Hello everyone, Duhop here!
This month, I'm pivoting the devlog away from the specific, technical topics I've been discussing recently. I want to talk about something that's helped me tremendously as a game dev, but also has the potential to help pretty much anyone doing anything.
From a game dev perspective, you might've guessed from the title that this is an article about marketing—but you'd be dead wrong. There's a reason I emphasized it as your community, not your studio's or your game's.
Human beings are collaborative, social creatures. No matter how independent, introverted, or stubborn one may be, their quality and enjoyment of work or a hobby can almost always benefit from the input of another. Plus, without any interaction at all, they're quite liable to lose their motivational steam entirely
The caveat is, though, that their interests, experiences, or motivations need to align to at least a certain extent with yours.
This devlog is about how and where I found those people for myself, and why you should look for yours.
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When I first started Violet Horizons two years ago, I had almost no community to speak of. Not for the business side of game dev, not for visual novel development, and not even for any of my hobbies.
I did of course have communities before that, for various games I used to play and other activities like school, college, etc., but at the time I had pretty much nothing but a handful of friends I only interacted with occasionally.
The first community I gained was the team I assembled. A character artist, two background artists, two music producers, and growing larger since. All great people, and with aligned motivations to make an amazing visual novel!
Already, the collaborative nature of our effort had a massive impact on my motivation to get things done. But despite skills in writing, art, music, and programming, none of us had ever actually, uhh... made a visual novel before.
The second community I found filled that gap for me. The DevTalk discord server is an incredible hub of activity for visual novel and narrative game devs all around the world—a goldmine full of people with interests and experiences mirroring my own! It's hard to even put into words how helpful it has been even on just a psychological level to be in this server and see all my fellow VNdevs putting in so much passion and effort into the same discipline I'd been going at completely in the dark beforehand. It's so big and active it's almost overwhelming, but I've never once regretted getting stuck in a conversation there about the intricacies of topics my prior self would've hardly even believed anyone else ever thought about.
I would extend this bubble to include the Ren'Py discord server as well, for the more technical side of my VNdev experience. The Ren'Py community is incredibly open and welcoming, and you will almost always find someone willing to spend some time helping you get over that one last pr ogramming hurdle you can't seem to crack on your own. Seriously, many of AJG's awesome custom features never would've been possible without their help!
At this point, I had a community. But it was all online; it felt far away, like I was the only member in a thousand mile radius, and not without good reason.
I live in Winnipeg. A mid-sized Canadian city quite literally located directly in the middle of absolutely nowhere, 1200 kilometers or about 750 miles from the next major city in the country, and a frozen wasteland colder than any other settlement of its size outside of northern Siberia.
I'd never heard of a local game dev community other than a Ubisoft office and a couple small 3rd party developers. For a long time, I kind of just assumed there wasn't one.
Imagine my surprise when I came across the Winnipeg Game Collective, a discord server with over one thousand members that runs monthly local meetups, post-mortems for successful local indie games I'd never even heard of before, and massive yearly game jams with hundreds of participants.
Oh yeah, by the way I took part in one of those. I helped make a cute little game called Zlorp Life about a sentient microscopic creature forced to battle to the death with pathogens in the cruel name of capitalism science.
My discoveries didn't end there, either. Through WGC, I also found out about New Media Manitoba, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the growth of the local film and interactive digital media industries. Interactive digital media includes video games, of course, and they run a program called the GameBiz Lab specifically to help new studio owners learn and grow the business side of their endeavors.
In other words, specifically to help people like me.
...
How did I not know about this earlier?!
Since then, NMM's GameBiz Lab has allowed me to join a local cohort of new studio owners in almost the exact same position business-wise as me, give or take a couple months/years of progress and experience. It's filled in the previously empty gap of a gamedev-business-focused community perfectly, especially considering the local relevance which is incredibly important for this context!
In fact, NMM and the friends I've made there have gone far above and beyond just the social duties of a community to support me. Earlier this month (November), their support allowed me to attend the Montreal International Game Summit, an event I never would have been able to consider attending otherwise.
NMM generously provided a free ticket to the conference, a food allowance, and a 50% reimbursement for all other event-related costs. When even that wasn't enough to convince me, a couple of my friends from the GameBiz Lab invited me to attend along with them and crash for free on the couch of their AirBnB. What could I do but cave when all I had to pay was half the cost of airfare for a trip to the very heart of Canadian gamedev?
At the conference, I attended presentations by developers, publishers, and others from all across the globe, and made direct connections with some incredible localizers that I'm doubtful I ever would have had the chance to connect with otherwise.
The highlight for me, though, was a tour of the Montreal-local Indie Asylum, organized through my connection to NMM.
I'm second from the left in the bottom row here between my friends Sasha and Annie from Prairie Interactive!
Indie Asylum is a collection of indie game studios that share a physical space, pool resources such as equipment and support staff, and support each other through difficult times. To me, it's the singular brightest-shining example of community that I've ever heard of in my life.
After a tour through their incredible space and a long talk about how their collaboration works, I was honestly a little stunlocked by the non-profit organization's very existence. Indeed, according to them and as far as I could verify, there's no other place quite like it in the world.
I'm jealous. Someday, if I ever find it feasible, I want to help start something like it in Winnipeg.
Anyway, I think I've rambled enough about the communities I've found centered around game dev. I said this was a topic that could potentially help anyone, right?
These past few years, I've struggled a lot with some of the issues that come with physically sitting your ass at the computer all day. I've never been one particularly motivated to exercise, or excited about participating in team sports, and both my hobbies and work were all on the computer for far too long.
I finally managed to change that at the start of this year by picking up rock climbing! Exercise for the point of exercise is boring, painful, and constantly makes me feel like I want to stop doing it, but climbing—like gaming—engages my brain in a way that no other sport or physical activity ever really has for me.
Climbing has been a well needed addition to my life to get me outside and moving. For the first time pretty much ever, I actually feel motivated to push my body to its limits, and somehow even find myself having fun doing it! Combined with physio and massage therapy, it finally has me feeling like I have a functional body again.
Plus, my fingers and forearms are strong as hell now, and I can crank out half a dozen pull-ups when I previously couldn't even do one!
So what does this have to do with community?
Well, usually when I climb, I just go to the local bouldering gym on my own. Talking, climbing, and trying to figure out problems together with other gym regulars is a lot of fun and the highlight of most sessions, but I eventually found myself wanting more.
I scratched my head for a long time trying to think of how to become more immersed in the climbing community, once again hindered by the Winnipeg problem. All we have is a couple of commercial climbing gyms with occasional community events, right?
Nope! Through a family friend that's also into climbing, I found out about the Alpine Club of Canada's Manitoba section. Turns out, they do a whole bunch of awesome stuff for members that I'd never even heard about, like run a huge outdoor climbing and ice climbing tower free for them to use throughout the year, free educational courses, and free guided climbing trips to western Ontario—provided you help to clear some trails and such.
Surprised, I signed up for a membership (which is under $100 annually!), and participated in the last Fall climbing trip for the year.
It was amazing. Everyone involved was incredibly passionate and excited to help me out as a newbie outdoor climber; unlike the gym who does it at least partly to make money, for them it was nothing but a genuine love of climbing and a pure-hearted desire to see the community grow further. In return, I had to be socially engaged as a new member of the community, and help to keep clear the climbing areas they treasure.
I think this example paints a pretty important picture of what community truly is and what you have to do to get the most from it.
If I want climbing, I go to the gym, give them money, and I climb. No socialization is actually required of me.
If I want climbing with community, I go to the gym, give them money, and make an effort to socialize while I climb. I won't necessarily be successful every time, because that's not what everyone is there for, but there's a good chance some will reciprocate and I will find success eventually.
If I want community climbing, I join the club, do my fair share helping out with volunteer work, and climb. At least some level of socialization is required from me; this is a social agreement, not a business transaction. However, I could just do the bare minimum and focus mostly on the climbing if I really wanted to.
If I want community climbing with community, I join the club, do my fair share helping out with volunteer work, and make an effort to socialize while I climb. I will almost always get engagement back for the effort I put in, and most likely even extra while I'm still a new member.
Essentially, you have to put in at least some effort to enjoy the benefits of community. There's no guarantee of success when creating a community from nothing, but there is a guarantee of failure if you never even try in the first place—likewise, if you don't put enough effort into engaging with an existing community, you won't be able to reap the full rewards of its membership.
My biggest takeaway is that you shouldn't just assume a community doesn't exist because you've never seen or heard of it. Look for it! You might be pleasantly surprised by what you find!
Community doesn't need to be large, or have a specific theme or purpose to it either. If you have a friend group, that's community, and—though it will inevitably start small—you can even build your own from scratch if you make sure to put in the effort.
Sometimes, all that effort really entails is engaging with someone earnestly.
Opportunities will often come to you at unexpected moments. It's up to you to take advantage and follow through on them.
-Duhop