Hi. I’m Stephan (@talecrafter), the solo developer of Death Trash, and I want to explain to you the decision process that lead to Death Trash being self-published and entering Steam Early Access.
First I want to mention that I'll speak from my personal perspective, but there are indeed also other people helping on the game, like James Dean, who's creating the audio parts for the game. Nonetheless, for explaining the decision process it makes a lot of sense to speak as the one mainly working on the game day by day.
Origin
Let's begin with some personal history, because this is ultimately responsible for why I am here now, talking to you.
I was interested in games right from the beginning, already programming text adventures in school. But for years of my life I worked in another job that had no future and left me with a lot of frustration. So one day I left my job, took my savings, moved to Berlin and began working on computer games. It was the most exciting thing I ever did in my life.
For getting a job in game development I figured I needed a portfolio, but since I didn't even know what to specialize in, I learned design and art in addition to my programming and began making a lot of smaller games on my own. Eventually even one game a week for a dozen weeks.
One evening I made a pixelart image which was supposed to be some fanart for the upcoming Fallout game, and I jokingly tweeted "I'm gonna make my own now".
(That original tweet is still over here.)
The following days I began making more isometric and rough pixelart images as I liked the style so much. They felt coherent, featuring a dark post-apocalyptic world with flesh monsters and humans with punk attitude. A broad setting that could equally contain philosophical thoughts, horror, and humor. I knew I had the foundation of a game that would interest me more than anything else and I wanted to continue working on it fulltime.
Development
What came next were years of development, learning something new at every step, not even knowing how many steps were still to come. And making mistakes of course, since everything was new and needed iterations. Two steps forward, one step backwards, repeat.
- How does pathfinding work?
- How do you sort images in this weird perspective so they get drawn in the correct order?
- Someone writes an article about the game. Whoop!
- Someone writes a comment about the game. Oh my gosh.
- How do you make a grenade fly in this weird perspective?
- Someone writes an e-mail about the game, asking if we could also add pissing on people. Oh my.
- How do you make the game fit for mouse/keyboard and controller?
- Why isn't there any solution for getting the pixelart animations into Unity?
- and so on...
When I began working on Death Trash I thought I had enough experience now to tackle a big project. That I had all the necessary pieces in place. Turns out though, I vastly underestimated the effort required.
Self-publishing
Throughout all these years there was the looming question of how to handle the future of this project. There were enough tasks left to do that accepting some kind of partnership was appealing.
Work with a publisher? Do a Kickstarter? Find an angel investor? Partner up with another developer?
For the most part I did not decide on anything and continued working on the game. I applied for a local government funding handled by the "Medienboard", got that (will have to pay back if successful) and this together with my own savings and family support helped me get to this moment: Having a promising game, but still a lot of work left to do.
In the last months I came back to a feeling I had at the beginning of the project:
I want to build something from the ground up, stay independent, work at my own pace, create an experience that’s worth to be remembered, be open through its development and listen to feedback so it becomes the best it can be.
I am interested in the process of things. That's why I code my own framework, paint scene after scene, talk to people on the internet about it, get nervous when the game is showcased, figure out how the Steam backend works, learn about marketing, figure out how to use a console dev kit etc.
In short: I want to experience every part of making a game. Once I've done that, I'm ready to grow more, delegate more, partner up more.
Self-publishing was what I had in mind since starting out. It just took me quite a while to realize, that, despite all opportunities, my motivation for making this game never changed.
Early Access
Over the years the game got some attention and a few people were telling me about their expectations. And, to be honest, that can be a bit intimidating. Because, while I share the enthusiasm about the game, I also get reminded daily that this is still my first large game and there isn't much budget to hire people that compensate my inexperience.
This is how it is: I think I have some good ideas, I think the world of Death Trash feels fresh and has a lot of opportunities. Nonetheless, the game still needs a lot of testing and feedback.
Since we don't have the funds for a professional QA department now, my hope is that you, the players, the people interested in this game, might help make this the best game possible.
And it will be a bonus if this will also help pay rent until the game is finished and to pay for additional work on the game, but, to be honest, I didn't spent more than four years of my life on Death Trash already just to get stopped by financial shortcomings.
Your feedback and support is why we're using Steam Early Access.
The Future
We'll be talking more about the game itself and the Early Access roadmap in the coming months. For now please wishlist the game here, follow it to see our upcoming articles, tell others about it and talk to us on the Steam Forums, on Twitter, Facebook or Discord.
And please add Death Trash to your wishlist if you haven't done so already:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/941460/Death_Trash/
Have a nice week!
Stephan