As Frank mentioned a few weeks ago, we’re getting closer and closer to the release of Where Shadows Slumber in Spring 2018, and as such, we’re going to try to take on a bit more of an active role in terms of publicizing the game. To that end, I’m going to take some time today to answer a question I’ve been asked a few times, that’s very vaguely related to the topic of publicity. “If you guys were to start another indie game development project,” they ask, “how would you want to expand your team? What skills and responsibilities would you want from your new team members?”

This is an excellent question – pursuing a decently-scaled project requires a lot of forethought and planning, and none of it is more important than designing your dream team. After all, you’re going to be working with these people for a while – so what does your dream team look like? The best way to answer this question is with experience. I’ve been working on this project on a two-person team for over two years now. What’s my dream team?

I will never cave and get Photoshop or something else “professional”!

In The Beginning…

When Frank and I first embarked on Where Shadows Slumber, we felt like we already had a pretty good team. Our personal dynamic was good, and we knew that together we had the set of skills that would be required – I would do the programming and design, and Frank would do the art and sound. Boy were we in for a rude awakening!

You see, for our first project, SkyRunner, we did the same thing. We built and released it, and it never really felt like our team had a gap in skills. It didn’t do so well, but we viewed it as a learning experience either way, so we never felt that we had failed to do anything in particular. When planning Where Shadows Slumber, we tried to do the same thing – design/programming, and art/sound. What we didn’t realize was that there was a huge gap in our skillsets. One of, if not the most important skills was something that we simply didn’t possess. We’ve been managing okay without it, but everything would be going a lot smoother if we had thought about it up front.

Where We Are Now

Before I get into the things that we don’t have, let’s talk about what we do have. We have a very lean, very agile team, with pretty strong design, artistic, and programming skills. There hasn’t really been a point when I’ve thought “man, I don’t think I’m gonna be able to implement this” or “wow, I really wish Frank were better at art” or anything. These are our strong points, and these are the things that we’ve consistently done well throughout development. I don’t think we need to do anything to improve on these skills at the moment.

On the flip side, there are a couple of areas where we are lacking. You’ll notice that I previously listed ‘sound’ as one of the tasks, but I didn’t mention it above. That’s because neither of us has any training or experience in sound design. Frank heroically took on the sound for the demo, since it sort of feels like a more artistic endeavor, but we quickly realized that we would need someone else to do the sound design for Where Shadows Slumber if we wanted it to have a real professional sound.

However, sound isn’t the thing that we were missing at the beginning. We’ve been looking for sound people, and we’re confident that we’ll be able to incorporate great sound design into the game. No, there’s something else, a huge blind spot, something that could potentially destroy us all and leave us with nothing, something that we never realized we needed, but can’t live without. There’s one more task that encompasses everything we’ve already talked about, and is perhaps more important than all of them put together.

Publicity!

A successful game is one that a lot of people download. The idea is that if your game is really good, people will download it. Unfortunately, this idea doesn’t always pan out – in order to get people to download your game, you need to give them some reason to. This is where a marketing and publicity expert really helps.

“Our game really speaks for itself.”

This can be a tough pill to swallow – paying someone who may literally never contribute to the actual game itself can feel pretty awful. Despite this, your publicity expert will probably end up being the most important person on your team.

Think of this person as a salesman, helping you sell your product. It doesn’t matter if you have a billion units of the best product on the market – if you don’t have someone to sell it for you, you’re not going anywhere. Infrastructure like the app stores make this a little easier, since you can publish a game yourself, but you still need someone advocating for you and getting people to download the game.

We don’t have the experience or know-how to actually do this. It seems easy – just talk to people, tell them about the game, take any chance to promote it. But the reality is much more difficult. In reality, it’s a full-time job. Talking to bloggers, reaching out to potential publishers, doing interviews, even writing blog posts, all of it adds up to a lot more work than we had anticipated.

In the same way that your game’s name is the first thing people will see about your game, any efforts you make at publicity – ads, going to shows, posts on Facebook – are going to be right up there in your first impression. Why wouldn’t you do everything you can to make sure you make the best first impression possible? It doesn’t matter how great your game is if no one feels like they want to play it!

“Doesn’t Play Well With Others”

Getting back to the question at hand – what would I take into account when picking out my DREAM TEAM?

Well, clearly, more people working on any aspect of the game means that the work will be done faster, right? While this is true, it’s also subject to diminishing returns. This means that two people doing the job will get it done faster than just one, but not twice as fast. In the same way, the third person on the job adds even less.

This effect is compounded by the fact that coordinating the implementation of a complex system is a tricky business. If I’m the only one working on my game, then I completely understand the whole system, and I know what changes I need to make and how they will affect the rest of the game. As soon as someone else is involved, we each have to coordinate all of our changes and work to understand the whole system. This overhead can slow things down quite a bit, to the point where it seems like it might be more efficient if just one person were working on it. You’d have to ask Frank, but I assume the same thing goes for coordinating artistic styles and assets.

“Alright, new guy, here’s our system. It’s really pretty simple…”

Now, it probably sounds like I’m a crotchety old programmer who refuses to change or take a second opinion on my work. I like to think that this is not the case – I work with a handful of other programmers every day at work, and we do awesome stuff. The difference is one of scale, timing, and goals:

• Where Shadows Slumber is a small enough project that one programmer can conceive of and manage the entire system. If I were working on a bigger project, you bet I’d want more programmers, just so that we could wrap our collective head around the tasks at hand.
• We are nearing the end of development for Where Shadows Slumber. There’s still a long time and a lot of work left, but we’re about 80% of the way through development. Bringing someone on now would require spending a lot of time bringing them up to speed. Since there’s so little time left anyways, adding another programmer might actually cost us time, rather than save it.
• As the only programmer and head designer for Where Shadows Slumber, I think of it as my baby, my brainchild. When working on it, I have very specific ideations and goals – hiring another programmer would mean there’s another person with their own ideas and goals. If they don’t line up with my own, then we’re gonna butt heads a lot throughout development.

Hopefully these points do a good job of explaining why I’m still the only one doing any programming work on Where Shadows Slumber. If I were to start another project, these are the things I would think about when hiring a programmer.

The DREAM TEAM

Dreamin’ of the Dream Team

So, if it wasn’t obvious from everything above, my first addition to the team would be a professional, dedicated marketing and publicity person. Alongside that, I would want a sound designer – which, fortunately, we are actually working toward.

Those two roles, in addition to Frank and myself, would put us in a pretty good place, in my opinion. If I were to continue expanding the team, my next move would probably be to get another artist and programmer to help with the heavy lifting. The best way to avoid diminishing returns, I think, would be to divide the work into discrete parts – for instance, the art could be divided into the art for the game itself, and the cutscenes. If I were to bring on another programmer, I would want someone with expertise in graphics and aesthetics, since those are my weakest areas.

So, if you’re looking to put together your own dream team, my recommendations are to make sure that you don’t overload any one person, and to definitely, definitely not underestimate the value of a dedicated publicity expert. Otherwise you’ll end up posting blogs full of crappy MS Paint art and thinking “Eh, it’ll be fine”.

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If you want to know more about how our team is put together, or are curious about building your own dream team, feel free to contact us! You can always find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, find us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, and feel free to email us directly with any questions or feedback at contact@GameRevenant.com.

Jack Kelly is the head developer and designer for Where Shadows Slumber