with the actual musician and what medium you use to find that specific music sure so pond5 you know as I come from a film editing background so I'm very used to finding stock music available to license on pond5 and music bed and audiojungle there wasn't a personal connection at first that's kind of the funny part Josh Kramer he had his library of music is gorgeous orchestral music and again it was really affordable and so I was able to just find that I was like oh I like everything he does I'm gonna buy all of his songs and put it in my game and then he reached out to me afterwards because he was like oh I'm seeing a lot of news articles with this game with my music amp and I was like is that okay with you is like of course like I put it on there to be licensed and projects like this so specifically I don't know I just it's almost like meditative for me to like browse these asset libraries and just be like oh would that work in my game I would that work though that sounds good so that's what I did I just went through pond5 and I also I splurged on two songs from music bed which they do like bigger artists and so two of the final songs in the game which were more expensive is from music bed and I think it was worth the music such an important part of a story-driven game like that so yeah that's that's all I did I just looked around Google search alright thanks so much yeah thank you if what game was gonna have audio or like voice acting do you think that the gif like if that was a big part of it would the gif still have the same amount of traction opposed to screenshots do you think maybe like sometimes people would say online I say oh like I love like that that it looks like a desktop wallpaper I'm gonna save it to my computer and that you know that works for a still screenshot I think then the movement like it just it inspires imagination it people say like we're talking about people who are like a built-in fanbase like people who love journey and people who love foxes they would see the game be like oh that looks like something I would like and they would market it for myself so so yeah I think I think still screenshots can still help you know like give you an idea of all does this project have legs does it kind of gain traction do we have time for one more question okay yeah one more question so um thanks for the talk is awesome um you showed both posts that like did really well as well as some ones that didn't mm-hmm was there a key underlying kind of thing that you saw what made those posts not do as well as others I think being in my personal opinion I think being too vague it hurt the post I think like not like having a human connection was important I think that's a cool thing that Indies have that like a triple-a company can't really do is like you're just like you're like a friend next door making a game you're not a company with the PR department trying to not market a game and that gets people excited like people put themselves in your shoes it's like oh he made a game that's my dream is to make a game like he did and they like they kind of want to celebrate with you too and that's what happened I noticed it was like just being human like I think saying like this is like my dream because it was like to see my game on a window switch and it got people excited and they wanted to celebrate with you so yeah I would say the human connection is most important thanks thanks thank you everybody appreciate it [Applause]

Channel: GDC

Views: 365,845

Rating: 4.9569416 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: g5f7yixtQPc

Length: 31min 42sec (1902 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 26 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/_cmik_]

he shared actually a lot about posting to social media :) nice nice

[u/goasklaura]

Awesome video. Brilliant to see exactly what works and what doesn't. I like the focus on the stats e.g what gifs actually shared more than screenshots. This is the useful part for me.

[u/Yavimawa]

This is VERY valuable talk, I didn't know I wanted to know this stuff